Q&A: Medicine
Medicine
Question
Dear Rabbi, hello,
What is the halakhic definition of a medical need (with practical relevance for permitting prohibitions for the sake of medical treatment)? Does a mental or psychological need fall into that category?
Thank you.
Answer
In my opinion, a mental or psychological need definitely meets these criteria, and a psychologically life-threatening situation has the same status as an ordinary life-threatening situation. I seem to recall that a former student in the kollel, Rabbi Danny Nikritin, wrote an article/paper about this (I advised him a bit). Both logically and based on the law of eye-related danger that permits Sabbath desecration in a case of risk of blindness, about which Rashi and Tosafot disagreed—whether this reaches an actual danger to life, or whether the loss of an eye is itself treated like a life-threatening situation. According to the second approach, it seems obvious that loss of sanity is no less severe. Of course, there are more moderate psychological dangers as well (and sanity is not a binary concept), and it is impossible to give a clear and general line.
Discussion on Answer
I wrote that I am not getting into details, and of course there are different states of mental illness.
Just a small note regarding the derivation from eye-related danger: perhaps one can distinguish, because eye-related danger is an irreversible condition, which is not always true of a psychological problem (unless there is a risk of suicide, in which case it is certainly a life-threatening situation).