Word: abarbanel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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yoram barak brushes past some purple bougainvillea and unlocks the heavy door to one of the psychogeriatric wards at Abarbanel. It's a hut built by the British army to handle mentally disturbed World War II soldiers. "If you'd been stuck in this place for 50 years, you wouldn't be doing very well, believe me," Barak says. Inside, old people in thin hospital smocks sprawl on the floor tiles to keep cool in the seaside humidity. Until they moved out last year, this was how the hospital's Holocaust survivors had lived for half a century. That move...
...media examinations of Holocaust survivors' plight. The film, Last Journey Into Silence, directed by Shosh Shlam, has saddened and shocked audiences, but it is contributing to a growing debate about the problem. "It's the last chapter in the Holocaust," says Henry Szor, a psychiatrist who treats survivors at Abarbanel Mental Health Center in Bat Yam, Israel's biggest mental facility. "The conspiracy of silence is being broken...
When Barak came to Abarbanel four years ago, he found 67% of his patients were Holocaust survivors - compared to barely a third of Israel's over-60s generally. A similar imbalance was found in the country's other mental hospitals. Decades of using antipsychotic drugs like haloperidol and Thorazine hadn't worked. In the lobby of the survivors' ward, patients still shake uncontrollably and grind their jaws grotesquely from the side effects of such drugs. Barak changed the diagnosis of schizophrenia attached to most of the 120 survivors in his ward to "long-term post-traumatic psychosis." With Szor...
...survivors get older, it's not just the long-term mentally ill who suffer. At Abarbanel, 70 Holocaust survivors with no history of psychological disorder were brought in last year, mostly for depression. New research by Abarbanel psychiatrists finds that Holocaust survivors are 40% more likely to commit suicide than other old people. Though 1,200 survivors die in Israel each year, the Finance Ministry estimates it will still be making payments to the rest for another 30 years. The final chapter will be long, but perhaps easier than those that went before. At least some of the survivors with...