Is Mental Illness a Myth?

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The Gospel of Salvation and Coming Judgment

People are tired of hearing nothing but doom and despair on the radio. The message of Christianity is that salvation is found in Christ alone, and any who reject Christ therefore forfeit any hope of salvation, any hope of heaven.

The issue is that humanity is in sin, and the wrath of almighty God is hanging over our heads. They will hear his words, they will not act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment, when the fires of wrath come, they will be consumed and they will perish.

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Jesus is saying there is a group of people who will hear his words, they will act upon them, and when the floods of divine judgment come in that final day, their house will stand.

Defining Mental Illness as a Pseudoscientific Category

Welcome to Bible Bash, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask. We're your hosts Harrison Kerrig and Pastor Tim Mullett, and today we'll answer the age-old question, is mental illness a myth?

Now this might be the one that maybe a lot of Christians, they hear that question and they're like, of course it's real, what are you talking about? Are you crazy? Right? But I think this is sort of the issue that we're going to end up having to address probably on the front end of this episode, is just how much this type of psychological ideology has really infiltrated the church.

Right, Tim?

Right. Yeah. I mean, it's really remarkable when you think about this category of mental illness in general, because it is a category that is distinct from what you might describe as biological illness.

So the whole idea of mental illness is that, just as the body can get sick, so also the mind can get sick. And when you think about that assumption in general, it's a fairly absurd assumption. And most people don't appreciate how absurd this assumption actually is.

And this kind of goes to your comment that it's, I mean, the idea of mental illness has been so pervasive in our society and so frequently taught. It's the air we breathe right now. And many people just haven't stopped to think about what they're actually being asked to accept.

And if they just did a little bit of research into this kind of topic and just thought about what they're being asked to accept, they might find that this idea is fairly preposterous. It's very counterintuitive.

And why have we swallowed so much of this idea in general? But as it goes, this is the standard state of affair. This is the air you breathe. And there's no easier way to get quote-unquote Christians mad at you than to question the legitimacy of any of these DSM -5 mental illnesses that are out there.

So with that being said, what would your answer to the question be? Is mental illness a myth?

Yeah. I mean, it's a fantastical fairy tale that is born out of materialism. It's a myth. It's worse than a myth. It's a fairy tale, man. It's just like, for you to believe in mental illness, you have to essentially believe in magic.

It's that bad. So what's happening here is that there's just profound category errors that are being made as it relates to this subject. And it's so convoluted that what you're being asked to believe is multiple, contradictory, illogical things all at once, even to make sense of what is actually being argued.

So at a popular level, what's actually happening, when you think about what's happening at a popular level, is that when you talk about mental illness, people immediately think brain problem, right?

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

But then that's not really what mental illness is, okay?

Okay. What is it?

So if you have a normal brain problem, that would be like Alzheimer's or dementia or something like that. That would be a brain problem. That would be where your brain is deteriorating. You can do a brain scan, and you can see that this brain is abnormal in that way.

And there's objective evidence of pathology. There's objective tissue damage. And so traditional medicine is going to deal with pathology. It's going to deal with tissue damage or malfunction.

There's some kind of physical damage is what you're saying.

Right. Yeah. So if I break my leg, I go to the doctor. They're going to be able to run a test, and they're going to show that my leg is broken, if that makes sense, right?

Right. Yeah.

So my leg is broken. They're going to be able to run a test and see, hey, look, here's your x-ray, and this shows that your leg is broken. And it's cracked here, and this is the solution. If you have cancer, they're going to be able to run a series of tests that show that you have an overproduction of cells, and they're going to be able to demonstrate that through objective tests.

So the whole idea of mental illness was that this is a category distinct from biological illness. That's what the whole idea of mental illness is. It's a category that's distinct from biological illness that's resulting from pathology.

So you come up with, like what the psychologist did, it was very clever, is that they're a pseudoscientific kind of endeavor. And what they've done is they've attached themselves onto the medical community like a parasite.

And that's what they've done. They're like a leech sucking at the medical community as a host in that way.

Feeding off the life force of their life force.

Yeah, so what they've done is they've attached themselves to that, and then they began to package all of their language in the language of medical disorder. So all of your psychological labels are packaged in this language of medical disorder.

So you have obsessive compulsive disorder.

You have general anxiety disorder.

You have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. So all of it is labeled in this language of disorder. But then the whole idea was that it started as a discipline distinct from medicine, meaning that traditional medicine deals with pathology.

Psychology is not dealing with pathology. It's not dealing with organic illness. It's dealing with this nebulous category of mental illness. Now what's happened in the mind of many people is that because we're so accustomed to using medical language to describe mental disorders now, in people's minds they just assume that there's some biological ideology behind mental illness.

They assume that there's some kind of organic problem, that essentially it's a brain problem of some sort. And so half the time what you're having is you're having people who are treating this as if it's an organic problem with no evidence behind that.

