Israel’s Mental Health Crisis: The Missing Election Issue
And time to repair….
Israel is entering another election with a blind spot. After three years of war, loss, displacement, and prolonged uncertainty, the psychological consequences are becoming impossible to ignore. Yet mental health is largely absent from the political agenda.
We hear endless debates about security, military service, political alliances, and who should lead the country. But where is the national strategy for the psychological recovery of Israeli society?
Mental health is no longer simply a healthcare issue. It is a matter of national security, economic stability, and social cohesion.
The figures are alarming. Recent data from Clalit, Israel’s largest health maintenance organization, confirm what professionals are witnessing in the field: psychological distress has become widespread. Demand for mental health services has surged among civilians, soldiers, reservists, and displaced families. Waiting times stretch into months, professionals are in short supply, and staffing standards have not kept pace with reality.
Yet instead of a bold national response, we see budget cuts, underutilized resources, and little strategic innovation.
Reported reductions of NIS 150 million to the Ministry of Health budget, following an earlier NIS 139 million cut, raise serious questions about priorities. Reports of unspent funds allocated to mental health programs are equally troubling.
We are confronting a crisis of unprecedented scale with a system designed for a different reality and perhaps most destructively, increasingly rigid polarization.
Three dividing lines dominate: ultra-Orthodox military service, the legitimacy of Arab participation in governing coalitions, and the endless confrontation between pro-Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu camps.
These are legitimate political disagreements. Yet they are increasingly framed in absolute terms: us or them, loyalty or betrayal, legitimate or illegitimate.
This resembles the dynamics of collective trauma.
Under prolonged threat, complexity becomes difficult to tolerate. The nervous system seeks safety, while the mind searches for certainty. Binary narratives offer an illusion of control.
Polarization becomes a way of organizing fear.
The result is a political discourse dominated by blame and exclusion rather than constructive programs. We know whom we oppose, but hear far less about what we intend to build.
Yet there is something deeply paradoxical about this situation.
The Jewish people have spent centuries learning to live with contradictions. Jewish intellectual tradition, particularly the Talmud, is built on argument, competing interpretations, and the capacity to hold opposing truths without necessarily resolving them.
Disagreement was not a failure of the system. It was one of its strengths.
Perhaps this is precisely the wisdom we need today.
The challenge is to transform destructive polarization into a capacity for complexity, dialogue, and creative solutions.
This is not about abandoning convictions or avoiding difficult decisions. It is about recovering the ability to disagree without destroying the social fabric that holds us together.
The same shift in thinking is needed in mental healthcare.
More funding is essential, but insufficient. We need to rethink the continuum of care: prevention, early detection, early intervention, accessible emotional first aid, and specialized treatment when necessary.
Mental health must become part of everyday infrastructure—in schools, hospitals, workplaces, municipalities, and emergency services.
We need to embrace evidence-informed innovation, including somatic, self-regulatory approaches, as well as community-based programs, while expanding the mental health workforce and evaluating outcomes.
We cannot expect an entire society to recover through conventional psychotherapy alone.
Above all, we need leadership that understands that psychological recovery and national recovery are inseparable.
Every political party should be challenged to present a concrete mental health strategy, with measurable objectives, funding, and accountability.
But we should demand something more: leadership capable of acknowledging suffering without exploiting it, tolerating complexity, and restoring a sense of collective agency.
Israel has demonstrated extraordinary courage, solidarity, and resourcefulness throughout its history and during this war.
Now we must mobilize those capacities for healing.
The real question in these elections is not only who will govern Israel, but whether we can move from survival to recovery, from helplessness to agency, and from polarization to the Jewish wisdom of holding paradoxes.
Our mental health, and our future as a society, depend on it.
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Dr. Cathy Lawi is a trauma therapist and founder and CEO of EmotionAid, an Israeli-based NGO which equips individuals and communities with practical tools to manage stress trauma and emotional distress.
