The mental contestants walk among us with severe but invisible wounds.
They struggle to live with dignity, but for the most part, they continue to suffer relatively quietly.
It is we who should be ashamed that we treat all the weak as transparent.
Today (Sunday) is a great day for mental health in Israel and around the world, and most of us do not know how critical the situation of the mentally ill in Israel is.
For 12 hours I sat in the emergency room of a mental health hospital in the center of the country with a lost relative.
Next to me sat a couple of parents of a female soldier who was trying to commit suicide, next to her sat a Holocaust survivor who talked to the flowers on the wall and in the middle came policemen with a detainee who went on a rampage and jumped from the third floor without clothes.
All these people, the lost ones, waited for hours for one doctor, suffering and tormenting.
The doctor also did not solve the distress, because there are not always beds, and if they managed to get on the bed, the doctors will hurry to release the mentally ill to their home, even though they are begging for comprehensive treatment.
Psychiatric ward.
Photography has nothing to do with the news, Photo: Gideon Markovich (Archive)
And it's not just there, in mental health hospitals.
The phenomena so familiar to mental contestants and their families are also present in community medicine, in the HMOs.
How would you feel if you needed psychological treatment to maintain your sanity, the ability to barely live at home with the children, but you would get an answer that there is only a standard of a quarter and a quarter for 40 mental contestants waiting for treatment.
That is, even if you are eligible for psychological treatment, you will have to wait over two years, while your mental state continues to deteriorate.
Bureaucratic matters are also exhausting.
For many, just the thought of queuing at Social Security, filling out forms and proofs, often causes people to give up rights they deserve from the state.
I was there, I went through with a mental injury all the committees, all the appeals, the consultation with experts, lawyers and the like.
It was a monstrous nightmare that people who did not face problems would not face.
How does the state expect the soul contender, who is usually lost, to succeed alone in the path of torment?
And I ask until when?
What else needs to happen for us to understand that the weakest people are not capable of fighting for crumbs, when will we already understand that society is not built only of the strong?
Tomorrow there will no longer be anyone who will put the mental contenders on the agenda.
They will continue to be transparent, they will continue to try to survive, while society ignores the silent cries.
We may remember them again when there is a disaster, when a poor 17-year-old girl will be murdered just because we dumped her in a place where there are exploitative people.