Mental Illness (Part 2)

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, but we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Why This Show Exists and How It Is Produced

Welcome back to No Compromise Radio ministry. The days go by quickly, don't they? Well, my typical MO is to not take calls because I don't have the right setup. If I was at the studio at WV &E, I would have a producer there, I would have a glass that I could look through and see, window, and work it all out.

If I had an hour, I know Krauss has got an hour, it makes it a little bit easier to take phone calls. That's just not the way it goes around here. And so I think lots of people try to get me to take phone calls.

You can email me if you like, but I just don't have that much time to talk to people and make the show work the way I think it should be run. So if you're ever wondering what the scoop is, that's why you write at info at nocompromiseradio .com, or you call and demand an hour show.

I don't even think I would do an hour show because this show is not like MacArthur's Grace to You or Alistair Begg's Truth for Life or even R .C. Sproul's show that follows mine. Those are recorded and those are sermons.

Sometimes R .C.'s are not, but you have the sermons and then someone just produces them and cuts them and works with them and then John doesn't really have to do anything. This requires not just for me preaching, but it requires me to come in here and put together these shows.

And so far, I haven't really had to study for any of the shows because they were from old messages, old bits of information that I've had stored on my computer. And so we've almost got, I don't know, a couple hundred shows done and I still have material left.

And so we'll just keep going. So our year will be up at the end of August. If you'd like us to stay on, I guess you write or call or since I'm anti giving money, I don't want your money. If you want to sponsor the show, I guess you could always sponsor the show.

But anyway, that is the scoop. We are talking today about mental illness, mental illness. And I put together a little quiz, mental illness. Let me stay up front once again, if you were on some kind of psychotropic drugs, you need to work with your doctor.

I am not a medical doctor. I have a doctorate of ministry and expository preaching. I cannot write scripts. I cannot write prescriptions. I cannot tell you to stop taking your medicine. I can tell you that if you're a Christian and you're taking a lot of medicine, it's fine if you go talk to your doctor and ask, can you cut down?

Can you be weaned off? Is there something with less side effects? I think you can go do that. And I think you should ask more questions. I think you should find a DSM-IV and go to the library and find a DSM-IV and pull up, for instance, Ritalin and find out what the long-term effects are on your children before you give it to them for more than six weeks.

I think you should be informed. And so I want today to be a voice crying in the wilderness to say that I'm not so sure mental illness is what you think it is if you're a Christian. And so we had true or false so far.

True or false, the topic of mental illness is very controversial. And we found out that is true. True or false, mental problems are real and extremely difficult. I'm not saying that you are just having some figment of your imagination and you're not really struggling like you are.

I think you are struggling. And there are issues that we have to face as fallen creatures. Even as redeemed people, we are not totally rid of sin. We don't have to pay the penalty of sin. Jesus did that.

If you're a Christian, he has paid the penalty. The power of sin is broken in the sense that you can say no to sin, Romans chapter six and seven, but the presence of sin still exists. And so we will not have sinless practical bodies practically until we get to heaven and we are glorified.

So in the meantime, I think we just need to take ownership that we have these things, especially if something is a sin. Let's not rename it. If you have anxiety, just call that a sin. Don't try to give it some kind of syndrome, disease, disorder thing.

Just say it's a sin. You're gonna be a lot better off. Proverbs 19, a man's own folly ruins his life. And number three, we're up to number three now. Psychology is a science. Psychology is a science. Psychotherapy is scientific.

Here's what I'll say to start. Let's be inflammatory and then we'll back up a little bit. That's what we do here at the show, right? That's probably why you listen. You listen because you like this kind of teaching, blunt, biblical.

Are you listening because you're bored and you just need some cheap entertainment? Are you listening because you don't like it, but you're trying to figure out what you don't like? Maybe it's you don't like propositional truth.

This is the way it is. I'm certainly not right in everything in my life and theologically, but if I study and I think I'm right, I'm not gonna say, well, I don't know. I'm not really sure. I am too humble to have an opinion.

I think if you're gonna stand up and be bold enough to preach the gospel in a pulpit, in a church, if you're going to have enough temerity to say, thus saith the Lord, you better know for sure to study to show yourself approved.

And if you're going to be what James says, held under stricter judgment as a teacher, then you better study to make sure you know the truth. And so I wanna make sure I do know about these things. And in my opinion, with my study, with my background, I believe that psychology and psychotherapy is more of a religion than a science.

