The occupied McDonald's was their headquarters. Pinned to heavy glass doors the very big letters: "PSYCHOLOGICAL HELP."

Morning was tenser. Ukraine was coming under sustained psychological warfare. Russian troops were surrounding Ukrainian bases in Crimea. The tense standoff flicked the city mood up and down. Bandits had robbed a Kiev bank. Militia-boys muttered about Russian scumbag provocateurs.

I pushed open the McDonald's door. The kitchens were sealed off and spewed over easy-wipe tables and their uncomfortably designed seats was the chaos of a makeshift clinic. Printers, papers, documents. Tired-eyed men holding the hands of clear-eyed specialists. They were Freudians, Lacanians, New Agers, everything. Here men in uniform with dangling plastic rosaries sought help.

That is where I met a night-worker of Maidan, a holotropic rebirthing specialist, Nataliya Stepuk. Somewhere in her forties, she had very pale eyes and a manner that sometimes calmed me, sometimes unnerved me. She had been on Maidan since the start, through the carnival and the clashes.

Nataliya told me psychologists' stories. There was the boy who had fought with his father on Maidan. The bullet that killed his father had sliced his leg. He could not sleep. He could not sleep without seeing his father and the charging Berkut and the smoke and the screams. He came to Nataliya and that night he clutched her in trembling holotropic ecstasy. And now he was better.

Nataliya told me about the gruff mercenary who by grease-crusted cooking pots in his military tent opened up to the psychologists. The man, who had fought in both Chechnya and Bosnia, began to discuss his own trauma, then his inner stress.

The 400 psychologists worked in shifts. They worked for free — some manning the McDonald's help point, others wading through the tents. They treated about 80 people a day, mostly Ukrainian widows and dazed Maidan men. They were working through the hospitals, with about 200 bandaged, strapped-up patients.

Nataliya took my pen and began drawing circles of trauma in my notebook. The first circle, Maidan. The second circle, families of Maidan. The third circle, those watching Maidan. The fourth circle, those who had only heard of Maidan. These were the nightmares: "Those in the first and second circle see the Berkut charging them with their metal shields. Their nights are full of sounds. Explosions. The faces of the dead. The fires."

Kiev is a city in post-traumatic stress. At first the schoolboy in me couldn't understand this. I learnt the map of Ukraine as the map of the German advance for my GCSEs. I learnt the names of Ukraine's regions by memorising details of Soviet atrocities for my degree. Ukraine I thought of as "bloodlands".