October 2021 – When COVID-19 raged across the globe in early 2020,people were terrified of the novel pathogen. Health-care professionals were taxed to their limits as hospitals filled with patients struggling to breathe. Virologists and epidemiologists worked frantically to understand the virus, while national governments disagreed over policies to contain and control it. Meanwhile, Columbia’s psychologists and psychiatrists began to prepare for a second pandemic: one of widespread mental-health challenges