In October 2002, the first National Conference on the Promotion of Women’s Mental Health in Israel was held at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Over 400 researchers, practitioners and mental health professionals gathered together to hear cutting-edge presentations that represented a broad spectrum of theories and conceptual approaches to salient issues in women’s mental health. Now, the Center for Women’s Health Studies and Promotion at Ben Gurion University, in cooperation with the Spitzer Department of Social Work at Ben Gurion University and the Smokler Center for Health Policy Research at the Myers-JDC-Brookdale Institute are presenting this volume, which includes 25 original and newly translated papers that give Israeli readers, for the first time, a selection of themes, issues and challenges in addressing the mental health concerns of Israeli women. When papers were not available from the conference, the editors turned to researchers and writers in the field in order to provide new material to highlight critical and salient issues.
The book opens with a translation of an interview on new approaches to women’s mental health conducted with Prof. Phyllis Chesler, one of the pioneers of a critical, feminist exploration on women’s psychiatry and author of the classic book “Women and Madness”. The first section includes five chapters covering historical, artistic, sexual, and psychoanalytic approaches to the interaction between gender and mental health issues for women. The second section of the book presents four different perspectives on how pregnancy, motherhood, new types of mother-child interactions such as surrogate motherhood, and polygamous marriages impact on women’s mental health status. The third section explores the rich interplay between physical health and mental health among women. New approaches are represented with material on immunology, cancer etiology, anorexia nervosa from a cultural perspective and the treatment of mental health problems within both psychiatric and primary care frameworks. The fourth section presents new material on an old problem that has long beset women and compromised their mental health – physical and sexual violence. The four chapters explore these issues among students and their fear of rape, Bedouin and Jewish women in the Negev, women’s attitudes to their sons who are violent husbands and generational transmission of violence in the family. The book concludes with a section including six chapters that covers the quality of life of women over the life course – single mothers by choice, women coping with breast cancer, a cross-cultural look at women’s mental health, demoralization of women over 60, the quality of life of women who leave their work-place and women who are living in old age homes.