Spotlight: Otef Lev – Turning Mental Health Support into Something People Can Actually Do

There is a moment in the conversation with Otef Lev’s leadership that captures something essential about the current state of mental health in Israel. It is not about lack of ideas, or even lack of programs. It is about a quieter, more structural gap: the people who need support are often not the ones who reach it.

As Dr. Hadas Shaharabani Saidon describes it, they are working with young people

“who we won’t even see in the mental health system… and if they reach it, they fall out.”

This is the starting point for Otef Lev, led by Prof. Nurit Yirmiya and Dr. Shaharabani Saidon. Not a new therapy. Not a new diagnosis. A different question: what happens before someone ever enters the system and who is there to meet them?

What they have built over the past years is an attempt to answer that question in a very concrete way.

At the center of their work are two programs that reflect two different entry points into the same problem. The first, PWP (Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners), focuses on people already working in the field such as social workers, community practitioners, those who encounter distress every day but have historically lacked structured tools to respond to it. This program currently operates at the Academic College of Tel Aviv Yafo with a collaboration between Otef Lev, the Ministry of Welfare and Social Security with Noroot Forum serving young adults at risk and with the College. The second, Amit Ba’Kehila, works with 7 academic institutions from the North to the South of the country (Tel HaiUniversity Galil Maaravi, Rupin, Bet Berl, Hebrew University, Sapir and Ben Gurion Univeristy), training students and placing them in communities where they provide supervised support. Together, they begin to sketch what a broader, more distributed mental health infrastructure might look like.

But what stands out most is not the structure of the programs, it is the philosophy behind them.

Prof. Yirmiya returns several times to a simple observation: until now, many of the people closest to those in distress had no real well-being and mental health tools. They were present, committed, often deeply engaged, but unequipped. The shift, as she describes it, is that “now they have the ability to actually offer a response geared at wellbeing, resiliency and mental health based on knowledge and skills” and in doing so, they can spare people the long and often prohibitive wait for formal care and allow the experts to offer help to those who need them most. 

This is not framed as a replacement for the system, but as something that sits alongside it, offering appropriate services to those who need them and catching those who would otherwise fall through. 

The PWP training reflects this pragmatism. It is long, demanding, and highly structured training. Participants do not just learn concepts; they rehearse them. They practice conversations, watch themselves on video, repeat, adjust. There is a deliberate move away from abstraction. As Dr. Shaharabani Saidon puts it,

“nothing we teach is only ideas… it always includes actions.”

There is something almost countercultural in this approach within the Israeli context, where many trainings still rely heavily on theory and experts  Here, the emphasis is on doing, on building a kind of muscle memory for responding to distress.

Amit Ba’Kehila takes a different route but arrives at a similar place. Students are not sent into communities as volunteers with good intentions. They are trained, supervised, and embedded within a structured system. Prof. Yirmiya contrasts this with what she has seen in the past when she served as Dean of Students at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where too often, students were “sent out with not enough training or no training at all,” relying only on motivation. Here, everything is prepared in advance, from coursework and skills workshops to field placement to monitoring.

The result is not only support for those receiving help, but also the creation of a new layer of capacity within the system.

What becomes increasingly clear is that Otef Lev is not trying to hold onto this model as its own. Again and again, Prof. Yirmiya emphasizes that the materials are meant to be shared. The manuals, the protocols, the assessment tools… They are all available. “Everything exists… we are happy to share it, to pass it on,” she says, almost in passing.

There is even a tension in the way she speaks about it: the work is “close to the heart,” but precisely for that reason, it should not remain confined. The intention is for other organizations, institutions, and practitioners to take it, to adapt it, and to use it.

This openness feels less like a strategic decision and more like a reflection of urgency. The need is too great, and the system too stretched, for ownership to matter.

That urgency is visible in other parts of the conversation as well. There is a sense of fatigue everyone is noticing, among professionals, within institutions, and even among funders. And yet, at the same time, the needs are not diminishing. If anything, they are becoming more diffuse, harder to identify, less likely to surface through formal channels.

This is where Otef Lev’s model feels particularly relevant. It does not depend on people navigating their way into the system. It assumes that many will not and builds around that assumption.

It also challenges a deeper habit within mental health systems: the idea that care must always begin with specialists. What Otef Lev is quietly proposing is a more layered approach, where meaningful support can begin earlier, closer to where people live their lives, and where escalation to specialized care happens when needed, but not as the only entry point.

There is nothing particularly flashy about this idea. In many ways, it is almost obvious. And yet, as the conversation reveals, it is still far from being systematically implemented. It is a familiar story in this space: solutions that work, but are not yet anchored.

And still, what remains is not only the fragility of the moment, but also the clarity of what has been built. A set of tools. A way of training. A model that can travel.

In a context where many feel that systems are overwhelmed, Otef Lev is distributing the ability to respond to it. Not everyone will become a therapist. But more people, in more places, might know what to say, and what to do, when it matters.