John MacArthur Under Fire for PTSD / Mental Illness Comments

Moore's Corner Church

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Hello, in this video a controversy has broken out that we're going to cover. So John MacArthur is in the news again.

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I actually posted a video a few days ago, statements he made about pragmatism from a

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Q &A done at a Christian conference. So little did I know another clip from this

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Q &A was going to go viral. But now John MacArthur is under immense criticism.

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The headline is John MacArthur says there's no such thing as mental illness.

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Now I actually saw the clip myself and I didn't think much of it. I did not interpret his comments to mean that there's no such thing at all, that there's no mental illness.

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Rather, he was saying that things like PTSD are actually just grief instead of dealing with it in a healthy way or a different way.

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America, the Western world, maybe the whole world, our solution to everything now is just give people a pill.

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So instead of dealing with it through counseling or seeking the Lord or other ways, MacArthur was saying, yeah, doctors just give people pharmaceuticals and it's making things worse, which

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I think he has a valid point. But let's read through the article and I'll play you the pertinent clip in a moment.

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But this is from the Christian Post. It says, Pastor John MacArthur says there is, quote, no such thing as mental illness.

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And he calls PTSD or post -traumatic stress disorder,

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I think that's what it is, right? He calls it just grief. Okay, so it says, in what at least one critic has dismissed as the

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Dunning -Kruger effect in action, Pastor John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, he claims that there is no such thing as mental illness.

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More than one in five U .S. adults live with mental illness. Now obviously, right out of the gate, this article from the

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Christian Post is very critical of John MacArthur. And I've noticed this, the

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Christian Post, they run columns by people like Joyce Meyer and Rick Warren, so they're not exactly fans of John MacArthur at the

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Christian Post. So it says, just throwing that out there, but it says more than one in five

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U .S. adults live with a mental illness, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Over one in five youth, ages 13 through 18, either currently or at some point during their life have had a serious debilitating mental illness.

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About one in 25 U .S. adults also lives with serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression.

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Days before the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Month, however, John MacArthur, which

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I don't think MacArthur said that because of Mental Health Awareness Month. So they throw that in there as an extra, like look how insensitive he's being at the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Month.

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It's a week away and he's being so insensitive. And I know it sounds like I'm defending

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John MacArthur, but I think John MacArthur has, I'm not saying I agree with him, if he's really saying there's no such thing as mental illness at all, then no,

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I wouldn't agree with that, but I think he has a valid point overall. We'll get to that.

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But yeah, days before the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Month, John MacArthur, who is also the president of the

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Master's College and Seminary, he called mental illnesses, he called them noble lies while speaking during a panel discussion at Grace Church of the

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Valley last Thursday, citing the arguments presented by Bruce Levine, a clinical psychologist in his book,

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A Profession Without Reason and the Myth of Mental Illness by the now -deceased Hungarian -American psychiatrist

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Thomas Szasz, MacArthur urged patients not to believe in the noble lies he alleges are being supported by the pharmaceutical industry so they can sell medication to the public.

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MacArthur's comments about mental illness came in response to a question about helping parents navigate

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America's cultural disaster. Let's just play the clip. I was reading a book, an interesting book, called

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A Profession Without Reason. It's a book that shows basically, this is pretty shocking to some of you, that psychiatry and psychology is finally admitting the noble lies that they've been telling for the last hundred years, and the major noble lie is there is such a thing as mental illness.

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This isn't new. You have Thomas Szasz, back in the 1950s, writing a book who was a psychiatrist on the myth of mental illness.

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There's no such thing as PTSD. There's no such thing as OCD. There's no such thing as ADHD.

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Those are noble lies to basically give the excuse to the pharmaceutical industry that in the end of the day, to medicate people, and Big Pharma's in charge of a lot of that.

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If you understand, take PTSD for example. What that really is, is grief.

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You were fighting a war, you lost your buddies, you have a certain amount of survival guilt because you made it back, they didn't.

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How do you deal with grief? Grief is a real thing. But grief is part of life, and if you can't navigate grief, you can't live life.

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But if you clinically define that, you can give them a pill, a series of medications, and they end up in L .A.

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homeless on the sidewalk. Okay, so there's the clip, and I'm not a doctor,

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I don't want to be on here pretending to give medical advice or anything, so I just say this.

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The article continues, and it defines what PTSD is, and it says that many experts say that PTSD is because people go through traumatic events, or they witness traumatic events, and then other experts claim that it's a chemical imbalance.

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And it's like, well, which is it? MacArthur is not saying that these people are not experiencing feeling.

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He's not saying that their feelings aren't real, that their difficulties are not real. His complaint, now if he really is saying there's literally no such thing at all as mental illness, then

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I don't agree with that, but I just don't think you can be too hard on MacArthur here.

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He has a point. The bigger point is that these days, let's face it, the pharmaceutical industry has a lot of power, and a lot of doctors, we all appreciate doctors, but a lot of doctors, instead of dealing with the main issue, that's hard.

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Going to counseling twice a week, and overcoming these obstacles, that can be a long road.

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It's easier to just pop a pill. It's easier to just write a prescription, and that's kind of the problem that we're dealing with, where people go to a doctor, they get pills, and it's turning not just kids, but adults into drug addicts.

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And I'm sorry, I'm just not going to be too hard on MacArthur here. I'm not saying I agree with what he said.

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We should probably get some clarification, but the guy's got a valid point.

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Leave your angry comments below, but let's all try to show a little grace here.

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I think we know what he was saying. Let's pray for one another, pray for those who are dealing with grief.

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Everybody deals with something, and hopefully you can resolve problems through counseling and seeking the

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Lord. Some people really need medication, but if you don't need it, you probably shouldn't take it.