Mental Illness: More Prevalent Than You Might Think

May is Mental Health Month, so it's an appropriate time to get some perspective on how mental illness effects the population. World of Psychology blogger John Grohol compiled some striking statistics from the work of Kessler, et al. about just how prevalent mental illnesses actually are. Over the course of a lifetime, more than half of Americans will experience some form of mental illness. In any given year, 75 million Americans, nearly 1 in 3, will suffer from an emotional or mental disorder.

Here's a breakdown by various categories:

	Women	Men	Both
Any Anxiety Disorder	23.4%	14.3%	19.1%
Any Mood Disorder	11.6%	7.7%	9.7%
Any Impulse-Control Disorder	9.3%	11.7%	10.5%
Any Substance Disorder	11.6%	15.4%	13.4%
Any Disorder	34.7%	29.9%	32.4%

Take home point: if you think that mental illness won't affect you, think again. Chances are that someone you know suffers or will suffer from it during his or her lifetime.

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