My adult son deals with anxiety, and when he's stressed, I'll get multiple texts in a row. If I'm not responding for some reason, one of them will be "???" as in, "hello, are you going to respond?"
A bit of temperature-lowering, sanity enhancement, comes from using the auto-set sleep/focus settings in iMessage, and training him to understand that random texts in the middle of the night can, and will wait until we're awake enough to look. If it's really that critical, a phone call can still work.