The Mental Health wing
After years of negotiations and long months of intensive preparations, the Deputy Health Minister, MK Rabbi Yaakov Litzman, finally announced his ministry's approval for the allocation of 24 hospital beds in the psychiatric wing's unit for eating disorders in children and youth, which will operate in the well-appointed Mental Health Center of Maayenei Hayeshua.
This new unit will operate in the central building of the Maayenei Hayeshua's department for Mental Health. These new beds are added to the dozens of other hospital beds in the respective wards for men and women operating under the administration of Professor Yisrael Strauss, one of the chief Israeli experts in this particular area.
View of the Mental Health building
Thanks to the initiative of the president and founder of the Maayenei Hayeshua Health Center, Rabbi Dr. Moshe Rothschild, and the operative activity of Professor Mordechai Sheini, this new unit is expected to be an international model for a state-of-the-art professional medical treatment for emotional disorders within the community. It will deal with problems such as anorexia nervosa, a condition which causes drastic weight loss leading to dire conditions. The patient is convinced that he must lose weight to the degree that he refuses to ingest any food, allowing only the tiniest amounts to enter his mouth.
Those in his environment warn him about an eventual condition, but sufferers of anorexia nervosa disregard them, believing that they are right and on the mark. 72% of sufferers are females between the ages of twelve and twenty-five. They deny themselves food to the point of starvation and even death. Officially, there are some 50,000 sufferers but unofficially, there are hundreds of thousands of victims.
Dr. Rothschild
According to Dr. Rothschild, "One third of the patients are chareidi. I have visited hundreds of places throughout the world which treat this condition, each one with its particular approach. A major problem is that many of the sufferers abandon Yiddishkeit and their connection to Torah because of the influence of the other patients being treated. This is due to the nature of the treatment, which includes psychiatric group therapy and support groups from the general secular public.
"This disorder embodies both physical and spiritual dangers. The unit which we plan to organize will be under the auspices of all the rabbonim, poskim and Admorim, and will operate under the guidance of the chairman of the Maayenei Hayeshua Medical Center's halachic committee, HaRav Yitzchok Zilberstein."
