Dave Gordon
National Post, Aug. 10, 2025
“Traumatic invalidation can cause mental health issues in the short term and long term.”
After the Hamas-led terror attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, Dr. Miri Bar-Halpern, a psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School, wrote on an Israeli Facebook group offering therapy resources to those affected by the attacks.
She was flooded with requests from American Jews and Israeli-Americans. She, and seven colleagues, provided a year’s worth of pro bono support in Massachusetts.
In September, she will lead three talks in Toronto, on the theme of what many Jews have been experiencing since Oct. 7: a second layer of trauma — traumatic invalidation — that comes from their pain being dismissed, minimized, or invalidated.
She co-published a study on the topic: “Traumatic invalidation in the Jewish community after Oct. 7” in the peer-reviewed Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment. Typically, she says, studies like these receive some 2,000 reads; hers crossed 47,000 in the first two months.
Some examples she received included:
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