Sanism and ableism pervade the modern world. Nationalist rhetoric around the “strong” mind and body reflects deep anxieties around ideal types. This paper contextualizes multiple discourses of national strength, family politics, and individual worth. I argue that male doctors and political elites in the 1940s and 1950s pathologized women’s experiences in family life (particularly with depression and psychosis) under a nationalist veneer of conformity in a medical effort to silence or suppress difference. By analyzing the memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz and Rosine Nimeh-Mailloux’s The Madwoman of Bethlehem against a backdrop of several psychiatric records from Bethlehem Mental Hospital in the 1940s, and in light of recent research in trauma studies and disability studies, I argue that women navigated the medical landscape with the agency available to them: some chose to escape criminal prosecution or family persecution through accepting the label of madwoman and the carceral space of the hospital, while others turned to suicide in despair of the limitations of the period. While much of the sources analyzed here focus on psychiatric interventions, the paper complicates binaries of “sane” and “insane,” “modern” and “traditional,” and “science” and “magic.” The unseen supernatural and observable natural world overlap as illness and treatment are shaped by culturally meaningful practices as well as immediate political goals. Gender, ethnicity, and class-based identities intersect in treatment options and beliefs that contribute to conversations on the worthy and sacrificial body. The paper foregrounds questions around inclusion and exclusion against a backdrop of 1947 and 1948. It shows multiple and not necessarily conflicting approaches in how these communities perceived and reacted to cognitive difference and disability more generally in the nation-building project, with hierarchies around congenital vs. acquired wartime physical disabilities and visible vs. invisible cognitive and intellectual disabilities. Both political and medically shifting conditions led to marginality of individual experiences of illness and trauma while the collective trauma of the Holocaust and the nakba came to be framed by politicians as deeply inflecting nationalist trajectories in the decades to come. Informed in part by the work of Alean Al-Krenawi, Bashir Bashir, and Amos Goldberg, this paper applies approaches from both the critical disability and mad pride movements and argues for more scholarly attention to complementary systems of care and political trajectories that may better incorporate the voices of individuals and communities seeking support, affirmation, and inclusion.