Election Day itself was certainly a grueling one for campaign staffers, poll workers, and political reporters.
But the day after is when things got tough for therapists, many of whom saw their practices go into overdrive while already feeling personally upset over the election’s outcome.
“This morning, I was more or less crying while my client was crying,” an upstate New York therapist, Danielle (who requested just her first name be used out of privacy concerns), said on Wednesday.
“In the morning, I thought, I don’t know how I’m going to do this,” she admits. “At one point, I had thought about taking Wednesday off. But then I was like, ‘I can’t take the day off. I’m a therapist.”
Being a mental-health professional is always intense, of course. This week just brought a bit more intensity to many practices—particularly those with clients that supported Kamala Harris.
It also brought a higher volume of patients: On Wednesday, nationwide mental health bookings on Zocdoc, a virtual platform, jumped by 22% between the hours of 6 and 8 am alone. Mental health provider Spring Health reported a 24% increase in member account creation from Nov. 4th to Nov. 5th—and, most significantly, a dramatic 240% surge in appointment bookings from Nov. 3rd to Nov. 4th.
Crisis lines also saw a jump: The Trevor Project, for LGBTQ youth, told the Washington Post it saw a 125% increase in calls, texts and chat messages on Election Day and on Wednesday. Crisis Text Line saw its volume increase by a third on Election Day.
Anecdotally, therapists tell Fortune that many patients called for extra emergency sessions on Wednesday, while others who had ended therapy altogether decided to return to treatment.
“The last few days have been taxing,” Matthew Solit, LMSW and executive clinical director at LifeStance, a network of providers, says. “For many left-leaning clients, we are seeing a sense of heaviness and feelings of being in ‘crisis-mode.’ I have seen and heard of clients feeling a sense of anxiety and catastrophizing to the point that they suffer. There is a broad feeling of information and emotional overload.”
And, Solit adds, “Clinicians are as vulnerable to this as the rest of the population.”
When therapists are as rattled as their patients
Therapists who spoke with Fortune this week expressed that post-Election Day felt different than usual because they, in most cases, were dealing with the same grief and fears and disappointment as their clients.
“I used to be really strictly boundaried all the time—not really a blank slate, but people didn’t know anything about me,” Danielle tells Fortune. “And I think during lockdown, it was like, the thing that’s happening to everybody is also happening to you.” Being a blank slate during that time “didn’t even seem appropriate,” she says, noting that the experience is helping her get through this week. “I think I’m more human with people.”
For her own self-care, she had a therapy session and has “refused to cook this week,” she says. “But I don’t have anything magical.”
New York City therapist Sandy Silverman, who has been in practice for over 30 years, says this week represented her third time working through “a really major, shared crisis,” she says. “The first was 9/11. The next was COVID. And now there’s this, where [my patients] know that I’m struggling, too, with what they’re struggling with…I can’t spill to them, but I have shared how hard this is.” She relies on a peer group of colleagues for personal support.
Solit says that for him, post-election stress feels very different from the pandemic. “COVID affected the entire nation and profoundly impacted people of all ages,” he says. “As a virus, COVID was apolitical, although the response from many people and politicians was certainly divisive…This feels different in how much more polarizing the results of the election were. It is much more divisive. As clinicians, we could discuss COVID as a virus and the lifestyle changes that resulted without bias. Much more care must be taken when discussing election stress in order to provide equitable and ethical treatment.”
The biggest challenge on Wednesday for Anna Macgregor, a therapist in private practice in Rhode Island, in fact, was keeping her own feelings about the election in line.
“I was working very, very hard, much harder than I usually do, to put away my own bias,” she says, despite all of her clients being Harris supporters. “I was just so self-conscious about making a safe space for their issues in the session, and so what I was pushing down was pretty gargantuan…I’m always bringing my real self to the work, but I had to put a lot of myself away.”
Michelle, a Massachusetts-based therapist who asked that her last name not be used due to privacy concerns, said her challenge was not getting lost in despair, especially when one particular client wanted to really wallow in it. “That was hard for me, because I’m trying to manage my own despair,” she says, “and while I had some who moved in and out of it, for this person it was the whole session.”
Some therapists felt better due to focusing on others
Alex Rascovar, a New York City therapist, spoke about the relief he felt in getting to focus on the emotions of others rather than his own.
“As hard as my feelings are, the more I get to be supportive of others actually helps me process through my own thing,” says Rascovar. “Not to say that we’re actively doing that, but it’s like the more that I get to be there for whatever people’s feelings are, the more that I’m in this place where I’m like, I’m doing something right. And doing something feels better than doing nothing.”
Says Rosenstien: “It was such a drag to have to wake up and go start being a therapist with my wife in tears and, you know, put that into a box. But it’s also a blessing to be able to be available for other people and to put your woes in the box. And so that was actually the greatest gift that could have been, to make it not about me.”
That idea resonates for Michelle, whose own fears were “pushed aside just by being with other people really in their process about it,” she says. “It does actually feel good in the midst of this dark time. Like I’m doing something.”
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