The world decided COVID was over.
There was no announcement, exactly. No ceremony. Just a gradual shift – masks coming off, offices reopening, news cycles moving on. And at some point, you were supposed to be back to normal by now.
But you’re not. And if you’re reading this, you probably haven’t been for a while.
Maybe it shows up as a tiredness that sleep doesn’t fix. A flatness that’s hard to explain to people who seem fine. A low hum of dread that arrived during the pandemic and never fully left. A grief you can’t quite name because nothing you can point to has technically ended.
This is especially true for BIPOC individuals. Because what COVID did to BIPOC communities was not the same as what it did to everyone else. And the recovery hasn’t been the same either.
What COVID Did to BIPOC Communities in Vancouver
When COVID hit Vancouver, it did not land evenly.
Vancouver data showed that communities with the highest number of racialized people also had the highest rates of COVID-19 infections and related hospitalizations. This wasn’t coincidence. It was the direct result of who was deemed essential, who lived in crowded housing, who held precarious employment with no option to work from home, and who had the least access to healthcare when things got bad.
BIPOC communities in Metro Vancouver, (such as Richmond, Burnaby, and Surrey) carried a disproportionate share of the illness, the death, the economic collapse, and the caregiving. Many did so while also navigating anti-Asian racism that spiked visibly during the pandemic, anti-Black racism that intensified alongside global uprisings for racial justice, and the particular grief of watching homelands in crisis from a distance.
The impact on BIPOC communities was compounded by existing barriers to mental health services – low income, language barriers, unemployment – barriers that were present before COVID and that the pandemic made worse.
And then the world moved on. The emergency funding dried up. The public conversation shifted. The therapy waitlists that had exploded during the pandemic remained long – over half of psychologists reported no openings for new patients, with average wait times of three months or longer. But the urgency that might have addressed those waitlists systemically? Gone.
The Post-COVID Bubble – And Who Got Left Out
Here is what happened in the broader mental health system during and after COVID: demand exploded. An American Psychological Association survey of mental health professionals found providers reporting increased levels of demand, leading to higher workloads and mounting waitlists, with nearly half reporting burnout. Therapists who had capacity filled it. Waitlists grew. Virtual therapy expanded access for some.
For people with financial resources, with benefits plans, with access to therapists who looked like them and understood their lives – the system strained, but it held. They got on waitlists. They eventually got seen.
For BIPOC communities, the barriers that already existed before COVID didn’t pause for the pandemic. They intensified.
The shortage of culturally responsive therapists – practitioners who practice from an anti-oppressive framework, who understand intergenerational trauma, who don’t require you to spend your session explaining why racism is real – was already acute before 2020. COVID didn’t create more of them. And as demand surged across the board, the already-thin availability of BIPOC therapists in Vancouver, Richmond, Burnaby, and Surrey became thinner still.
The cost of therapy didn’t drop either. Private therapy in Ontario typically runs $150–250 per session. For communities that took the hardest economic hit from COVID – job losses, precarious work, caring for ill family members without paid leave – that cost didn’t become more accessible. It became less.
And the therapists who were available? Many were trained in frameworks built for and by white, Western, middle-class populations. Frameworks that pathologize collective grief, that treat hypervigilance in hostile environments as a disorder rather than an intelligent response, that offer coping strategies disconnected from the cultural realities of the people sitting across from them.
So the bubble, for much of the mainstream, has started to deflate. For BIPOC communities in Vancouver, it never did.
Why You Might Still Be Exhausted
Post-pandemic exhaustion in BIPOC communities doesn’t always look like what gets described in mainstream mental health content. It isn’t always burnout in the classic sense. It’s something more layered.
It might be grief that had no container. COVID accelerated death and loss in BIPOC communities at rates that were never fully acknowledged publicly. Funerals happened over Zoom or not at all. Mourning had to happen in isolation, alongside the ongoing labour of survival.
It might be the weight of having been essential and then discarded. The pandemic revealed who society considered expendable. Many BIPOC workers in healthcare, food service, transit, and caregiving were told their work was heroic. Then the heroism narrative ended and the precarity remained.
It might be compounded racial trauma. The years 2020 and 2021 brought not just a pandemic but a global reckoning with anti-Black racism, a surge in anti-Asian violence, and continued violence against Indigenous communities, all while BIPOC people were simultaneously trying to survive a disease that was killing their communities at higher rates.
It might be the exhaustion of not being believed. Telling people you’re still struggling, when the official narrative is that we’re past it, carries its own particular isolation. The secondary wound of having your ongoing pain treated as an overreaction is real, and it compounds the original one.
None of this is pathology. It is a proportionate response to what actually happened.
Finding COVID Mental Health Support in Vancouver, Richmond, Surrey, and Burnaby
If you have been trying to access mental health support in Metro Vancouver and have run into walls – waitlists, cost, practitioners who don’t understand your experience – that is a systemic failure, not a personal one.
Ready to find support? Browse BIPOC therapists in Vancouver who specialize in trauma, racial trauma, and culturally responsive care → Find a therapist at Healing in Colour
What to look for:
Anti-oppressive framework. This means a therapist who understands that your mental health exists in a political and social context – that racism, poverty, precarity, and systemic exclusion are not background details but central to what you are carrying. They will not ask you to adapt to the system. They will help you navigate it without losing yourself.
Intergenerational and collective grief. Post-COVID exhaustion in BIPOC communities often connects to longer histories of loss and displacement. A therapist who understands intergenerational trauma will not treat your COVID grief as isolated. They will hold the full context.
Sliding scale fees. Cost is one of the most concrete barriers to care for BIPOC communities – and it is one of the most rarely addressed directly. Many BIPOC therapists at Healing in Colour offer sliding scale fees specifically because they understand that equitable access means meeting people where their finances actually are, not where the system assumes they should be.
Language access. In Vancouver BIPOC communities, the most resonant therapeutic work often happens in the language closest to the part of you that’s hurting. Look for therapists who offer sessions in your first language – whether that’s Tagalog, Tamil, Cantonese, Mandarin, Somali, Punjabi, Spanish, Arabic, or others.
The System Moved On. You Don’t Have To Pretend You Did Too.
There is a particular pressure on BIPOC communities to be resilient, to have survived what you survived and emerged functional, if not grateful. To not still be struggling. To have processed it already.
You are allowed to still be in it. You are allowed to name that what happened was not small, and that the recovery is not finished just because the world stopped paying attention.
The exhaustion you’re carrying is real. The grief is real. The anger is real. And you deserve support that can hold all of it – not just the parts that are easy to name, but the full, layered, complicated weight of what these past five years have been for BIPOC communities in Vancouver and across Canada.
That support exists. It is not as easy to access as it should be, and that gap is something Healing in Colour is specifically built to help close.
We are here when you are ready.
Additional Resources
Browse BIPOC therapists in Vancouver who offer care for COVID related concerns
- Find a therapist on our Therapist Directory
Related Reading
- What Is Intergenerational Trauma? And How It Shows Up in Immigrant Families
- How to Find a BIPOC Therapist in Canada: A Guide
- Sliding Scale Therapy: What It Is and How to Ask For It
Not ready for therapy yet?
- Explore our Resources page for community organizations and mental health tools
- Follow us on Instagram for first-gen mental health content
- Join our newsletter for monthly immigrant mental health resources
About Healing in Colour
Healing in Colour connects BIPOC clients across Canada with therapists and allied professionals who practice from anti-oppressive values. We believe BIPOC people, in all our intersections, deserve therapy that supports our healing and liberation.
Learn more: About Us |Our Statement of Values