"I feel a strong need to apologize hugely to Little and her family. Maybe we could have prevented this horrific murder."
This is what MK Michal Waldiger of the Religious Zionist Party said in an urgent discussion in the Knesset's Labor and Welfare Committee this week, following the murder of 17-year-old Little Yael Melnik. According to police suspicion, Melnik was buried alive and her death was caused by suffocation.
In the committee, Waldiger dismissed voices that saw the connection between the suspect and the murdered woman as a legitimate one: In the matter of the purpose of the prohibition, mental and serious sexual exploitation. "
The committee's chairman, MK Efrat Reiten-Marom (Labor), said at the beginning of the meeting that since the discussion was scheduled, stories and difficult cases have begun to arrive that indicate problems in the field. MK Shirley Pinto (right) said: "Every day that passes we discover more details about the murder, which indicate a great failure that lasted for years and swept under the rug, where were they all?". The frustration of the participants, and especially the participants, could be felt in the committee .
Indeed, the murder case of Little, which this week shook social media, the media and also elected officials, must be bravely and honestly investigated by both the police and the Ministry of Health. As part of the investigation, difficult and numerous questions may arise about the Ma'ale HaCarmel hospital, where the brother suspected of the murder has worked for many years. According to the allegations, many sharp allegations against the suspect have already been raised before the hospital management. The allegations, it was said, were covered up.
But the investigation should also deal with the disgraceful, fundamental and ongoing failure of the Ministry of Health's system of supervision and control over psychiatric hospitals in Israel. This is evident in the conduct of state authorities with psychiatric patients in psychiatric wards in hospitals, in the mental health clinics of health funds, in hostels, in institutions and in the framework of welfare and relief services - and also in the police and the courts.
The failure is accompanied not only by the deep and systematic budgetary deprivation of this population, and by the lack of sufficient political and governmental attention to it, but by a conduct that sometimes borders on indifference to the fate of patients and their families.
This indifference is accompanied by systematic rendering and disregard for complaints recorded about sexual, mental and physical abuse during hospitalizations and treatments in health and welfare institutions.
There is no desire to listen
Mental patients, of all ages and genders, are the most transparent human beings in Israeli society.
They are treated in frameworks that are considered the backyard of the public health and welfare services in the country.
How do we not hear more about the complaints of mental patients?
Presumably because these are sick, debilitated and exhausted people, who are usually and their family members ashamed to death by being assigned to a psychiatric illness.
The health discourse in Israel, which is already tired, is not prone to kindness anyway - the Israeli public does not have enough desire to listen to the mentally ill, and the media also prefers to leave the "backyard" out of bounds.
The tendency of the Ministry of Health, hospitals and HMOs not to take the harm to mental patients seriously enough and their complaints have many, severe, outrageous, and sometimes even tragic examples. For example, in November 2020, an unusual verdict was handed down in Israel Today in the Haifa Regional Labor Court, according to which the management of the Mazur government psychiatric hospital in Acre harassed Billy Reichman, a brother who has worked in a closed men's ward for eight years, and punished him. Reichman was punished "because of his complaints about deficiencies in the department in which he works."
The extraordinary affair came to light following the lawsuit of Reichman, who claimed that management was trying to harm his working conditions, put him to the test and tried and fired him, only because he bravely warned for many months about many failures, some endangering the lives of inpatients and neglect. Mind in the closed ward where he worked.
But in fact to date no answers have been given by the Ministry of Health and the hospital management to the affair, and the hospital management then stated that it rejects all the allegations against it.
In another case that was exposed in "Israel Today", shocking testimony was revealed by a specialist doctor who worked at the government psychiatric hospital "Ma'ale HaCarmel", which was raised as part of his lawsuit to stop working at the hospital.
The doctor made allegations in the court of serious medical errors in the medical treatment, which put the patients in danger of death.
The omissions were many: giving the patient incorrect medication, a mistake in identifying a patient, a department head who was engaged in private medicine and abandoned his department, and specialized physicians who lacked basic medical information.
In the same testimony, the doctor recounted the work of a specialist who was in charge of 150 patients on duty for 26 consecutive hours - without any help and support from a senior doctor, revealed the story of a patient who committed suicide due to failed supervision, By a specialist doctor.
In this case, too, Ma'ale HaCarmel Hospital rejected all the allegations against him.
As usual, and as expected, the doctor's testimony remains orphaned to this day, without a thorough investigation by the Ministry of Health.
Murder suspect / Photo: Michelle dot com,
The net is perforated
The emergency meeting of the Knesset committee indicates that perhaps this time, the murder of a 17-year-old girl, who was left exposed, without any defense mechanisms, managed to penetrate the high wall of indifference of the system and the public in relation to mental patients and their distress. Vered Windman, director general of the Child Welfare Council, said at the hearing that "Little Yael's case should shake the barriers. "This is a girl who was in the mental health system, where we have previously asked for a committee of inquiry into another case that took place there, and where an indictment was recently filed for assault by a security guard."
Windman then sharpened the tone, stating that "policies, procedures and regulations are being written in the blood of children today. It should stop. We can no longer save the unfortunate girl, but perhaps the following yes. The child protection network should be dense and not perforated."
Transparent psychiatric patients must not continue to be harmed, sometimes until their deaths, away from the public eye.
For that to happen, the time has come for the psychiatric system to be given a budgetary priority.
The conditions of hospitalization and treatment of patients should be improved, doctors' specialization in psychiatry should be encouraged through reward and a real, non-whitewashing and supervisory mechanism should be created.
Only in this way will the psychiatrists and nursing staff in the mental health system not act as a "guild" that is often engaged in protecting its members, and closing lines from the investigation of the truth.
Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz, for your care.
