And I agree with your second paragraph completely. I am sick of society pretending that people are "sick". They are not. They are responding naturally to an increasingly hostile world.
Psychiatrist and family member tend to fear relapses, and typically the effort required to enhance the situation is tremendous, and some situations are simply not fixable, they need to be accepted, time need to pass for healing, and attention need to be shifted elsewhere. The person would certainly lose some confidence in their own ability to withstand future pressures and tend to fear relapses as well, and yes there are financial incentives to sell pills and pitch as an easy fix. Thus, there is a risk of being dependant on the pills.
However, a good treatment plan is a mix of medicine and some form of talk/behavioural therapy. The medicine is designed to be temporary but might be necessary fix (unless there is a real hardware issue which I think is a rarity), and is usually combined with CTB and other form of talk/behavioural therapy aiming to strengthen healthy coping skills, eliminate damaging thoughts, change perception and take some actions. Do some people need medicine for lifetime? I don't know personally, but I've a feeling it is being overprescribed and it might cause more harm than good if taking for a long time. I mean, who knows what it does to the brain reward system if used long-term? I don't think it is well understood.
Ideally, people are given the time/care to heal on their own, around 3 to 6 months at least for severe depression and usually the person emerges at the other end have different perspective/interests in life. But the problem is the economical system is setup for constant productivity and 6 months of downtime for many of us is simply not an option.
We've had to ask you about this many times:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28981889 (Oct 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28952194 (Oct 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27648887 (June 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052513 (May 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14405337 (May 2017)
That's not cool, and will eventually get you banned. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and eliminate this pattern, we'd appreciate it.
They are effective though.
The "thousands of professionals and the decades of research devoted to the topic" were mislead by pharma companies propagating the erroneous idea that depression and other problems are just chemical imbalances in the brain that are to be fixed with medication and that's that. So you can hardly blame them.
It will help if you read more slowly and if you don't get outraged during the process. Then you'll see that not one thing you said was something that I claimed. I never said not even one of the things you claim that I did.
A bit of a puzzling comment you posted, man.
Another hint: those thousands of professionals have a perverse monetary incentive. Food for thought. Some do good; I've met a few. Many others simply look annoyed and just hand you a prescription. We should do something about the latter.