medicine
In honor of Rabbi Shalom
What is the halakhic definition of a medical need (the NPFKM allows prohibitions for the sake of medicine)? Does a psychological need fall into this category?
thanks
In my opinion, a mental need certainly meets these criteria, and mental insanity is treated like regular insanity. I remember that a former kollel student, Rabbi Danny Nikritin, wrote an article/work on this (I advised him a bit). Both from the interpretation and from the ruling of Shurein De’ina (desecration of Shabbat due to the risk of blindness), about which Rashi and Toss disagree, does this amount to actual danger to life or does the loss of an eye constitute the same as insanity. For the second method, it simply seems that the loss of sanity is not worse. Of course, there are more moderate mental dangers (and sanity is not a binary concept either), and it is impossible to give a clear and general line.
Just a small note regarding the lesson from the Shar'ayin Da'ina: Some may think that Shar'ayin Da'ina is an irreversible condition, which is not always true with a mental problem (unless there is a risk of suicide, and then it is certainly a Piku”n).
I wrote that I am not going into details, and there are certainly different situations of the mentally ill.
Leave a Reply
Please login or Register to submit your answer
