Safety Net

 “The frum community isn’t immune to clinical depression panic and anxiety disorders bi-polar disorders and the like.” MHMC’s $20 million facility will provide a safe environment for those in need of hospitalization (Photos: Lior Mizrachi)

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fter two excruciating days in Be’er Sheva’s mental hospital following a series of extreme psychotic episodes Rabbi Moshe Kagan checked himself out and returned home. At 35 this talmid chacham — blessed with a supportive wife and children — had been battling mental illness since he was a teenager yet his sensitive soul couldn’t take the blaring television the immodesty of the mixed ward the chillul Shabbos the Arab patients the screaming and foul language — and so he convinced the supervising psychiatrist that he was thinking straight and would follow his meds protocol. A week later he jumped off a building in the center of town.

For Dr. Michael Bunzel chairman of psychiatry at Mayanei Hayeshua Medical Center and head of its adjacent mental health hospital which is slated to become fully operational in the coming weeks Rabbi Kagan was much more than another statistic among the shocking number of suicides that have plagued the Orthodox community — close to 80 since last Rosh Hashanah alone. He was also an on-and-off patient and Dr. Bunzel is convinced that he’d still be alive today if there were a religious inpatient psychiatric facility that could have cared for him at the time.

Dr. Bunzel sees the de-stigmatization of psychiatric assistance — especially in the religious community where there is now a frum inpatient option — as a personal mission and believes that if people challenged by these issues will become more open about their distress and seek help instead of suffering in silence and shame such catastrophic outcomes can be avoided.