Orthodox Mental Health Needs Not Being Met: Study

A just-published survey of more than 100 Orthodox mental health professionals revealed that despite significant improvements in the past 25 years, the psychological needs of today’s Orthodox Jewish community are still far from being met.

“Unfortunately, even thought the mental health world spends a lot of energy studying diverse population minorities, it tends to be that religious minorities like Jews and Orthodox Jews have been omitted from that population,” said Eliezer Schnall, clinical assistant professor of psychology at Yeshiva College of Yeshiva University and the project’s lead researcher.

The study, called “Psychological Disorder and Stigma: A 25-Year Follow-up Study in the Orthodox Jewish Community,” follows up on an original study conducted in 1984 by Dr. Shalom Feinberg, clinical associate professor of psychiatry at YU’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his wife Dr. Karyn Feinberg, school psychologist at Yeshiva Har Torah in Queens. Schnall and his team distributed the survey among a listserv of about 450 mental health professionals from Nefesh — an organization formed in 1992 to bring together Orthodox mental health professionals and rabbis. About 100 replies were received.

Respondents answered questions on topics such as the most prevalent psychological disorders within the Orthodox community, how well each segment of the community is being served and how much stigma is still associated with mental health conditions.

Schnall presented his team’s findings at the American Psychological Association convention in San Diego last week.

“On the one hand about 50 percent are telling us that [the Orthodox population is] at least somewhat underserved, and that’s a situation where we are not where we want to be,” Schnall told The Jewish Week. “But … the number of those who in 1984 said needs are adequately met was only 10 percent — now the number is 40 percent.”

The most common patient visits involve marital problems, followed by a combination of anxiety disorders, substance abuse and affective (mood) disorders like depression, according to responses in Schnall’s survey.

In the quarter-century between studies, the responding clinicians who felt that community members mistrust the mental health field has dropped from 87 to 59 percent; clinicians who felt that mental health patients are stigmatized fell from 93 to 70. Mental health visits are still perceived as relatively expensive, with 47 percent of doctors in 2009 responding that patients view psychological services as unaffordable; that figure was 57 percent in 1984.

“Clearly the needs are being met better now than back then,” Shalom Feinberg said. “It seems like there has been light years of progress. So how does one explain the numbers. Our take on this is that there’s a greater awareness of psychopathology now. There was so much more denial and so much less awareness of the existence of problems than there was back then. The bar has been raised now.”

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Reposted on FailedMessiah