What do you do when there’s a national crisis that touches the entire population?” asked Gila Tolub. “We don’t have a playbook for that.”
Israel has been trying to write such a playbook since the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, and the organization known as Israel’s Collective Action for Resilience is part of the process. ICAR took part in a panel discussion on Nov. 11 at the Jewish Federations of North America’s General Assembly in Washington, D.C., titled “Addressing the Mental Health Crisis in Israel.”
“[ICAR is] an organization that was established about a year and a half ago to bring together the different organizations working on trauma, healing and on recovery, because we truly believe that by collaborating, we can accelerate the healing process,” Tolub, ICAR’s executive director, told Washington Jewish Week in an interview following the discussion.
Tolub was joined on the panel by Renee Wizig-Barrios, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston; Rina Goldberg, vice president of Israel and overseas and deputy director for Israel at the Jewish Federations of North America; and Professor Jonathan Huppert of the Center for Trauma Recovery at The Hebrew University.
Tolub spoke about the issues within Israel’s mental health care system and how philanthropy might help with the recovery process for Israelis dealing with trauma.
“The idea was to get together to talk about the biggest issues that philanthropy could tackle, and where they can have the most impact,” Tolub said. “It was promising to see … commitment to continue to support Israel, in addition to everything they’re doing in the United States to support the community here and then, specifically, a commitment to continue to think about the mental health impact of the war.”
Before the war, she explained, Israel’s mental health support system was already undersupported. “Israel spent 5% on its health budget on mental health [compared to] seven [percent] in the U.S. and 10 [percent] in Europe,” she said.
ICAR’s approach centers around collaboration and transparency.
“The first thing we are doing is mapping and engaging all the players in the ecosystem,” Tolub added. ICAR, a non-governmental body, originally met with 250 different
organizations to survey the challenges they face. Then, Tolub explained, they brought together organizations with similar issues and interests.
For instance, she said, the organization hosted a roundtable with 30 different organizations to discuss rehabilitation for veterans and soldiers. “By bringing people in the same room, we identified potential solutions that become possible when we work together,” she said.
Tolub said that the biggest challenge ICAR faces is ensuring that everyone who needs help knows about the resources available to them. ICAR’s goal, she explained, is to educate people about their psyches so they know what they might need and then ask for help.
“How do we put these messages at scale, on TV and on social media, so that everybody has the language to understand what’s happening?” she asked.
ICAR’s main message, according to Tolub, is to tell people that their trauma responses aren’t a sign that they are “broken” but that “your brain is actually doing its work to protect you.”
“That’s why you’re a little bit more hyper vigilant right now. That’s why you might have a hard time to sleep, because your body senses and your brain senses that you’re in danger, but in all likelihood, you’ll be fine,” Tolub added. “That’s a very normal reaction to what’s happening to us, and it doesn’t mean that anything is wrong with you.”
The roundtables uncovered issues within the existing healthcare system. “We agreed that the biggest issue right now is [that] we don’t know how to match the people in need to the right services or solutions,” Tolub explained. “There’s so many different options that it’s hard to know which one matches the needs of a soldier or reservist that requires support.”
One possible solution is to create a standard intake form for all mental healthcare
organizations that asks the same questions. “Then we speak the same language, and when I refer a patient from one place to the next, we actually know why and the rationale for referring them,” Tolub said.
“For each new PTSD case, we know that there’s another two people that are going to suffer from depression, anxiety, eating disorders or addiction,” she added.
“Israel is such a small country that everybody knows someone that’s been impacted by the war, and there’s this mass grief in the country,” Tolub said. “There are no 15-year-olds that haven’t been to a funeral in the last two years. … All the teens have been exposed to grief and complicated grief, untimely death, and that creates a society where we need to think about everyone, not just the people who were in the South on Oct. 7 … but really, how are all the communities impacted by that mass grief?”
