Can the moderators close this thread? Only harm can come from this discussion. A person should seek mental health advice from a trained psychologist, and only a trained psychologist. To argue back and forth on this website is pointless, especially since most of the posters here (my self included) have no formal training in psychotherapy.
Do you all really think that because someone has a degree in psychology (and even has many years “experience”) knows exactly how to help another person with their psychological issues? For every competent psychologist, I can find you many more psychologists who have no real clue how to help their clients. And for nth patient that was helped by a certain psychologist, there are many more who were not helped, because the psychologist didn’t understand what the real underlying issue was. Don’t get me wrong. There are many psychologists that are very good, but many others do not have the knowledge and intuition what would help figure out the causes for certain behaviors. And many of them do more harm than good.
I cannot agree or disagree with PBA regarding CBT, because I don’t know exactly how it’s implemented, but I can tell you, that there is no doubt that depression comes from circumstances which causes the “Chemical imbalance” rather than the other way around. And it’s important to go through the thoughts (childhood circumstances or current environment) that is causing the depression rather than train a person to have positive thoughts and/or medicate them.