So true or false, psychology is a science. False. William Kirkpatrick, I think he was teaching at Boston or Boston College, said in 1999, psychology as faith has proven to be a sturdy creed. The assumptions and techniques of psychology and therapy have found their way into business, schools, families, popular entertainment, and even the courts.

So much so that it has become common to speak of our society as a therapeutic culture. That was 10 years ago, 11 years ago, that William Kirkpatrick said that very thing. If psychology is to analyze behavior, there's lots of fine research that says, this is what happens when people do this.

There's probably some science to that. But beyond that, trying to change behavior, what are we made of sociologically, with our soul, with our spirit? How do you change behavior so it's more pleasing to Christ?

I don't think this is a science. Did you know, according to one man, there are currently over 500 brand name psychotherapies on the market? And by the way, it's not getting smaller, it's getting bigger.

The same man says, they come at problems from many varied angles, but the one thing is common to them all. They start with a biblically defective view of the nature of man. That is exactly right. Namely, that man is basically good and able to solve his problems apart from God.

If you start from the wrong base, you can't build a system that complements scripture. If you mix dirt and water, you get mud, end quote. And so you have, if this is science, then you should have one view because it should be empirical, it should be measurable, it should be specific.

But if you have 500 of something, then my question is, how can that be science? One thing is for sure, we do know that if you look at psychotherapy and psychology, even Christian psychology, they have a default, they have a faulty view of the fall, sin, the nature of mankind as a fallen creature.

And they don't understand depravity and therefore their solutions to problems don't mix in sin and depravity, therefore it is faulty. Listen to another quote I have here. In attempting to evaluate the status of psychology, the American Psychological Association appointed Sigmund Coe to plan and direct a study which was subsidized by the National Science Foundation.

It's a few years old, but still interesting. The study involved 80 eminent scholars in assessing the facts, theories, and methods of psychology. Now we are dating ourselves, but here we go. Still, I think the point is valid.

In 1983, the results were published in a seven volume series entitled Psychology, A Study of Science. Coe describes the delusion in thinking of psychology as a science. Here's what Coe says. Goat, the hope of psychological science became indistinguishable from the fact of psychological science.

What does that mean? Oh, the hope of, from the fact of. The entire subsequent history of psychology can be seen as a ritualistic endeavor to emulate the forms of science in order to sustain the delusion that it already is a science.

Wow, that is amazing. That is amazing. Psychologist Roger Mills wrote an article, Psychology Goes Insane, Botch's Role as Science. Here's what Roger Mills says. A psychologist, the field of psychology today is literally a mess.

There are as many techniques, methods, and theories around as there are researchers and therapists. I have personally seen therapists convince their clients that all of their problems come from their mothers, the stars, their biological makeup, their diet, their lifestyle, and even the karma from their past lives.

How about the very famous research psychiatrist, E. Fuller Torrey? The techniques used by Western psychiatrists are, with few exceptions, on exactly the same scientific plane as the techniques used by witch doctors.

Ay yi yi yi yi yi yi yi. What does that tell you here on No Compromise Radio Ministry? If you think psychology and psychotherapy is a science, you are sadly mistaken. And so why do you go to your psychotherapist with the same attitude that you would go to your pediatrician?

Matter of fact, pediatricians and internal medicine doctors prescribe a lot of these drugs. OB-GYN people, at least to my wife one, tried to prescribe one of these drugs when she was feeling down. It happened to be not postpartum depression.

It happened to be a thyroid problem. So that was an interesting thing. Listen to Carl Jung. Religions are systems of helping, of healing for psychic illness. That is why patients force the psychotherapist into the role of priest and expect and demand of him that he shall free them of their distress.

That is why we psychotherapists must occupy ourselves with problems which, strictly speaking, belong to the theologian. At least somebody's honest. So if you wanna go to your psychotherapist, I'm not saying you can't go.

If you're on medicine, you still should go to figure out, do you still wanna stay on it? Should you be weaned off? Is that prudent? Is that legal? Is that everything else? Listen to what psychiatrist Thomas Szasz says.

Szasz says, S-Z-A-S-Z. It is not merely a religion that pretends to be science. This is, he's talking about psychotherapy. It is actually a fake religion that seeks to destroy true religion. Well, William Law was right.

He said, man needs to be saved from his own wisdom as much as his own righteousness, for they produce one and the same corruption. Well, we don't want you to be tricked. We want to try to educate. We want you to try to study.

