What the Waiting List Taught Me
by Helga · 12 July 2026 · Biography & Memoir
Helga, a Viennese psychologist with over two decades of experience, describes how waiting times at her public counseling center have grown from two weeks to four months. She observes that merely being on a waiting list gives some people enough hope to survive a crisis – a fact she finds deeply unsettling rather than comforting. Against her employer's guidelines, she uses her lunch breaks to make brief calls to those waiting, simply to let them know they have not been forgotten.
Helga has worked as a psychologist at a public counseling center in Vienna for twenty-two years, and for the past several years has carried around a number she can't put down: the length of her waiting list. When she started, someone in crisis could get an appointment within two weeks. Today it averages four months — not because there's less staff, but because demand has multiplied over a decade while positions have barely grown.
What's changed her most isn't the number itself, but a pattern she notices in first sessions: many people who finally get an appointment tell her that the simple fact of being on a list helped them hold on — that just knowing someone would come, eventually, was enough to get through the worst weeks. That unsettles her more than it comforts her. It shows her how little some people otherwise have to rely on.
She's started making brief five-minute calls to people on the waiting list, against her own job description, not as therapy but as what she calls a sign of life. Her supervisors view this critically, since it isn't billable work and further strains capacity. Helga does it anyway, on her lunch break, because she believes a system that makes people wait four months owes them, at the very least, a sign that they haven't been forgotten.
The waiting list taught me that help isn't only the actual treatment, Helga says. Sometimes the most important help is the message: I see you. Hold on. Someone is coming.
Read in the app, leave a resonance, discover more stories.