I'd add the caveat that therapists are like friends and teachers: who they are as people matters for how effective they are professionally.
Treat finding a therapist like dating or considering a friendship with someone. A therapist can be a very good therapist (objectively) but not click with you.
It's okay to say "I'm trying out multiple therapists right now to see who fits best. Can we just do introductions with each other?"
Find someone who you respect, shares some beliefs with you, and generally has a compatible outlook on life.
It may not help in the moment, but best money I ever spent was going to a therapist weekly, or more often, for about 2 years. Many universities offer free mental health services. Therapy didn’t fix everything, but it did help with perfectionism and especially with black-and-white thinking.
as in Google Assistant for depression/OCD/ADD/anxiety management. Specialized for 1-2 problems that were diagnosed by a real doctor.
The biggest problem is it needs to be quite well customized for each user.
I believe talking to anyone/anything helps a lot, and hearing feedback helps even more.
A "personal medical assistant" like that could help manage medication intake, serious episodes, moments when you feel very bad.
I have a prototype for myself, it's just a bunch of cobbled software running on a dedicated smartphone. The voice triggers and replies are prewritten based on my own self-analysis. But I know it all already, so the best part is medication reminders and letting me know what I live for.
However it needs to always be on me, and right now it uses too much custom software to just install on anything. I can't build such an app myself, but it should be possible.
I am single btw, so of course I have no one to talk to.
The therapists I tried were just public ones, so they're more interested in showing up and getting their cut out of the mandatory insurance system.
"We don't take on new clients" or "we only speak German" is a valid reply, and what's a depressed person calling for help gonna do?
Just hang up and give up or best case, call others. It's a shit system.
I gave up on it all and am trying to make/find a "system" that is truly personal, custom, free as in freedom, independent of the gargantuan public and for profit healthcare machines, which are too big to accommodate everyone, plus the disinterest in actual help is obvious in places where insurance is mandatory.
Not knocking on emergency services, surgeons, anyone fixing obvious physical problems, those people are worth it. Mostly mental healthcare, where it's easy for unscrupulous people to fudge numbers and make money for doing nothing.
It's like my hypothyroidism, took me years to get that diagnosis, it's stupid.
But of course, when you say "I'm depressed and I drink a lot', that's not the first thing anyone would think to check for. Or maybe my luck is terrible.
Either way, universal healthcare systems are just huge machines like the justice system, they work for most, but many slip through the cracks and get zero help, being left to self-medicate and self-help, which is hard when said machines gatekeep anything that can actually work.
That's how you get a huge popularity of homeopathy, religion, diets, illegal drugs, and anything desperate people can cling to and believe in.
Well, I am not sure such a thing would work for me, at least not in the long run. But like you said, it could be useful if you are alone and need a voice (even if a synthetic one) to remind you that there are reasons to keep going.
I hope you can find yourself proper counseling though, I didn't know things were so dismal in Germany (I am assuming you are in Germany based on the contents of you comment).
