Q&A: What Is Their Status?
What Is Their Status?
Question
Hello.
What is the halakhic status of people with mental disorders that cause impaired judgment of reality, relative to what we regard as normal reality, which by its nature can lead to a happy life for a person and those around him?
It is clear, at least today, that people with schizophrenia, psychopathy, etc. make it difficult for a person and those around him to have a happy life.
Another example: people with physical head injuries, or conditions like Alzheimer's and strokes.
And another example, which I’m not sure you’ve really encountered yourself (at least based on your life story): stupid people, but in the clinical sense of low IQ. People who seem as though they will always be occupied with the material world. And certainly existential questions will never interest them.
I know the diagnoses are subjective, and I don’t know whether in practice these are metaphysical demons expressing themselves through them.
Even so… what is their status? Legally incompetent, coerced, or what?
Answer
It’s hard for me to answer in general terms. Each person and each symptom has to be judged on its own. If his judgment is very seriously impaired, then he is legally incompetent. But ordinary stupidity usually does not fall into that category. And it is certainly not true that anyone who does not engage with philosophical or existential questions is legally incompetent.