> I'm dismissive of Allopathic Psychiatry because those doctors hurt my friend, and force her to take prescriptions to make her substance abuse problems worse.
No one should be forcing her to take anything, so that's a problem. Also treatment for substance abuse is a challenge unrelated to issues like depression, and given addiction often is a cause of depression (due to environmental and obviously drug/alcohol interactions) treating addiction before depression is what should really have been happening. If the depression was caused by the substance abuse, then that might work - but then abuse is often a response to depression in which case the depression would still need to be treated.
> Benzo's hurt a lot of people, without actually fixing anyone's problems.
Agreed, benzos are super dangerous, and they should be prescribed only if other things fail, or for very specific reasons - I was using them for a while as my knees are shot and getting to sleep was challenging. But I'm one of those people who doesn't seem to develop addictions to drugs so I only had to deal with the obnoxious "getting to sleep" problems while coming off them. Similarly no issue with Vicodin/norco, but there's also a general problem of over prescription of opiates where simple anti-inflammatories would be sufficient.
> My friend called me up and said she'd bought herself some lithium.
Lithium is a drug you shouldn't be taking unless it's the only option as it has significant focus, etc issues. Just buying them yourself without a psychiatrist who is aware of what else has been tried would be super worrying.
> 5HTP
5HTP is glorified tryptophan, and like so many "natural", "herbal", "homeopathic", etc treatments has no evidence to support effectiveness.
Depression is not a nutrition or metabolic problem in the vast majority of cases - otherwise there would be actual data to back that statement up. People who dismiss it as being "eat better", or suggest B12 (which can cause short term improvements), light treatment (vitamin D deficiency causes a host of problems, but not severe depression) are basically saying a variation of "this is your fault for not looking after yourself better".
> ECT tries to reset people's brains, without doing anything else. It's a simplistic treatment that needs to be treated like calomel/quicksilver (mercury).
Modern studies do show it to be effective, the older "do it while awake" approach caused many problems which have lead to the long term stigma, but that doesn't magically mean modern treatments don't work.
> Palliative drugs never fix the problem.
Except they do, for many many people.
I'm sorry your friend was poorly or mistreated, but that isn't the case for everyone, and dismissing the treatments that do work for people is not helpful. Dismissing treatments that have been shown to work is similarly unhelpful.