I’m sharing my story with the intention of helping to change the way people view mental illness and helping others who have similar struggles. 

I’m Sarah. I am frum. I am a psychologist. I am just like you. But there’s something I keep beneath the surface that separates us, something I think you may not understand. That is my bipolar diagnosis. 

Until I was 27, I was just like everyone else, going through the same milestones and changes in my life. I got married and had two healthy pregnancies and two kids. Then, when my younger son wasn’t even three years old, things changed. My sleep patterns changed and that led to a full-blown manic episode. I was hospitalized for three-and-a-half weeks. When I finally walked out of the hospital, I had a bunch of prescriptions and a label attached to my name.

Shortly after I turned my computer on to begin this article on how people choose their shul, a headline leaped out at me: “Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner Pick $5.5M Home – and Chabad Synagogue – in Washington.” Is it true? Was their purchase of the magnificent six-bedroom home due to its location, a mere seven-minute walk from TheSHUL, led by Rabbi Levi Shemtov? While “SHIPPA (Shul HIPPA) laws” preclude confirmation of the reason for their buying decision, I concur with the article’s author’s opinion that it was indeed due to the shul. (That the house happens to be only a couple blocks away from the Obamas’ new home appears not to have been a factor!)

August, 1960. My family moved from the Jewish enclave in the Riggs Park section of Washington D.C., NE, to the Maryland suburb of Silver Spring. Our new home was located on Malibu Drive, in a neighborhood roughly equidistant from Langley Park and a new development named Kemp Mill. I was soon to enter the Hebrew Academy of Washington, Yeshivas Bais Yehuda, as a first grader, so my father took me to the school one day for the required interview. In those days, the Academy was located on 16th Street NW, adjacent to the Shepherd Park section of Washington. But enough geography.

I saw a sign in a store a while back advertising “all purpose shrimp.” Other than eating them (not for us, of course), how many purposes do shrimp have? Do shrimp make good doorstoppers? Can you string them together to make a necklace? Use them to wash windows? Remove stains? Fix squeaking hinges? Somehow I suspect these uses would cause unwanted odors. It would be a dead animal, after all, and I’ve yet to come across “shrimp scented” fabric softeners or air fresheners.

I’ve never seen “all purpose gefilte fish” advertised and can’t imagine what another use would be. Perhaps the canned type could be employed as bookends. And if a bookend fell off the shelf onto your foot, you could take a frozen gefilte fish roll out of the freezer and use it to relieve the swelling. But generally, we seem to use gefilte fish only for eating.

I hop on the bus heading for Bayit Vegan in southwest Jerusalem, only a short ride from my home. As we pass the Yefei Nof neighborhood, with its beautiful scenery, I reflect on a thought I heard this past Shabbos: Heroic figures are not always the best barometer to measure greatness in life. It is the attainment of goodness, often achieved and known only in the depths of one’s self, that defines real greatness. Little did I know that I was about to meet one such person, who traversed seemingly ordinary chapters in her life, but with the faith and outlook that defines greatness.

At the levaya, people spilled from the chapel into the lobby and out onto the sidewalk. At the shiva house, the door opened and shut, opened and shut, as the community came to share the family’s grief. The mailbox overflowed with cards and letters, and the emails poured in.

Soon enough, shiva was over. The mourners and the visitors went home. The door remained shut at the house-with-the-cow-in-front, and the cards and letters were packed into an oversized ziplock bag and put away.

These are the sorrowful postscripts to the life of Mrs. Laure Gutman, a”h. Yet it was just as Pirkei Avos attests: “Aizeh hu mechubad? Who is honored? Hamechaved es habrios. One who honors others.”

When Bais Yaakov Middle School teacher Mrs. Rochelle Goldberg’s only daughter Shoshana was applying to seminary, she concluded that she preferred to stay home and attend Maalot Baltimore, rather than join the vast majority of her class, who only considered going to seminary in Israel. That was back in the day when Maalot offered a first-year seminary experience. The ever-increasing popularity of Israeli seminaries resulted in closing that program. Maalot now offers only a second-year seminary program.

“People exerted a lot of pressure on us, and we finally caved,” recalls Mrs. Goldberg. “My daughter is happily married with children, b”H, but even now, I wonder if she had to go. She was unhappy much of the year.”

Over the years, I have written articles after a visit to Israel. No matter how many times I have been there, each visit opens my eyes to another aspect of the Land and its remarkable people. Let me start with one anecdote. One morning, in the hotel, I was waiting in line for an omelet. In front of me was a man and his two children, and I started a short conversation with him. He was a non-Jew from the Midwest on his first trip to the Holy Land with his family. He appreciated my interest and gave me a warm pat on the back as we parted.

I remarked to the omelet lady that it is important to be nice to visitors to Israel and to make them feel welcome. She responded, “Of course we have to be nice to any human being. Anachnu rachmanim bnai rachmanim – We are merciful children of our Merciful Father.” This once again demonstrated that not only is Israel a Jewish country, but we are truly one mishpacha.

Our community has recently experienced multiple tragic events, and as humans, we cannot help but be impacted by them. The loss and injury of people in our lives and the lives of those around us affect our actions, our thought processes, and our emotions. 

Some of us have consciously changed our actions in response to the tragedies. We may be attending Tehillim groups, adding a chesed as a merit for others, and strengthening our Torah learning. We may have become defensive while driving, or become more protective over our children. Some of us may be spending more time alone, while others may be making concerted efforts to connect with others. Perhaps our bodies have been subconsciously affected: perhaps we are feeling muscular tension, easily startled, having trouble sleeping, or experiencing our hearts race.

To most people, memory loss means Alzheimer’s disease, but in reality that is only half the picture. A large percentage of cognitive decline in the elderly is due to vascular changes in the brain, as described by Prashanthi Vemuri, a Mayo Clinic researcher who studies cognitive decline.

As discussed in the Nutrition Action Healthletter, the distinctive characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease is the presence of amyloid, abnormal fragments of protein in the brain. These fragments collect in the brain and may trigger a chain of events that eventually leads to damaged nerve cells. Vascular dementia, on the other hand, is due to damage to blood vessels in the brain. On scans, it can show up as brain cells that have died from lack of oxygen after tiny blood vessels became blocked. In both cases, people are not aware of the amyloid accumulation or that the small blood vessels are damaged. By age 70, about 15% of people have vascular disease in the brain, and some people with memory loss have both amyloid and vascular damage.