I have only experienced it for a few sessions last summer so my judgement may not be that accurate. I didn't mean to sound so "authoritative" in my last comment. Anyway, i felt like it was putting me under a lot of extra stress, even though fortunately i was relatively well off at the time - i couldn't imagine not feeling extremely stressed out paying 90€/$ for therapy when youre already struggling to make ends meet. Seeing a regular therapist that I don't pay for (except indirectly through my health insurance, as a student around 140€ currently although it keeps getting more expensive every year) really gives me peace of mind that I'll be able to continue seeing her for the next 40-50 sessions and slowly work on lasting change.

Becoming a licensed therapist is a long and strenuous process in Germany. As a client, it gives me some peace of mind, although before my current therapist I also had some "bad" ones in the past (ones i didnt match with). As a result of this, getting into therapy in Germany is a availability issue, not a financial one, usually. Clients have to write dozens of emails/phone calls to therapists, which can be a big struggle especially considering the population we're talking about.

The process definitely needs a huge overhaul. There are a lot of willing and able prospective therapists, who can't, for example because they didn't have the perfect high school grades requored to study psychology here (unless you go to Austria, which the Austrian students understandably are a bit unhappy about), or because they can't years of expensive, badly paid training required to become a licensed therapist.