Not in most cases.
Medical causes for what appear to be thought originated problems of psychology need to be identified and successfully treated before therapy could have any chance at working.
Before bullying relatives and school destroyed my life, I was born with severe congenital obstructive sleep apnea, a condition not diagnosable when I was born, and not treatable in 2020.
Therapy for conditions like narcolepsy, leukemia, Huntington's chorea, glaucoma, cancers and other diseases is not only obviously worthless and patently absurd, but criminally fraudulent. If therapy was useful for most of us, then Sanctioned Suicide might not exist. (How many of us are NOT here because of chronic pain or mental distress?)
"Speed date" therapists? How about speed therapy instead? I favor cost effective Single Session Therapy as the one modality for replacing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as the only mode of psychological treatment covered by insurance.
Otherwise, teach coping skills like Progressive Muscle Relaxation, Autogenic Training, Diaphragmatic Breathing, Biofeedback (which can all be combined), or administer Clinical Hypnosis (more potent than any pharmaceuticals for pain relief).
Cures and rapidly effective treatments for many, if not most of the problems which have brought us to this site exist, and have existed for 175 years. (British physician James Braid coined the misnomer "Hypnosis" after Hypnos, the Greek God of Sleep in 1846.) However, there's little money in cures and effective treatments. Money is made by PREVENTING people from getting better, NOT by actually helping them. In this respect, psychotherapy is absolutely akin to an addictive drug.
Psychotherapists do not care about their patients. They care about making money off their patients, and protecting their licenses so they can continue ripping off victims until deciding to quit.
When my psychiatrist of 18 years achieved full financial independence, she abruptly closed her private practice, then ended her medical career overseeing my area hospital's mental health unit without advance notice a year later, walking away from all of it. For her, it's as if patients who she treated on a weekly basis for over 20 years no longer exist, and never existed. All we are to therapists are cash cows to be milked for profit as long as possible.
Another psychiatrist I had a fleeting encounter with later retired, moving from New England to Texas. Again, all connections to her patients was totally cut off. These people are not trying to wean us off their services, but aiming to keep us addicted to their care until they choose to leave their practices.
