Treatment A had a 10% effectiveness, Placebo had 10% as well (which for some kind of 'talk therapy' - and for a lot of other things may not have an exact placebo, but let's assume it is) is another 10%

Question: Are those the same 10%?

Or with a better example, naive blood transfusion (that is, if you ignore blood type) has a low rate of success

That effect, however, happens to be about equivalent to placebo.

Engaging in a course of well-tested psychotherapy, according to the new analysis, gives them an added 20 percent chance of achieving an even more satisfying improvement, or lasting recovery.

An added 20 percent chance.

Don't forget they're already saying that talking therapy is only 25% less effective than originally thought. They are still saying that talking therapy is effective! And at no point do they compare it to placebo.

The very article we're talking about:

1) Disagrees with your extremist stance

2) Never mentions it nearing placebo level

3) You probably didn't read it as you didn't address it

CBT, for example, is known to be particularly effective when dealing with anxiety as well as dealing with secondary symptoms and making people's lives better. It has an effect WAY above placebo.

So why did you say this? Are you actively attempting to make people's lives worse by putting them off therapy?

Also from the article:

for those who do well or fully recover, “psychotherapy, particularly cognitive behavior therapy, seems to be most effective in cutting the risk for a relapse long-term,” Dr. Hollon [one of the co-authors] said.

The most generous interpretation of figures in this article is that NNTT for depression and therapy is 5. Meaning one out of every five people treated by therapy will show some improvement due to effects of therapy itself.

We can certainly call this effective in that there is an effect for some people who try therapy. But not for 80% of them.

Therapy is a 10 billion dollar/year industry in the United States, with its practitioners often charging desperately unhappy people high rates (beyond what most of us lucky software devs make), with no advantage to show for their various methodologies beyond what one gets from talking to an untrained stranger.

Financially successful yet largely bogus businesses and industries are never going to put themselves out of business and have little impetus to change the status quo.

Awareness of the current poor options for mental health treatment is important. However uncomfortable or against an established narrative of "help is out there' it is to address these realities, it will be easier to marshall efforts to finding real mental health solutions if we aren't pretending the current paradigms are working when the numbers show otherwise.

I'm sorry therapy didn't work for you or you didn't want to try it, but I'm not sure what your agenda is.

You seem to have some weird axe to grind about people making money. I'm not sure what else I can say as you seem to want to believe the whole thing's a big rip-off. Like where does the claim that untrained listeners are as good as trained ones come from?

Is that what you're angry about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict

This article is more interesting for me in that it supports the dodo bird verdict. Cognitive behavioral therapy results have for a while been put forward as the exception. According to the article, those results have been inflated, and there are no exceptions.

edit: of course, if you consider a priest the control for the psychology industry - then it may be fair to say that established therapies have no better success than placebo. Is a priest a placebo?

edit: tl;dr

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"The most commonly studied of [talk therapies is] cognitive behavior therapy — in which people learn to identify and defuse automatic, self-defeating assumptions, like 'I’m unlucky in love' or 'I always choke' — and interpersonal therapy, which focuses on reshaping how people interact with others. These studies typically have subjects engage in weekly, hourlong sessions with a therapist for three to four months.

"The researchers found that 13 of these funded studies were completed but never published, usually because those who did the trials did not think a finding of no benefit stood much chance of being published. The team contacted each of the 13 investigators originally paid to do the work and requested their data. Once that data was included with those from the other, published papers, the effectiveness of the therapies dropped significantly — by about a quarter.

"'That seems to be the magic number, a quarter — about the same as you see in the pharma trials' of antidepressants, said a co-author, Dr. Erick Turner, an associate professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University and the lead author of the 2008 paper detailing bias in those drug trials."

They're not saying CBT doesn't work or isn't more effective, they're saying it's not quite as effective as thought because people don't always report the failures.

What's happening is that people who do a study that results in no positive benefit aren't publishing. But one study doesn't give the whole picture. There are many reasons why a singular study might show no benefit, a lot of them statistical reasons.

What you need to do is look at all the studies, but the problem has been that the failing studies haven't always been published, which is bad science.

So what's been happening is the published studies were:

B NB B B NB B B B (6 benefit / 2 no benefit)

When in fact the results were:

B NB B B NB B B B NB NB (6 benefit / 4 no benefit)

In science and statistics you have to report the false negatives too.