text: One Friday spring evening near the end of March 2020, Karen Dougherty was scrolling through social media, thinking about the dire kaleidoscope of images from Wuhan, Italy, New York. As a psychoanalyst and registered psychotherapist, who, at the time, had a practice in Toronto, she worried not only about the virus invading her city but about how the healthcare workers tasked with holding the lines of defence would fare—or, rather, how they were faring right then, watching the virus advance across the globe, unstoppable and untreatable. If SARS-CoV-2 attacked the body, then the pandemic could attack the mind. Depression, anxiety, fear, insomnia, loneliness, stress—each condition could appear in, and even come to define, a healthcare worker's life as the weight of COVID-19 care crushed down. In particular, Dougherty thought about what she and others call "pre-TSD," or, in other words, the anticipation trauma: the worry, "Will it happen here?" and, potentially even more palpitation-inducing, the question, "What will we do if it does?" Talk of a repeat of the SARS outbreak, during which 43 per cent of those who caught the virus in Canada were healthcare workers, was already in the air. So when she saw that a group of New York City mental health practitioners had banded together to offer free mental health services to frontline healthcare workers, her first thought was to fire off a tweet that said, "We should do this here." She barely had time to wonder if people would respond.
  
  Within two and a half hours, someone had helped her make a website and an intake form. Another person helped her put out a call for volunteers. She found her administrator in a friend from grade five whom she hadn't spoken to in forty years. They called themselves the Ontario COVID-19 Mental Health Network. Within two days, 450 licensed therapists had signed on to offer pro bono phone and video sessions to healthcare and social workers in the province. By the end of April, more than 900 registered therapists had signed on to help; Dougherty eventually had to stop taking on new volunteers. They made the process as simple as possible: fill out the form and they'd send you two potential referrals, according to your preferences (maybe, say, you wanted a woman therapist or someone who matched your own racial or cultural background). If you decided not to call, that was up to you. But if you did need to talk to someone, the therapists were there, waiting. Dougherty and her colleagues knew health crises could trigger distress and trauma in healthcare workers, and that the shadow mental health crisis often went untreated. She also felt like the provincial government wasn't ready to step up—in part because "it had no bloody idea this was coming" and in part because it had never rectified the dearth in access post-SARS. She also knew she'd be fighting stigma against accessing mental health care. Whatever the reason, Dougherty didn't want history to carbon-copy itself.
  
  In the end, more than one thousand healthcare and social workers reached out to the grassroots group. Together, their stories were a rushing undercurrent of anxiety, bubbling deep with fear and betrayal, often at odds with the "we got this" narrative the federal and provincial governments presented. Some called to talk about feeling that their hospitals or the provincial government, or both, weren't taking the crisis seriously enough. Many worried that they wouldn't have adequate PPE, or that it would run out, especially those who worked in long-term care homes. Nurses and doctors feared being moved from their regular wards and being made to work exclusively with COVID-19 patients. Their minds chewed on the mystery of it all: Would they know enough to treat patients? What procedures should they follow? How would they keep up with the information, which changed by the day, by the hour? They were terrified of getting sick, and most of all, they were terrified of being the ones who got their families sick. They agonized over the possibility of ventilator shortages and being forced to make gut-wrenching, impossible decisions about who would live and die. And they also worried about regular, everyday human issues that were suddenly, as Dougherty put it, "on steroids." Would somebody's ex-partner use the threat of COVID-19 as an excuse not to let them see their children? Would they not get to say final words to a dying parent? Would lockdown topple a relationship over to divorce?
  
  "That uncertainty is the fabric of anxiety," said Dougherty. "That is what anxiety is." Dougherty is a former full-time documentary filmmaker who began to transition out of the profession after Canadian documentarian Allan King turned to her one day while they were working on a project together and told her she was in the wrong field. Her true calling, he felt, was to become a psychoanalyst. She told him she didn't know what that was, but he persisted. Eventually, she enrolled in a master's program in psychoanalytic studies, while continuing to work in filmmaking, both fields leading her to listen to and document people's trauma, their triumphs, their shaky steps toward healing. After she graduated, she began psychoanalytic training and started her first practice in her Toronto apartment. That was ten years ago. Today, Dougherty makes documentaries about psychoanalysis. She has never lost her belief in the power of storytelling: how it can connect us, unburden our shame, release whatever load we're carrying. She believes at least half the power of it is in the other side—the act of listening to someone's life, of validating that their experiences matter through your own attuned presence.
  
  During the early weeks of COVID-19, she knew she and her army of listeners couldn't make their temporary patients' anxiety vanish in a few free sessions. Her job, as she saw it, was simply to attend and, in doing so, to help them better tolerate the sense of not knowing, even if only incrementally. That is, after all, what therapists do: they allow people to feel witnessed and heard, to download their anxiety into another person who can contain and detoxify it. Dougherty also hoped that, in some way, she was giving permission for frontline workers to reach out for help, to say that they couldn't handle everything, not always. On the other side of it, her new mental health network gave therapists—many of whom had also had their worlds upended in their own ways—the opportunity to feel like they, too, were using their skills to do something essential. They were healing in their own way. The slow build of everyone recognizing how protecting and cherishing frontline workers' mental health keeps us all alive was worth Dougherty's own long and sometimes stressful days. She couldn't take away the pandemic, but she could let people know they didn't have to endure it alone.