Tuesday, November 12, 2024

Millions were devastated by the election results, and so were their therapists. Here’s how they pushed through together

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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.”

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.”

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