For the last few weeks, as the Senate Republican health effort was twice pronounced dead only to be revived a day or two later, Nancy Molitor, a psychologist in Wilmette, Ill., has heard escalating anxiety about health care from all of her patients. Many want to spend entire sessions discussing it: how to handle the stress and the feelings of fear, powerlessness, rage and frustrated paralysis.

“They know they should turn off the TV and their news feeds, but they can’t,” said Dr. Molitor, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral health at the medical school at Northwestern University.

On Wednesday, the day after the Senate narrowly voted to begin floor debate on health legislation, she saw eight patients who each brought up the issue, regardless of whether they would be directly affected by the repeal efforts. She noted that her patients worried about caring for parents as well as for children with severe mental illness. “But the situation is so fluid and volatile that it is a recipe for stress.”

And yet conventional therapeutic wisdom for managing stress does not translate well to health care-related anxiety, she said. In more typical periods of life agitation — death, divorce, job loss — a therapist tries to get patients to identify what is in their control, what is not, and how then to get information and make a plan.

“But with health care, even the therapists don’t know the answer. We haven’t experienced this before,” Dr. Molitor said. “It’s hard to be a therapist in this environment because we’re worried about the same things, too. We have to make sure our own anxiety isn’t infecting the session.”

In response to a callout to New York Times readers on Wednesday, many people talked about stockpiling medications, postponing surgeries so as not to set up a pre-existing condition, or racing to see specialists for fear of losing their coverage.