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Even as the coronavirus crisis is slowing down in the Big Apple, the trauma that essential workers have experienced throughout the ordeal could haunt them long after the pandemic is over.
Helaine Cantor is here to help.
Cantor, a licensed therapist with a practice on the Upper West Side, has been volunteering with the NYC COVID Care Network, offering free therapy for essential workers struggling with big work loads, family separation and an unprecedented amount of death.
“The hospital workers are experiencing a critical, almost violent emergency. There’s an aggression to what they’re experiencing that is overwhelmingly traumatic,” Cantor, a Greenwich Village resident, told The Post.
“Talking about what you’re experiencing helps to reduce the way the anxiety and the trauma is internalized … it is important for people who experience trauma to be heard and supported as soon as possible after the trauma… [which] can lessen the symptoms of PTSD,” she continued.  

“I love New York City. I’m devastated about what’s happening and how I see this playing out over the next couple of years and I feel like if I could use my training to help people who are giving so much to us to New York, I want to do that.” 
On top of the 25 clients that Cantor sees in her private practice, she has been volunteering to treat essential workers pro bono — with her new patients ranging from hospital workers to cashiers at Trader Joe’s.
She originally set out to help medical workers deal with “the awful experience of overcrowded hospitals, not enough equipment, and so many ill patients dying alone” — but Cantor has found many other New Yorkers are facing some type of mental-health issue related to the crisis. 
“I volunteered for the Red Cross after September 11 and what I’m finding is that the trauma of what we’re experiencing now, in so many ways is so much worse. So much more ambiguous than what we experienced before, which was much more finite,” she said. 

Do you have a nominee for The Post’s Hero of the Day? E-mail heroes@nypost.com.