Hi Darien, and welcome to Psych Central.

What you wrote resonates with me quite a bit. I myself spent 14 years in the mainstream mental health system trying various talk therapies and medications, and although I wouldn't necessarily write off every treatment that I received as being 100 percent useless, I tended to find the interventions to be of little benefit, especially in the long run. I currently follow an orthomolecular treatment protocol, and even though this protocol isn't as effective as I would like for it to be, I do find it to be more helpful than any of the more mainstream treatments that I've received. But as different treatment approaches tend to have different effects on different individuals, I'm not saying that orthomolecular treatments will necessarily work for you or for anyone else as much as I'm saying that it's helped me up to this point.

I do think that many in the mental health system tend to overvalue the interventions that they offer for depression and other mental health conditions. Sure, some people are helped by psychotherapy and/or medications, but a lot of people don't benefit substantially from such treatment strategies, and some are even harmed by the so-called treatments, especially the medications. I also think that some in the mental health system have a tendency to blame the patients when they don't respond well to the treatment interventions that they use. And maybe in some cases, those in the mental health system have a point in assigning some of the responsibility for getting better to the patients. However, some in the mental system to seem to be too quick to judge and too quick to jump to conclusions about things that they don't understand. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions too quickly myself, but from having read what you've written, I don't think it's the case at all that you don't want help, because if that were true, you never would have sought out treatment in the first place. It sounds to me like it's more the case that you do want help, but that the treatment interventions that were offered to you were, for whatever reason, not truly helpful.

Finally, I'd like to say that even though mental health treatment interventions aren't always helpful, I'm not saying that there's no chance that you'll ever find any interventions for your depression to be beneficial. As I said, I seem to be benefiting from orthomolecular treatment at the moment. A lot of individuals benefit from all sorts of different mainstream and alternative interventions for depression and other mental health conditions, and I think that each of us needs to find out for ourselves exactly what's best for our individual needs.