What Mental Health Professionals Say About Cures for Mental Disease

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From: softwinemarket <softwinemarket@gmail.com Joe Orlow>
Date: Tue, Jul 10, 2018 at 11:11 AM

An abstract analysis of Rabbi Nota Greenblatt's basis for granting Heterim

Rabbi Greeblatt writes in a letter published elsewhere on this blog a statement about mental health. He seems to assume that mental health professionals have an agreed upon list of mental illnesses. I assume he is referring to the contents of the DSM. He writes, if I understand him correctly, that the professionals have agreed upon which of these conditions are curable, and which are incurable.

I do not think that this is the case. I am not going to prove that here. I will say that the burden of proof is on Rabbi Greenblatt to demonstrate that his assertion is true. As far as I can tell, mental health professionals tend to talk in terms of treating mental illness, not curing it. Cf. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/braintalk/201408/cure-mental-illness%3famp

Rabbi Greenblatt basically told me the following. Say a doctor diagnoses a man with an incurable mental illness, determines the illness pre-existed the man's marriage, and is confident that the man's wife was unaware of the condition at the time of marriage. Those circumstances are the basis for a Heter to annul a marriage.

Taken to a logical extreme, they are also the basis to effectively uproot the laws of Gittin.

Any woman can go to a psychiatrist and manipulate the psychiatrist into diagnosing her with an incurable, pre-existing, mental illness. Then, the woman can go to Rabbi Greenblatt, and ask him to annul her marriage. He will determine that it is unlikely her husband would have wanted to marry her if he had known she had such a mental illness.

For example, the woman could state to a psychiatrist that before she met her husband she was "hearing voices", feeling alternatively "depressed" for several weeks and "maniacal" for several weeks, and had an intense desire to kill herself. She can say she hid all this from her husband and/or all these conditions disappeared when she met her husband only to have them recur after the marriage; that is, she can say she is now back to hearing voices, the cycle of depression and mania, and having suicidal thoughts.

The below from Dr. Stephen Seager M.D. discusses cures for mental illnesses. 

Joe Orlow

A Cure for Mental Illness by Dr. Stephen Seager M.D.

So what.

Posted Aug 15, 2014

magine we had a cure for mental illness. Today. Right Now. Imagine we had a pill, a “magic bullet,” that, if taken on a daily basis, would eliminate the voices, delusions and cognitive difficulties of schizophrenia, the mood swings and psychosis of bipolar disorder and the grinding depths of depression. What would that world look like? How would things change? Would it be the ultimate day, so longed and hoped for? The end of millennia of suffering? Maybe. Maybe not.

In the July 11, 2014 issue of Psychiatric Times, Dr. Thomas R Insel MD, Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH,) address this hypothetical issue and draws some salient, if disturbing conclusions. Insel compares the situation of a potential cure for mental illness to that of the current situation with HIV/AIDS treatment. Recent advances, primarily in Antiretroviral Therapy (ART), have changed AIDS from a certain death sentence to a treatable chronic illness with a near-normal life expectancy. Despite this, however, fully 75% of persons infected with the HIV virus do not have complete access to treatment. They either do not participate in care, get partially treated or drop out of treatment for various reasons: side effects, cost, they don’t feel “sick” anymore.

What does this mean? I think it means that regardless of any scientific breakthroughs looming on the horizon, the treatment for mental illness tomorrow, will look pretty much like it does today. Mentally ill persons will still need a coordinated team of professionals to deliver adequate care. We will still need psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, financial assistance programs, outreach teams and crisis intervention. There will still be sticky court cases regarding “forced” treatment. Psychiatric hospitals, outpatient offices and emergency rooms will still be there.

Whether this is good news or bad depends upon your perspective. But I think it allows the scientific inquiry into mental illness to proceed full speed without a diminution in the role for the other members of a patient’s treatment team. It appears that as long as human beings with a chronic illness continue to act like human beings, we will see things in the mental health field continue pretty much as they are.

Unless, of course, a vaccine is developed that prevents mental illness entirely. But that’s a topic for another day.