There are many prayers to help mourn the death of a family member. In Judaism, the Mourner’s Kaddish gives people the opportunity to publicly express their grief over death. When coping with mental illness, the appropriate prayer is much harder to find. “Judaism does not give us a way of understanding and speaking about mental illness,” Ayelet Amittay writes for Tikkun. Amittay’s father has not died physically, but she still feels that she has lost him to mental illness. Instead of a prayer for the dead, or a prayer for health that she knows will never come, Amittay struggles with her “need for a prayer that would redeem other kinds of losses–living losses.”
