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> There could be a regulating body which could determine the risk to people's mental health for example from 'features' of tech companies etc. I think ideas like this is why it's not going to happen. Our understanding of mental health is garbage. Psychiatry used to be full of quackery and very well still might be. Treatment for something like depression boils down to "let's try drug in a random order until one works"…
That is not the treatment for depression. this argument reduces mental health to medication, which leaves aside everything from the history of mental health (asylums, witch burnings to today), leaps in medicine (from lobotomies, to SNRIs, bipolar meds and more), to simply better diagnoses. There are certainly tons of people here who have benefited from mental health professionals - overextending the flaws in psych si…
There are some non-medication treatments for some psychiatric symptoms such as those caused by trauma (Prominently, EMDR) that some hail as actual cures, and even maybe depression (I am clearly not a doctor.) but in the case of depression I think you'll find its quite medication-heavy.
The reason for this is that psychiatrists are Medical Doctors and Psychiatry is a medical field which is of course bounded by the means of medical science. This is not to say there is some "magic" at work which science could never understand--not at all. It is merely the case that medical doctors are a research paper oriented bunch, and most of the medical research which makes it into practice is either relating to anatomy or pharmaceutical interventions.
Most of the treatments we have are pharmaceutical medications because most of our research dollars have gone into pharmaceutical research.
I decided to edit this comment to add: In my personal opinion, is probable that psychiatrists et all, writ large as it were, have already figured out how to cure depression. Only, we cannot really manage to employ it because it isn't a pill, therapy, device or surgery.