Omer returned from Lebanon with trauma. His ex-wife used it in a custody battle

Not long ago, a client I represent in a divorce proceeding regarding visitation rights sat in my conference room. I will call him Omer. He is a father of a five-year-old boy, a fighter and commander in the Paratroopers Brigade, who served more than 400 days of reserve duty. In one of the rounds, his unit encountered a squad of Hezbollah terrorists. Some of his brothers-in-arms were killed or wounded. Omer was the one who rescued them. But what scares him today is not what happened there in the north, but what is happening to him now in the courtroom.

Like many fighters who experienced what he experienced, Omer developed PTSD. He sought treatment and chose on his own initiative to be hospitalized in a dedicated therapeutic setting. He finished the treatment after months, balanced, with regular medication and psychiatric follow-up. The treating psychiatrist provided an opinion stating that the medication does not impair his alertness, his judgment, or his ability to care for his son.

And then Omer asked for a divorce. Within a short time, his ex-wife collected his medical summaries from the hospitalization and from the psychiatrists who treated him, and attached them to the file regarding visitation rights. Not as background material for an independent professional assessment, but as evidence intended to distance him from his son. Suddenly, he was no longer a father who dealt with a real difficulty and came out of it treated and balanced. He was "unstable" and "dangerous." The result was a judicial decision stating that he is not allowed to sleep alone with his son at night, unless another family member sleeps with them in the house. This, despite the medical opinion that he is fit to function as a parent.

His story is not exceptional. This is just one example out of several cases I have encountered. The State of Israel calls thousands of men and women to reserve duty, sometimes for hundreds of days in total. As a society, we expect them to go out and risk their lives and pay a heavy and prolonged mental price at times. And then, when they return home and seek treatment, we allow the use of the treatment documentation to reduce their time with their children. This is not only a cruel irony, but also a dangerous and perverse incentive. If the very act of seeking mental health help, and even a proactive and responsible hospitalization, can be used against a parent in a discussion about visitation rights, the message that might be conveyed to a reservist sitting in front of a psychologist or psychiatrist is: do not ask for help, because what will be written in your medical file might be used against you.

Israeli law is supposed to examine first and foremost the best interests of the child, not a diagnostic label. The problem worsens when what is placed on the court's table is not an opinion of a neutral expert, but treatment and hospitalization summaries submitted as raw evidence, without being examined through the truly relevant question: is the parent actually functioning as a parent. I am not asking the courts to ignore a parent's mental health. Quite the opposite. One must examine what is truly relevant: actual functioning, real parental capacity, and current and well-founded professional opinions, not the name of the diagnosis itself. When private treatment summaries are submitted to the court, the full picture must be examined within the framework of a professional assessment of parental capacity and not let them, in and of themselves, decide the case.

And alongside all these, there is a larger issue here. The state that recruits Omer, and many like him, for hundreds of days of reserve duty, and imposes on him an obligation from which there is almost no escape – does not offer him any parallel protection in the civil-family arena, when the price he paid in its service returns to haunt him in the place that hurts him the most: in front of his son.