My rhetorical questions apply to your point too. Do you think information on how to do yoga, how to be mindful, and how to get started running should also be medicalized, made inaccessible without going through our byzantine medical system and paying a thousand dollars (or trying to convince insurance to do so)? How about books on how to eat and cook healthily? Or a self-help lecture on positive thinking?

If not, why? All of these things are common parts of a treatment plan for mood disorders, and yoga and jogging bring with them infinitely more risk of harm than self-CBT does.

Your claim is that if something can help with a disorder, people should be prevented from accessing it easily. This seems precisely backwards to me! Something being "offered as a treatment" is a terrible, terrible basis for throwing up substantial medical barriers, and causes much more harm from reduced access than it provides benefits. As I said, I'm not imagining away the need for the FDA: The risks of accidental misuse or other safety concerns are a legitimate basis for medical barriers, costly though they may be. But I think the onus is on the ban-happy folks to explain why a chatbot that helps you think positively is closer to Fentanyl than it is to a YouTube video on beginner's yoga.

The answer is simply path-dependence. The reason you categorize CBT differently is that it was developed through the formal scientific establishment while (eg) yoga and mindfulness were developed externally and validated post-hoc by the establishment. This is decidedly irrelevant to the best interests of the patient, and there are a trillion and one examples of the FDA[1] acting in ways that are explicitly harmful to patient welfare.

My ultimate point here is that if your concern is the health of yourself and your loved ones, the barriers the medical system throws up around treatments serves as a weak prior that often needs working around and should never be blindly and slavishly followed without at least a bit of basic research giving you an understanding of _why_ the barrier exists. My sister and brother-in-law are doctors, and a decade+ of conversation with them about medical culture has given me a healthy respect of how pants-on-head stupid and/or ignorant some patients can be[2]. These poor folks have no real choice but to follow the FDA blindly, even despite the heavy tax on their physical and mental wellbeing that they pay for doing so. But if you've got anywhere near an average IQ and/or basic, basic cognitive ability[3], it's simply negligent to follow this strategy.

[1] I'm using the FDA as an evocative metonymy for the medical system writ large, as everything from med school culture to our insurance infrastructure contributes to this status quo. The FDA isn't a fully agentic actor in this scenario, and while it has severe cultural flaws that I'd love to see improved upon, it and especially its staffers can't be fully blamed for the status quo.

[2] This is where many physicians' God complex comes from. They have to deal with the masses day-in and day-out, and have too keen a sense of just how rock-bottom cognitive ability can get. Most of the rest of us end up with social interactions that are pretty substantially segregated by cognitive ability.

[3] to the point that anyone who can read and understand this comment thread more than qualifies