We want you to go get Edward Welch's book, Blame It on the Brain. Ed Welch, Blame It on the Brain. Distinguishing mental illness disorders, sinful behavior, I don't know the subline. I think it's a PNR book, Presbyterian Reformed.

Blame It on the Brain, Ed Welch. So at least you know, at the end of the day, if you disagree with me on all this and you still want to do what you want to do, it's fine. We should serve together, minister together, evangelize together.

You can come to our church and you don't have to sign the doctrinal statement. I am not on any meds. I do not have any psychotropic drugs in my house. I don't think that's the issue. And matter of fact, there are times to have psychotropic drugs.

And when I was in the hospital and I'm choking on something and they've got to relax me and they want to give me some Ativan to relax me so I don't continue choking. Well, I was really glad for that Ativan because I was no longer worried as I was before.

But I still had my problem. I think too often drugs just mask problems. The drugs just mask what we have going on and then we are not sick of what's going on to the point where we figure out we better do something about it.

I think too many times psychotropic drugs act like aspirin and they have this illusion where you don't have the problem anymore. As aspirin gets between the pain and the brain, so too these things get between the brain and the emotional problems.

But the problem is when the aspirin wears off, the pain returns because you have not directly discussed and directly addressed the real problems. And so if you use chemicals to solve problems, I think that plays into man's nature of being lazy, of man's nature.

Of course, when I say man's, humankind's nature to say, let's take the easy way out. We don't want to really deal with something. Let's just throw the bandaid on the cancer and hope everything is fine.

I think if you want to sit down with some biblical counselor, some wise elder from a church, I think they're going to try to help you figure out there's an underlying cause to these symptoms. And if the underlying cause has to do with sin and righteousness or lack thereof righteousness, then I think it's a spiritual problem that you ought not to mask, that you should be glad that you have the problem because as in a hand that touches the stove, you should not say, I just need to somehow squelch the nerve endings because that's a problem.

I don't like the nerve endings. No, they're given to you for a reason. And so, as I've said on the show before, when Cain sinned, his countenance fell in Proverbs 29, 18, and maybe it's 28, 19. I don't have the passage open.

If you do the right things, you're going to be happy. Happy is he who keeps the law. So if you're unhappy, what does that tell you? But what I am here to say is that I do not believe psychotherapy and psychology is a valid science.

And I think if you misunderstand the depravity of man, if you somehow deny that man is sinful to the core, that you are going to be problem, you're going to have a problem. Number four, mental illness is a fact.

Right now, I'm just going to say, I don't think it's a fact. It seems like it's a fact, but we're going to circle back around to this issue. And we're going to go to number five first. Number five, the brain is not the mind.

True or false? True or false? I think you have to have the brain to have the mind, but the brain is not the mind. That is true. Certainly they go together, just like question number four and five. But the brain is not the mind.

One man said, the third major myth is that people who are experiencing mental, emotional, behavioral, or problems are mentally ill. They're supposedly psychologically sick and therefore need psychological therapy.

The common argument is that the doctor treats the body, the minister treats the spirit, and the psychologist treats the mind and emotions. Ministers, unless they are trained in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, are then supposedly unqualified to help people who are suffering from serious problems of living.

There's a little booklet called The Myth of Mental Illness. It says the terms mental disease, mental illness, and mental disorder are popular catch-alls for all kinds of problems of living, most of which have little or nothing to do with disease.

As soon as a person's behavior is labeled illness, treatment and therapy become the solutions. If on the other hand, we consider a person to be responsible for his behavior, we should deal with him in the areas of education, faith, and choice.

If we label him mentally ill, we rob him of the dignity of personal responsibility and divine relationship by which problems may be met. Fuller Torrey says, and here we have again the psychologist saying this, the term mental illness itself is nonsensical, a semantic mistake.

The two words cannot go together. You can no more have a mental disease than you can have a purple idea or a wise space. The word mental means mind, and the mind is not the same as the brain. Your brain might have a disease because of the thyroid or some kind of tumor.

It may, but if your mind has got a problem, I wonder if you'd think this way. If you're to love the Lord your God with all your brain, what does that mean? How about if you're to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength?

Who gave the mind to the human? I believe that God did so that he might, with rational thinking, with thinking about the object of his faith, honor and worship and love and trust and obey the creator.

