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From Julia Neuberger, Senior Rabbi at the west London Synagogue:

Whenever I’m ill with flu, I read Jane Eyre, a novel I’ve loved since childhood, where we meet the first Mrs Rochester, who went mad and eventually set the house alight. Mr Rochester lost his sight. Jane Eyre married him. And the first Mrs Rochester died in the fire, unlamented.

Since then, thankfully, things have improved for people with mental illness. Even so, all too many cannot cope fully with normal life, and yet they are not given sufficient care. And that applies whether we’re talking about older people with Alzheimer’s disease, or young people all too often terrified in their teenage years by the onset of a mental disorder.

Yet none of this is new. Take Psalm 22 in the Hebrew Bible, where it sounds as if the writer was having some form of mental breakdown:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me,

So far from my cries of anguish?....

I am a worm and not a man,

scorned by everyone, despised by the people.

All who see me mock me;

they hurl insults, shaking their heads.

This could be severe depression, but he might have been hearing voices. We don’t know, but that passage suggests that mental ill health was just as much an issue for the people of the Bible as it is now. The difference these days is that in many cases we can alleviate the worst of the symptoms, with drugs, therapy and psychological interventions. Our ancestors didn’t have that ability.

We ought to celebrate that. Of course we could and should do more. Given we can help people who are having a terrible time with their mental health, why are we not more consistent in doing so? Maybe it’s because there’s still a bit of taboo about mental ill health. So, every time someone won’t talk about it or says they’re embarrassed, we should point them to the Psalms. These conditions are as old as the hills, but our duty now is to talk about the problems, provide cure when we can, and alleviation and care when we can’t do more.Ìý There’s nothing new under the sun…

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