By Barbara Bensoussan and Eytan Kobre. Fifty years ago, the number of frum people who sought help from a mental health professional was miniscule; today, there are thousands of frum mental health professionals in place to help individuals in need, and many within the community do reach out for help through therapy. But that’s not the only change our community has seen in this area.

Four individuals with long and broad experience in addressing the Orthodox world’s mental health needs met recently with Mishpacha for a frank discussion of the changes that have — and haven’t — occurred in this field in recent decades. 

Meet our Panelists

Rabbi Binyamin Babad directs Relief Resources, a mental health referral service. 

Dr. Norman Blumenthal runs the bereavement program at Chai Lifeline and trains Yeshiva University smichah candidates in counseling, in addition to maintaining a private practice. 

Rabbi Ronnie Greenwald is the director of Camp Sternberg and a distinguished community activist.  

Mr. Moshe Wangrofsky, ACSW, is the director of Counterforce and the Yitty Leibel Help Line, a hotline for those new to therapy, and also maintains a private practice. 

The Landscape 

We’ve come together to discuss what the mental health landscape looks like in the frum community today. How has the frum community evolved vis-?-vis treatment for mental health issues?

Rabbi Greenwald: Personally, I see a massive change in how the religious community perceives mental health care. The Jewish Board of Family and Child Services (JBFCS) opened an office in Boro Park in 1968, and a year later Ohel established Kinderheim and a Family Services division a year after that. That was the beginning, albeit a fledgling one, of the frum community’s engagement with mental health services.

The resistance was enormous. In fact, it existed to such a degree that JBFCS had to create an advisory board consisting of distinguished mechanchim like Rabbi Oscar Ehrenreich of Bais Yaakov and Rabbi Yoel Kramer of Prospect Park, along with other prominent community members. In the first few years, many people questioned whether Jews were even allowed to use social services.

Why were people so wary of therapy back then?

Rabbi Greenwald: Psychology was suspect because until then it was based on Freud, and everything about it was anti-Torah. I’m older than the rest of you all, but back in those days, if you brought a kid to a therapist, the first thing he did was say the kid should cut back on the learning. He’d relieve the kid of his “heavy burden” of Yiddishkeit. So that was the battle.

So has the field of psychology changed since then to become more kosher?

(The audibly positive reaction around the table indicates that is very much the case.)

Dr. Blumenthal: When I was in graduate school, Freudian psychology, which is inherently heretical, was dominant. A lot of the senior people in psychoanalysis had been raised Orthodox themselves and then rebelled against it, so they had an ax to grind. I was tormented in graduate school, constantly lectured about how religion causes mental illness. They’d say things that were blatantly false.

That has changed; now there’s all this research that shows overwhelmingly that religion is associated with better mental health across the board. What’s more, these days the Jewish, non-frum psychologists are so far removed from Torah that they’re not bitter. I don’t know if that’s better, but at least today they don’t have that passionate opposition to Orthodoxy.

Rabbi Babad: Relief Resources, which has been around for ten years, has amassed a database that currently includes over 1,000 frum clinicians, and growing. So it’s a totally different environment for a frum person looking for treatment than it was even 15 years ago.

Furthermore, the commonly held belief that the frum community ignores mental health issues until they become a crisis is proving to be wrong. In fact, there was a study some years ago that found that frum parents are quicker to seek help for their children than their secular counterparts. This shouldn’t surprise us, as a stable and healthy frum family is constantly concerned with the wellbeing of their children. 

By the way, we often hear from the non-frum and non-Jewish doctors how they love working with members of the frum community. Unlike their secular or non-Jewish clients who come for help but often have no support system, the frum patients generally have supportive families and if not, there are caring members of the kehillah who see to it that the person gets the help he needs. The doctors regularly tell us that they feel that they are able to make more progress with their frum patients because of this.

