Seeking help should not be so taboo as people are resorting to doing it alone at night while no one is looking. That is society loudly saying "if you slip off the golden path even a little your life is over". So many people resorting to LLMs for therapy is a symptom of a cultural problem, it's not a solution to a root issue.
"Seeking help" goes both ways.
> How can I trust a therapist that has a financial incentive to keep me seeing them?
The direct response: I hope the commenter isn't fixated on this framing of the question, because I don't think it is a useful framing. [1] What is a better framing, then? I'm not going to give a simple answer. My answer is more like a process.
I suggest refining one's notion of trust to be "I trust Person A to do {X, Y, Z} because of what I know about them (their incentives, professional training, culture, etc)."
Shift one's focus and instead ask: "What aspects of my therapist are positives and/or lead me to trust their advice? What aspects are negative and/or lead me to not trust their advice?" Put this in writing and put some time into it.
One might also want to journal on "How will I know if therapy is helping? What are my goals?" By focusing on this, I think answers relating to "How much is my therapist helping?" will become easier to figure out.
[1] I think it is not useful because both because it is loaded and because it is overly specific. Instead, focus on figuring out what actions one should take. From here, the various factors can slot in naturally.
When I was getting my Education degree, we were told that, as teachers, to take talk of suicide by students extremely seriously. If a student talks about suicide, a professional supposedly asks, "Do you know how you're going to do it?" If there is an affirmative response, the danger is real.
I suspect that comes from examining case studies?
I'm glad you carried through that period.
I wonder if really what we need is some sort of supervised mode, where users chat with it but a trained professional reviews the transcripts and does a weekly/monthly/urgent checkin with them. This is how (some? most?) therapists work themselves, they take their notes to another therapist and go through them.