A Mental-Health Crisis Is Burning Across the American West

There’s a fire up north, the woman says, the Kincade Fire. It flickered into existence on the nighttime horizon, a shapeless brightness billowing into the sky. Now the wind’s whipping it south toward Santa Rosa. Evacuations are under way, and she worries her home will burn. Allison Chapman listens in silence. She’s modeling for a makeup demo when the woman walks into the studio, where Allison studied after moving south a couple of years ago, at 18. She knows this woman from back home in Northern California, knows how close this woman lives to her grandparents, knows that if the fire is threatening this woman’s home, it’s threatening theirs, too. She feels the panic coming on.

It begins, usually, with a quickening of the heart and a tightening of the chest. Then comes a rush of cold, which is ironic, in a way, because her fear is fire. Her mind jumps backwards first—to the flames tearing across the mountainside on a late-summer evening in 2015, to the dark smoke rising from the woods around her house, to the toy wagon wheels discovered weeks later amid the wreckage—then springs forward and explodes like a shotgun shell into a million imagined tragedies. She shivers.

Only this time she doesn’t. In the four years since the Valley Fire destroyed her home, Allison has learned to suppress that feeling before it overwhelms her. She tells herself that she is okay, that her grandparents are okay, that everything is okay.

Allison had occasional panic attacks even before the Valley Fire. Afterward, though, the attacks seized her daily and lasted as long as a couple of hours. Often something would trigger them—a word, a smell, a sound—but other times they came without cause. Her panic would catch her like a riptide, sudden and irresistible. When it did, her mother, Ellie, would find her curled up on the floor of her room, hyperventilating, and hold her until her breathing slowed.

The next day, it would happen again. Or if not the next day, then the day after. She felt she’d lost control. She started to cut herself. She wore long sleeves to hide the scars.

When the woman leaves, Allison calls her mother. ( agreed to use pseudonyms for all family members to protect their privacy.) Allison’s grandmother is lying in a hospital bed with her lungs full of smoke, Ellie says, but she’ll recover. Her house is safe for now, though you can never be sure with