15/6/97

Psychological warfare

    This is one of those strikes that's easy to ignore. It's not the bus drivers, the police, the garbage collectors. Television is being televised, flights are  flying. If we couldn't get cigarettes, or gasoline, or chickens, the hue and cry would rattle the Knesset rafters.
    Nah. It's only the psychologists.
    There is a Jerusalem teenager on the verge of inflicting terrible damage -- on others, very possibly on himself. He's violent, hyperactive, a brooding tough kid embroiled in a messy home life. He has beaten up others. He speaks of suicide. 
    "I'm his only link," says psychologist Ruti Ben-Efraim, who has worked painstakingly with the lad for some months. "I've seen how much he's improved -- but now, I'm cut off from him. I called him and he said 'Ruti, I'm in panic.'" 
    Four children are living in fear of their brutal father. Authorities, in the process of leading them to safety, needed a psychologist's evaluation. Gil Goldzweig was on the case -- but then the strike began. The children are helpless.
    The strike has cut off a desperately vulnerable sector of society from its critical lifeline. 
    With clinical psychologists idled, patients in mental hospitals and clinics have been abandoned by the people they trust. For the mentally disturbed, the emotionally distraught, the suicidal, this strike is a profound, even mortal risk. 
    With developmental psychologists locked out of work, the innocent victims are young children with awful debilities, the sacrificial lambs of an enlightened society's freedom, the freedom to strike. 
    These three- and four-year-old children, and their burdened families, may be written off for the coming year, because now is the time to process them for special education for 1997-98. If the educational Placement Committees do not receive recommendations from the developmental psychologists in the coming days, well, tough luck kiddies. 
    During a pow-wow interview on Tuesday with several strikers at the Eitanim mental health clinic in Jerusalem, a grim variety of harrowing stories emerged, but something else too: the 800-or-so strikers themselves are suffering. They care, they really do. They're deeply worried about the effects of their actions. 
    Michelle Lisses, a developmental psychologist, recalls a comment from the mother of a patient: "She said to me, 'Who are you to hold up my child's life?' I agreed with her." 
    The only work they're doing now is on each other: there's a heavy psychological burden on the strikers. 
    So why don't they stop this selfish, irresponsible strike and get the hell back to work?
    Because they finally amassed the courage after enduring decades of governmental apathy, and three years of fruitless negotiations.
    Because their pay is wretched: NIS 4,800 gross; for seniors, NIS 6,000-7,000; they require as much training as a doctor, they need a master's degree and have to put in four years of internship at a measly NIS 1,100 per month with no benefits. Ben-Efraim earns NIS 3,200 a month; one developmental psychologist with 25 years experience said she earns only NIS 6,500 before taxes -- and she's a supervisor, for goodness sake.  
    Goldzweig wears a different hat at times: that of a magician. At a demonstration in the capital last week, he put that hat on the street and managed to earn a few kopeks for the strikers by performing for passersby. "Truth is," he says wryly, "I can earn more money as a street magician than a psychologist." Makes you wonder.
    Of course, these psychologists have a choice. Instead of earning NIS 20-30 per hour working in the public health system, they could go private; instead of treating society's dregs, they could pull in 10 or 20 times as much in private practice, tending to the rich. 
    Says Lisses: "Do we want a society where people have to fend for themselves?"  
    Leah Eligal, of the Beit Hayeled boarding school, echoes the sentiment, evoking images of the abominable conditions of the downtrodden in South America, with its millions of street children. It could happen here, she fears.
    As it is, even with the system working at full tilt, it's woefully unable to cope. Troubled children need immediate attention for a better chance at successful treatment, yet there's a waiting list of over a year. Despite the population boom (and new immigrants are among the neediest of such help), the pool of psychologists has not increased -- and there is talk of cutting back. Furthermore, many are giving up the field in frustration, few are attracted to it because of the pay and conditions, and most who do stick it out can only work part time, having to supplement their incomes elsewhere.
    And it's a tough job.
    "It's emotionally draining," says developmental psychologist Rena Schwartz. She's deeply devoted to her work, but "I've been doing this for 22 years, and frankly, I'm sick and tired of having to tell people their child is retarded."
    Edor Ben-Aba, the head of the city's strike committee, is not a hotheaded labor leader, but a gentle-mannered clinician. 
    "We have wall-to-wall support in the Knesset. Every party backs us, everyone agrees our cause is justified. Even the Knesset Welfare Committee -- someone there told us: 'Don't stop the strike.'"
    No one really expected the psychologists to carry it out. "They're counting on us to soften," says Eligal. 
    "We're not aggressive," Lisses agrees. "I told one patient's mother that maybe we should do something crazy and get arrested to attract attention, and she said perhaps we shouldn't: if the psychologists aren't sane, she said, who is?"
    Ben-Aba was one of a handful of psychologists who, four years ago, began to seriously talk about taking action to improve their conditions. "At the beginning, we all agreed we could never strike. We'd never before been on strike. We're weak, so nobody thought we would. It took us four years to come to this, and we can't back off."
    Or in the colorful words of one mother, who told Lisses: "It takes a while for your cockroaches to come out."
    So far the strikers are holding firm, even though they admit to some strike-breaking. Worried about how their patients are faring, some of the psychologists weaken and call them. 
    Eligal: "I'm working with a sexually-abused girl who has already tried suicide twice. So yes, I speak to her on the phone. I explain why I can't see her, and I ask for a smile. That's all I can do."
    Irith Sheelo, who works with children at a mental hospital, noticed a startling evolution in the youngsters she was forced to abandon. "At first, they said 'I miss you.' Then 'I'm sad.' Then 'I'm angry.' Then 'I don't need you.'"
    Much of their work is destroyed, because you just can't jilt people as susceptible as their patients. Even with widespread moral support, the psychologists know the sentiments that really count belong to the few thousand Israelis who've lost faith. 
    To these forsaken victims, feelings of perfidy, of hostility, can be devastating. 
    That is no exaggeration.
    Right here, four years ago in this very same clinic, four psychologists were murdered by a patient. 
    It was this tragedy that stirred Ben-Aba and his confreres to stand up and be heard.