Experts offer free help to frontline employees

Nurses, doctors and other frontline workers, burdened by the stress of providing health care during the COVID-19 pandemic, can get free counseling from hundreds of licensed Bay Area psychotherapists.

Counseling from the Frontline Workers Counseling Project (FWCP) also is available to essential workers, including police, firefighters, teachers, grocery store and delivery service workers, and childcare employees.

San Francisco psychiatrist Elizabeth Rawson and psychologist Michael Levin launched the project at the start of the pandemic in March. It provides free and easy-to-use phone or virtual counseling to workers who are exposed to high levels of stress, exhaustion or trauma — either because they are directly caring for COVID-19 patients or for other reasons.

More than 450 therapists have joined the project to provide free counseling on a volunteer basis.

“At the start of the pandemic, Dr. Levin and I became very aware of elevated levels of stress in our practice, particularly among health care workers, who were anticipating a catastrophe in the Bay Area, and who were watching what was happening in Italy, with the lack of PPE,” Rawson said.

Early shelter-in-place orders helped save Bay Area hospitals from being overwhelmed with critically ill patients, as what happened in facilities in Italy or New York City, she noted.

Still, that doesn’t mean the Bay Area has skirted the crisis. While Bay Area counties are starting to reopen businesses, restaurants, parks, pools, and hair salons, the region continues to see an increase in the number of cases and deaths.

“We expect the crisis to be ongoing,” Rawson said. “There’s not just the potential of a second or a third wave, the impact of traumatic experiences is longlasting. The effects of events that have already taken place may not sink in for some time.”

Frontline workers also are feeling the same stressors as everyone else from rising unemployment numbers, economic uncertainty and the protests and civil unrest following the police killing of George Floyd.

People are sad, depressed, angry, frustrated and afraid for themselves and their loved ones — all normal reactions in a global crisis, Rawson said. But it’s not healthy to stay sad or depressed, to struggle with insomnia or racing thoughts or to selfmedicate with drugs and alcohol.

“There’s been a huge disruption in how we’re living,” Rawson said. “Frontline and essential workers have taken on the essential work, which involves extra risk and which can be very stressful.”

People can go to the Frontline Workers Counseling Project website (fwcp.org) and find therapists with a range of backgrounds.