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 INTRODUCTION
The Western Wall ("Of the lamentations") it is one of the most visited tourist places of Israel. At any time of the day or of the night, visitors flow into the Wall, to pray, to take pictures, to take part in a declaration or in a ceremony of oath of the flag, to assist to one bar - mitzvá, or simply to absorb something of the historical and spiritual ambience with which this ancient place is imbued.
Certain individuals feel attracted to this place, in search of a supernatural experience. Between they are those who believe them mesías, the maladjusted ones, the confused ones, spiritually implied. It is them who suffer from the syndrome of Jerusalem and are intoxicated literally by the Holy City. The midnight delights them the past special ambience of the Wall. His psyche catches fire with the historical holiness in which they feel immersed. Although other places of Jerusalem also attract them, the Wall is the favorite place of such individuals, especially of the Jews. The critical periods are the religious festivities like the Christmas.
DESCRIPTION
The first one in identifying clinically the syndrome of Jerusalem was Dr. Yair Bar, the ex-director of the mental hospital of Kfar Shaúl and at present district psychiatrist in the Department of Health. Dr. Bar the examinó, declared temporarily insane persons, that they were attended in Kfar Shaúl between 1979 and 1993, and it extracted from his study some fascinating conclusions to 470 tourists. To 470 visitors of the entire world who were interned there, 66 per cent they were Jewish, a 33 per cent Christians, and 1 per cent did not have definite religious affiliation.
In the hospital Eim Karem there is a department of psychiatry specializing in foreigners who present this syndrome that in medical terms is a disorder disociativo hysterically: the patients generate another personality that then they will not be capable of remembering. It is a question of a failure of the common sense before the spiritual surcharge that floats in the ambience, before so many religion, ideology, history, mythology, concentrated on every stone of this city, and his clear consequences: wars, crusades, conquests, massacres, exoduses, martyrdoms, miracles, charities, tyranny, intolerance, art and destruction.
Dr. Bar the señala that the syndrome of Jerusalem is similar to the "syndrome of Florence" identified by the Italian psychiatrists, who some time ago observed a tendency between the tourists and visitors of the city to be operated in a rare and irrational way. Nevertheless, in Florence, there are the works of art and the beauty of the proper city those who provoke, apparently, the appearance of the syndrome, rather that the religion.
SYMPTOMS
"Suddenly something happened to me" these tourists usually say when they initiate his treatment psicoterapéutico. They usually show very similar rules of mental deterioration. The symptoms appear on the following day of his arrival to Jerusalem, when they begin feeling an inexplicable nervousness or an anxiety. If they come in group or with relatives, they feel suddenly the need to be alone and separate from the others. Soon they begin to realize acts of purification and ablutions, like baths and showers, or immersion in a ritual bath. Often they change of clothes, with clear preference to the white tunics, in order to look alike to Biblical personages, because mostly they wanted to be identified by some Biblical figure of the New one or of the Ancient Testament.
To four or five days, the patients answer to the comeback approach to the reality that the psychiatrists praise. "I feel as a clown", they say some, ashamed, and do not manage to explain why when they say to them that they felt like submerging in a pond in the park or singing hallelujahs in full night raised in the walls of the Old City.
There exists the convincing theory of which those who suffer the syndrome were predisposed to it in the shape of a latent mental disorder that was seen precipitate on having come to the holy city.
WHAT DOCTOR CAN TREAT ME?
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INTRODUCTION 
