Ah people I think you are getting confused here. Shamanism aka people taking clients to South America is indeed a kind of therapy. Using a powerful hallucinogenic drug called ayahuasca. It's got nothing to do with bloody mediums (fake) or tarot (fake) or other fake woo woo crap.
It's really not a kind of therapy. It is a form of spiritual practice that exists in some indigenous tribal communities. Shamans take decades to train and serve their communities in various ways.
Stalin had almost of the Russian shamans thrown out of helicopters opining that if they think they can fly let's see how they deal with this.
Shamanism and traditional spiritual practices in many indigenous communities is under threat from spiritual "seekers", ayahuasca tourism and ignorant westerners who believe that they can buy spiritual experiences in the same way that they buy trainers.
Vulnerable people needing therapy face all manner of risks from dangerous predators and angry locals when they embark on spiritual tourism.
There's talk about ayahuasca opening up your 'spiritual side' but really that's whatever you want you don't have to believe in anything. And there's some good evidence that hallucinogens work well for depression and as a therapy. I'd definitely give it a go.
Herein lies the problem. Privileged westerners feel very comfortable about appropriating and cherry picking the aspects of indigenous tribal spirituality that they like (usually mind altering drugs and dramatic costumes and rituals), while showing disinterest in and contempt for the communities whose ways they appropriate.
The rituals and ceremonies are one aspect of the lives of indigenous people and are intertwined with their lives and cultures.
A ceremony removed from its cultural and context is an empty ritual. These rituals are about community support and cohesion, they are ancestral ways.
Taking someone else's ritual and chery picking the aspects that appeal to you, wearing tribal costumes and using "sacred objects" removed from their cultural context is a kind of obscene pantomime.
In fact having had three sets of close to useless therapy by registered counsellors and met many of them with deeply dysfunctional personal lives I'd say that the ayahuasca is probably more effective.
I agree that some therapists and counsellors have dysfunctional personal lives. This is to be expected as therapists and counsellors are only human and deeply flawed like anyone else. No human being, whatever their profession is perfect. We all have our dysfunctional elements.
The active drug in Ayahuasca, DMT, undoubtably has many therapeutic elments as do many other psychoactive substances.
However, as most of these are illegal in many territories, including in the UK, people either take them with friends in a clandestine manner or go to Peru, Siberia, Mexico and various other territories to seek help from "shamans", many of whom do not have the interests of vulnerable people in mind.
Some of these "shamans" are indigenous healers whose tribes suffer when their leaders go away for months to administer drugs and ceremonies to tourists. The tribes may benefit financially although entrepreneurial middle men and women cream off most of the profits. Ayahuasca tourism impacts in various harmful ways upon tribal communities and can be a very high risk practice for naive seekers.
There is also a thriving underground network of accredited and non-accredited counsellors and psychotherapists whose "shamanism" businesses do include the administration of psychoactive drugs.
I know as I have met some of these people. I have even met psychiatrists who are ayahuasca tourists.
While many people offering therapeutic "shamanic journeying" (they seem to love the word "journey") may be well meaning, some of them are sexual predators, cult leaders and worse.
I am not for one moment denying the fact that some psychoactive substances can have profoundly therapeutic effects. The problem is that these same substances, when not adminstered by a knowledgable person, or when administered by an exploiter or predator can leave a vulnerable person profoundly damaged and even more vulnerable.
I think that in the UK we have a very bad situation in which the scarcity of quality mental health services leaves a significant percentage of the population who are the most vulnerable in a situation where they either self medicate with psychoactive drugs (with varying degrees of success and significant risks) or whey they turn to predatory plastic shamans for help.