Nice analogy, and there’s similarity between cooking and mental health care in how either can probably be explained quite formally at low levels, but the rabbit hole is so deep that to get any real-life utility in reasonable timeframe it seems like you just have to give up theory and follow some guidance or recipes.
Which I don’t mind, generally (discovering and applying meditation or other therapy techniques). What I mind about typical “therapy” as described here is that consulting someone, unlike with cooking, seems to require disclosing a lot about yourself to a person whom you probably don’t have enough information to determine the skill and depth of until after that disclosure has happened.
Plus, I suspect if you become sufficiently interested in how cooking works, you are not going to be satisfied by recipes or just-so advice. You’d be curious to know the why.
One alternative viewpoint for understanding why therapy is so effective for mental health issues, goes as follows:
Humans evolved in closely knit groups, where social relationships were extremely important. Good, close friendships were essential for survival. Humans evolved to innately feel better, when they feel that they have formed a close bond with another person.
Common Factors Theory posits that successful psychotherapy needs: alliance, empathy, genuineness, affirmation...
The school of the psychotherapist is not relevant(!), it's much more important that the patient and therapists are a "good match".
Having this viewpoint makes psychotherapy more understandable, and also explains why depressed people can't just read psychotherapy books and self-heal.
As a counter-example, one can read sources that provide logically coherent reasoning/research into how humans require human interaction and “self-heal” by exposing oneself to more of it.
Which, in fact, I have done and I do. (I am also somewhat fond of the “recursion” theory of self-awareness, in which modeling humans around us requires us to create a model of ourselves within their model, and which more or less requires other humans for human consciousness as it is generally understood to even occur.)
Which I don’t mind, generally (discovering and applying meditation or other therapy techniques). What I mind about typical “therapy” as described here is that consulting someone, unlike with cooking, seems to require disclosing a lot about yourself to a person whom you probably don’t have enough information to determine the skill and depth of until after that disclosure has happened.
Plus, I suspect if you become sufficiently interested in how cooking works, you are not going to be satisfied by recipes or just-so advice. You’d be curious to know the why.