Your mind is not a physical organ. Therefore, it cannot have a disease. If you have a watch on your wrist, your watch can't have a disease because your watch can't have a disease because your watch is not an organ.

Your mind is not an organ. It is not a physical organ. You could have a diseased brain, that's true, but you can't have a diseased mind. You might have a mind that's full of sin, sinful thinking, sinful responses.

You might have an unsaved mind that has a bent towards sin and you have no power over sin, you just sin all the time, just different ways. But you can have this kind of thinking where you say, I have a mental illness.

Here again, from the psychologist Torrey, the mind cannot really become diseased any more than the intellect can become obsessed, have an abscess in my mind. I have some kind of, you know, some pus in my mind.

Spiritual pus, that's probably true, but that's bad to think about, some kind of yellow pus. Whoa, furthermore, Torrey says, the idea that mental diseases are actually brain diseases create a strange category of diseases which are by definition without known cause.

Body and behavior become intertwined in this confusion until they are no longer distinguishable. It is necessary to return to first principles. A disease is something you have, behavior is something you do.

You might wanna write that down. If you're driving, you pull over to the side. A disease is something you have, behavior is something you do. Saz says, you know, people are psychiatric imposters who quote, support a common culturally shared desire to equate and confuse brain and mind, nerves and nervousness.

Brain and mind are not synonymous and neither are nerves and nervousness. Saz says, it is customary to define psychiatry as a medical specialty concerned with the study, diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.

This is a worthless and misleading definition. Mental illness is a myth. The notion of a person having mental illness is scientifically crippling. It provides professional assent to the popular rationalization.

Namely, Saz says that problems in living experienced and expressed in terms of so-called psychiatric symptoms are basically similar to bodily diseases. You can have medical problems. You can have a brain disease but you can't have a mind disease.

You can be medically ill but not mentally ill. So, are you ready to throw the radio out? Are you ready to get mad at me? I'm not trying to get you mad at me. I'm just trying to get you to think of things, think about things that society, that unbelieving society, that pseudoscience, psychiatry and psychotherapy, even under the guise of Christian psychology.

I'm trying to get you to think that there may be another way. Mind, brain, different? Can you have some kind of mind abscess? Does the Bible help when it comes to worshiping God with our mind? If we're not worshiping God with our mind properly, can we admit to ourselves and to God that sin, the sin of anxiety, is causing me a lot of problems?

And it actually can cause physical problems. You can get ulcers because of sins of the mind. I'm not saying your body isn't affected. I'm not saying if you do things wrongly and you respond to things wrongly that you don't get depressed and that you don't lose your appetite and that you don't sleep well and that you begin not to function properly in this life and in this world.

Those things are all true. But I'm trying to go back to the cause. And can the cause be something different than what your psychotherapist is telling you? Why are these men who are the psychologists that I've quoted today, Fuller and Sass and some of these, why are they so ostracized?

I'll tell you, because you follow the money. You follow the money. By the way, what would happen to the healthcare system if we just got rid of all this mental illness stuff? I think your premiums would go down a lot.

I think they would go down a lot. That's what I think. If you have a friend and they've got Alzheimer's, there's been some kind of trauma to the head of some person, well, your mind can be affected when the brain is not functioning properly because it is injured, of course.

But what I'm after today is this. If you are a Christian today and you struggle with sin or what you should label as sin, but you just blindly go to the doctor and you just take all this medicine and you take all these pills and that's how you solve the problem, the problem's not solved.

You're masking it. And if you stop taking those pills, you're gonna have the problem reoccur. So what does the Bible say about sin, behavior, putting off the old man, putting on the new man? What does it say about union with Christ?

What does it say in Romans 6 and 7? See, a lot of those questions are too hard for people to wanna work through. They want an easy route. And if you've got pain, you take some medicine and you just feel better emotionally.

So isn't it better to say you've got hope? What kind of hope does a psychotherapist give you? Call up your psychotherapist or psychologist and say, I'd like to schedule an appointment. I'm taking all these drugs and I'd like to know what is my hopeful outcome in the future so I can have a life full of hope and what's the program?

And see what they say. Again, I'm not telling you to stop taking your drugs, but you can ask them, can I be weaned off of them? I hope they say, I'd love to have you weaned off of these things. Who'd wanna take these things for the rest of your life and all the side effects and everything else?

We'll have to do part three next time. Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio.

Mental illness is a myth. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life transforming power of God's word through verse by verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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