Shmirat HaNefesh: A Mental Health Guide for Avodas Hashem
Caring for your mind is not a step away from the Torah. It is a step toward it.
Shmirat HaNefesh - "guarding the soul" - brings together three worlds that are too often set against one another: Torah, psychiatry, and neuroscience. It does so with a stated method and without concordism. Medicine describes. Psychology models. Neuroscience gives mechanism. Torah orients. Where these languages meet with rigor, they do not cancel one another; they fall into order.
From the words of Chazal to the Rambam, from the architecture of the soul - nefesh, ruach, neshamah, daas - to the most recent findings about the brain, this guide shows that mental health, too, belongs to Avodas Hashem.
Inside: - The halachic and hashkafic foundations of caring for the soul - the inner life in Tanach, the Gemara's recognition of psychological suffering, the Rambam on illness of the soul, moral responsibility under psychological constraint, pikuach nefesh extended to the life of the mind, and the contemporary poskim. - A structured account of the soul and of how psychological suffering arises - dysregulation at the level of nefesh, ruach, neshamah, and daas. - The modern fundamentals: the biopsychosocial model, epigenetics, evolutionary mismatch, the architecture of decision, and where free will actually sits. - Five practical pillars - sleep and circadian rhythm, movement, the gut-brain axis and nutrition, psychosocial and environmental hygiene, and the particular cases of alcohol and tobacco in halachah. - The eleven most common psychiatric disorders, their treatments, and what they mean for communal life and for shidduchim. - Fifty common myths about mental health, put to the test.
Every scientific reference carries its PubMed identifier or its DOI. Every Jewish source carries its traditional locus. The reader can verify all of it.
A work of reference - learned, careful, and readable - for serving Hashem with a clear mind, and for standing beside those who suffer with accuracy and with compassion.
Menahem Mendel Sander is the author of Shmirat HaGuf, on the care of the body according to the Torah. Here he continues his inquiry into health placed at the service of spiritual elevation.
This book is not a substitute for a qualified clinician or for your Rav. If you or someone close to you is in immediate danger, call 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or 911.
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