Is Mental Illness a Real Thing?

Mental Illness, Trauma, and the Fall

Christian social media is ablaze over whether or not mental illness is a real thing. In particular things like PTSD, ADHD, OCD. I'm gonna just name him.

So I believe the controversy you guys are talking about was from statements that John MacArthur made. One of the things we're seeing in Christianity today is that people are just terrified. They're just terrified.

It's not like the spiritual warfare that we're under right now hasn't always been the case for Christians, it has, but it seems to be just very visible right now. And every time you turn around, it seems like there's a new thing that you're going, give me a break.

That's just ridiculous. And then when you hear kind of what people like John MacArthur will say in response to that and sort of an attack of mental illness diagnoses and whatnot, it just seems like a reaction to being afraid.

When somebody is reacting, when they're afraid, look at I'm diagnosing him. The reality is, is that that reaction often becomes an overreaction, right? So you can say things like, oh, mental illness doesn't exist and then you start listing examples.

And inevitably when you start listing your examples, you're gonna list some things that are maybe very true, some things that are a little true and some things that are just ridiculous, right? So if you say PTSD doesn't exist, I want you to have a conversation with about 30 Iraq and Afghanistan vets who came home and watched their buddies get blown away or limbs blown off and tell them and look them in the eyes and say, PTSD is not real, right?

Because you're just gonna, you're not gonna go very far with that. But then if you say something like ADHD is overdiagnosed, okay, it probably is, right? Or it seems like to me, back when the movie Rain Man came out, nobody really heard of autism.

And now it seems like one in three kids is diagnosed by being on spectrum in some way. That seems a little weird. Here, we can have a conversation about that, right? And maybe reasons for that. Is that being diagnosed more than it was and why?

Sin, Suffering, and a Robust View of the Fall

But to just make these blanket statements, to say something like, these aren't real, this is just sin. From the Christian theological perspective, you can say, well, yeah, right? This is all just sin.

Anytime anything goes wrong in the world right now, in a relationship, in the way that we deal with one another, in our inability to deal with one another because of this, that, the other, ADHD, PTSD, bipolar, depression, whatever, this is, it's completely accurate to say this is just sin.

But it doesn't mean that it's also not something else connected to that too, that sin hasn't caused there to be another issue too, right?

To say that it is sin, that these things happen because of sin is a true statement, for sure. But there's a lot more going on with it in terms of a robust understanding of what the fall has done to us all.

Trauma in a Genesis 3 World

We live in a Genesis three world where trauma is an undeniable reality. You spoke to that. Where there is a condition and a state into which we're all born that manifests itself in all of us differently, like you said.

How is it that having a right understanding of those things would produce, not maybe this kind of anger, I need to stand on the wall and scream at everybody and mow everybody down kind of posture, but rather it ought to produce compassion, should it not, toward our fellow man?

Yeah.