One morning, in fall 2020, Francesca Camacho drove away from her 12-hour night shift as a critical care nurse at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and tried to merge onto the highway. The day’s work, in her words, was “just very terrible.” This wasn’t uncommon at the time: The Cook County area was experiencing the highest levels of Covid hospitalization it had ever experienced, surpassed only by the Omicron variant wave the following year.

She was on the phone with her parents, a ritual she’d developed as a way to decompress after a shift, when she noticed what appeared to be a teenage driver in front of her.

“I remember thinking, What is this girl doing that justifies her not letting me in?” Ms. Camacho, now 27, recalled. “And I just felt this surge of rage.” She hung up the phone and screamed and cried for the rest of the drive home.

The next day, she asked her co-workers if anything similar had ever happened to them; they all said yes. Lunchtime therapy sessions with fellow nurses turned into professional therapy sessions. “It really was feelings of anger that I felt, and I think very deep underneath that was just terrible sadness about what I was seeing and what we were all going through,” she said recently.

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