In early May, Tiffany Coffman was talking to me on the phone while sitting on the porch of her new house in North Carolina. I could hear the lilting birdsong of the Pisgah National Forest. Coffman had been offering acupuncture treatments on cruise ships for most of the last decade, but was now, like millions of Americans, indefinitely furloughed.

As a deadly pandemic grips much of the world and reconfigures almost every aspect of daily life, Coffman decided to start a YouTube channel and Facebook page — both named The Insight Circle — for people “who might be struggling emotionally…