Mr. Wangrofsky: I’ve been with Counterforce for 30 years, and in the early years we had to be so careful about the “separation of church and state” — anything religious sounded negative. The first time I saw change was about 11 or 12 years ago. Our program is funded by the New York State Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services, and they came out and announced that all the new research says that people who go to church or synagogue are less likely to use drugs and alcohol! All those years we were so careful not to sound religious, and now they’re saying it’s good! So we’ve come a long way.

The second organization I run is the Yitty Leibel Help Line, which is 25 years old, and that really speaks to the old resistance. It was set up as a way for people to seek help anonymously. But at the beginning, the purpose was both to provide guidance and support, and to reach the unreachable by giving people the experience of talking to a frum therapist and foster their willingness to consider a referral to a therapist if necessary.

Still, it’s painful to admit, but as far as we’ve come … we have a long way to go! If I were to give it a number, with us rating a zero in 1955 and 100 being the top, I’d put us as maybe 60 or 70. That’s fantastic, but it still leaves a lot of room to grow.

Rabbi Babad: When Relief started, all the skeptics said, “It’s a nice idea, but nobody will call you.” But over the last ten years over 40,000 people have called us for help. It’s not that people didn’t want help; they just didn’t know where to turn to for it. If you give people the information they need, in a way that’s comfortable for them and where they can remain anonymous if they so choose, they’ll come out of the woodwork.

Rabbi Greenwald: The fact that you can have Nefesh, an organization with 700 frum therapists, speaks volumes. And there’s at least three or four times as many professionals who don’t belong to Nefesh, so figure another two and a half thousand. Together that makes about 3,000 religious social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists. That’s a serious number.

But are there enough frum therapists for everybody who needs one ?

Rabbi Greenwald: If everybody came who needed it, it wouldn’t be enough.… The biggest change is that people don’t have the same reluctance. They’re willing to overcome their fears that people might know they saw a therapist, the fears it would hurt shidduchim. They’ve also changed with respect to kids at risk. When you have a kid who’s off the derech and at the same time has bipolar disorder, and the therapist says let’s leave the Yiddishkeit on the side for right now — that’s a major change.

Mr. Wangrofsky: Look, being frum has to be built on a foundation of being a stable individual. It sounds simplistic, but it’s really very deep.

We’ve made tremendous progress since the 1950s, but the average guy is not there yet. Sometimes you hear things from presumably intelligent people that make no sense to the mental health professional.

What kinds of things are they saying?

Mr. Wangrofsky: There’s still this distrust of mental health. It’s the stigma thing, the denial thing, the molestation thing.… I’ve been addressing the latter issue for decades and there’s still this refusal to believe it exists.

Rabbi Greenwald: The fact that Agudath Israel had a session on molestation at its last convention, and 70 rabbanim participated in a discussion about ways to recognize simanim and what to do if you encounter it — that means there’s a growing awareness. Agudah doesn’t do anything without the approval of gedolim, so that means they’re willing to talk about it.

Several initiatives have been launched to teach kids about inappropriate touching and how to react if it happens. Torah Umesorah has published material on this topic, and the Association of Jewish Camp Directors had a conference about it a couple of years ago — we’re talking 50 or 60 directors, headed by Meir Frischman — that brought in speakers like Dr. Pelcovitz. There they set down guidelines and rules for counselors and staff.

In what ways does a frum lifestyle foster mental health, and in what ways might it present challenges to it?

Dr. Blumenthal: The frum lifestyle enhances mental health by providing a purpose to living and communal affiliation. For teens in particular, promoting productive use of time is immeasurably helpful. I feel that the major downfalls are the cookie cutters or increasingly narrow range of what is considered acceptable or desirable. This may vary from one subset of the community to another but exists throughout.

Rabbi Babad: There is one trait of the frum community that is both our greatest asset and at the same time a major challenge, and that is that we are a close-knit community. On the one hand, it gives us the support that we need to go through difficult struggles, but on the other hand, it can be challenging maintaining confidentially. [Read more in this week’s Mishpacha Magazine]