Is Psychology "Good for the Jews?"

Idealistic Jewish psychologists and social workers often like to talk about bringing mental health to the frum masses. "If only the (fill-in-the-blank) community would recognize the psychopathology among them and seek professional help," the thinking goes, "the healing can begin, and we'll all be on our way to communal sanity." To most of us, a mediocre psychologist is still better than a good "eitza lady," hands down.


Last week's dibuk debacle and horrific tragedy of a psychotic father in Israel brutally beating his infant daughter to death hours after ditching a long-overdue psychiatric evaluation painfully underscore the urgency of better identification and treatment of mental illness in our communities and of generally reevaluating our priorities.

Nevertheless, just because we know something is broken, that doesn't necessarily mean that we know how to fix it. An article in this week's New York Times Magazine raises some important questions about the value of exporting Western concepts of mental health and illness to non-Western cultures. It cites a study, for example, that showed how the frequency of Western-style anorexia cases in China skyrocketed after an eating disorder-induced death there lead to a flood of media coverage introducing that population to a way of expressing psychological distress that most Chinese had never even known about.  "When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing," the author concludes, "we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress." 


For us, the question becomes are our insulated Charedi/Chassidishe  communities much different? Are we as professionals introducing our own New World diseases to the very, un-inoculated population that we have set out to save?  
-PsyJew