Women and Mental Health: The Middle East Case

Inquiry into the mental health of women in the Arab regions is coming into its own. Mirroring the slow start of gendered investigations of emotional health globally and hampered by the parallel infancy of general considerations of mental health in the Islamic world, serious academic attention finally is being paid to how women in these regions manage their considerable psychological strain.

The author has been at the vanguard of this analysis. For two decades, he has engaged in the treatment and study of Arab women. Already in the early 1990s, the author was combining his clinical skills and knowledge of local ways of being to create novel strategies for intervention with a highly resistant population: multi-unit Bedouin-Arab families in southern Israel. Work with these deeply traditional clients tested the clinical ingenuity of any practitioner, and set the author on a firm path toward seeking the stressors, needs and coping tools of women in this group. At the same time, the author’s investigative lens took into its sights the mental health of Arab/Islamic women throughout the world. Indeed, he has found that, thanks to the strong hold of tradition on the Arab populations worldwide, much of benefit may be extrapolated from research among specific population samples in Israel and the Arab world.

And so, the author has continued on his mission: to enrich the knowledge base of the mental health of women in the Arab/Islamic world. The broader scientific community, for its part, has begun to pay heed to this crucial inquiry. Thus we come to this volume. Herein are represented cutting-edge investigations on women’s mental health in the Arab regions, and how that health is intertwined with their physical well-being. Moreover, the brand-new field of the social ecology of resilience offers promise for women’s treatment in this region, and the author herein presents his tripartite ‘Wrap-Around Resilience’ program representing a fusion of his research findings and social ecology. Last, the author’s life-long commitment to blending traditional and bio-medical approaches has been taken up in full measure by thought-leaders of the medical world, culminating in a World Health Organization prioritization of traditional health strategies. Indeed, progress is being made. And so much remains to be done.