I guess the whole point of treatment is to help you get on with life because does anyone really ever 'recover' from mental illness? or do they just learn to live with it??
What if "mental illness" isn't the cause? I had a variety of diagnoses (ADHD, depression, anxiety, bipolar, etc.) and tried to manage them with meds and things like CBT and DBT, all of which were somewhat helpful in their own ways, but problems would eventually come back up. Turns out I wasn't "mentally ill," but had a history of unaddressed, long-term traumas that had at the time been overpowering and to which I'd tried to adapt in order to emotionally and physically survive. I had various forms of PTSD, to use another label which only covers so much. Finding and addressing the root causes via trauma-focused modalities like EMDR, Tapas Acupressure Technique, Emotional Freedom Technique, somatic interventions, etc. set me from the traumas and helped me to develop new ways of viewing, accepting, and managing difficulties without being overwhelmed by them if they aren't truly overwhelming, and to minimize their impacts if they are, and know that, if I can get free of such situations, I have the capacity to heal and experience resilience. I can even experience a measure of resilience asni experience them, which sets me up for a better recovery if they do end. Therapists who used trauma-informed frameworks and weren't stuck in the frameworks of psychiatric labels, patient-blaming, and the purely cognitive had lasting positive impacts for me. They supported me in healing and experiencing personal responsibility and capability, not in staying stuck and managing the impacts as if they were insurmountable. Unlike with true medicine, one cannot test for the vast majority of mental illnesses, and most practitioners don't send people for the brain scans that actually can diagnose things like schizophrenia, PTSD and sociopathy. Instead, they go by lists of criteria that overlap among diagnoses and try to prove the diagnosis by responses to medications, which do not cure such conditions and can lose efficacy over time. In fact, pharmaceuticals often drive psychiatry rather than being tools of psychiatry. So when a medicine stops helping, then one hopes for a more accurate diagnosis to be discovered, or to get rediagnosed, when meanwhile, the root cause of depression or mood swings may be because someone was abused or mindfucked or neglected throughout their developmental years, and that can be compounded by genetics, because one's ancestors experienced trauma, which can affect DNA, so if someone's family history is abuse through countless generations, there are long-reaching impacts as to how one experiences and manages trauma, which at some point nearly everyone will run into. Some people can be utterly changed by going through a trauma such as war, and for some people, childhood is physical or psychological war. The resulting depression isn't from an inherent "chemical imbalance" but from having been helpless and unprotected. I think the label of mental illness is a big ol' mindfuck and a red herring, and looks at someone as if they are somehow faulty, rather than looking for how such conditions arose and how to effectively address them and, if not totally free someone from the effects, to seriously mitigate them, and there are non-medicinal modalities that do this when a practitioner is willing to work in those frameworks and not the "mental illness" or extremely limited "cognitive" framework.
That's my soapbox. It comes from experience and study, and I humbly acknowledge it is incomplete and not universally applicable. My point is to caution against falling into the traps of theoretical frameworks and trusting people in positions of authority just because they have certain levels of knowledge and experience. Humans are wired to trust in and capitulate to authority and hierarchy, and such things do not always operate to serve our best interests. If interested, see the Milgram experiment and Robert Cialdini's writing on influence and persuasion for more information, I would never want someone to take my word for something just because I sound intelligent or emotionally convincing.