That's just the air you breathe. This is a mental disorder, man. What do you not understand? It's a brain problem, man. Are you anti-science? Anti-medicine? So the drugs are packaged as medicine. The disorders are packaged as medical problems in the same kind of language.

And so half the time people think, okay, this is a biological problem here. And the other half of the time you have people talking about it as it actually is, is that you witness a terrible event and then your brain gets sick.

Right, yeah.

And so meaning you have some kind of glitch in the program, you have some kind of glitch in your thoughts. And so you have to ask yourself, what realm are we in? What are we even saying right now? Are we in a biological medical realm?

Are we in this magical materialistic brain sickness, thought sickness kind of realm? And when you think about how the categories actually work, these are the labels that are given once all the medical tests run empty.

And this is not some sort of organic problem. This is a different category of problem that is packaged in similar language as the other. And then when you step back and you think about what's actually happening, you realize that this is like magical fairy tale kind of nonsense.

So just let me give you an example. So imagine what you're being asked to believe, and treating this as if it's an illness, what you're being asked to believe is that, let's say you witness with your eyes a wreck, right?

So you watch a wreck happen. And what you're being asked to believe is the act of you viewing that wreck somehow results in you having a broken leg or something. Does that make sense?

It makes complete total 100 sense.

Now I know you're lying.

I actually had that happen to me the other day.

You watched a traumatic event and then your leg snapped just instantaneously on its own.

I mean, it was wild. I've never seen that before.

Yeah.

So, but that's what you're being. So like with traditional medicine, you know, like you get hit by a baseball bat, your leg breaks. There's some like cause, right? There's some physical cause that's going to result in this physical problem.

And so what you're being asked to believe as it relates to, you know, this idea of mental illness is that somehow like if you see, like if you're treated poorly or you see terrible things, it's like somehow like you're, like all of a sudden you are left with some sort of organic problem as a result of that.

And it's just like, this is magic. This is a fairy tale. This is, this is not logical. This is not reasonable. This is not rational. This is not the way things actually work. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think it, I think it's really important that people understand you've said this already, but I want to restate it because I see people do this all the time where they try and they try and take what you're saying and brush it completely aside by, by making some sort of, you know by posing some sort of question that's really not a question where they basically say,.

Oh,.

So you don't believe that, you know, there can be like damage to the brain or something along those lines.

Like,.

Oh,.

Not by witnessing a dramatic event. I don't.

Right.

Right.

And what I, what I don't think people really understand is that, you know, with these various sort of sorts of like disorders as, as they're often referred to as, those are when all of the physical tests have shown nothing is biologically wrong.

With.

Right. Right.

There's nothing wrong with them.

There's,.

There's no physical reason for them to be experiencing what they're experiencing. There's no, you know, there's no gland dysfunction. There's no physical tissue damage. You know, there's no decaying of the brain.

Nothing, nothing like that. There's 0 physical damage in these situations.

And so,.

So when you get these sort of, when you get into like the sort of depression, anxiety, PTSD sort of realm, when you get into those areas, you have officially left the, you are, you've officially exhausted the potential for this to be some sort of,.

Yeah.

For it to be some sort of physical ailment with you, you've completely left that behind.

So,.

So I think people need to understand that when we're having this conversation, we're past all that already. No one, no one is saying those things don't exist because obviously, you know, like obviously the brain can get damaged.

I mean,.

You,.

You know,.

I'm a,.

I'm a football fan. Even though we did the episode where we condemned all football fans for,.

I'm,.

I'm still processing that one,.

I guess,.

But unrepentant.

Yeah.

But, you know, one of the, one of the things that has been a really big controversy over the last decade or so in, in the sport is what basically like the results of playing football for long, extended periods of time.

And basically,.

You know,.

You have, you end up getting various types of, of long-term brain damage done to you.

Right.

But, but the issue is with those things,.

They,.

They can scan the brain and see that there's a difference and they can see that there is damage. That, that is a sufficient explanation for the change in behavior, the change in mental capability, the change in physical capability as well.

And so,.

So obviously, so obviously, like there can be damage to the brain.

I mean,.

It's a physical object.

Yeah.

And so obviously there can be damage to it. But then when we're getting into this conversation, when we're talking about really what are, what you and I would describe and the Bible would describe as moral categories, we have left all of that completely behind.

That's the whole thing with, yeah, what people don't understand is that these DSM labels, they're just simple descriptions of thought behaviors and emotions that people might experience. So that's all they are.

They're descriptions of behavior. But then the problem is that they're packaged in medical language and it makes people think that there's some kind of medical problem, but some kind of biological problem undergirding this, but this is just a simple description of behavior.

So you can think about any of these,.

You know,.

Major depressive disorder or general anxiety disorder. Whatever it, that sounds like a medical problem because they've, they've worked the system to label it.

Like,.

Because it's how it, because it's how you would name any other sort of disorder.

Right. Right.

It's how you would describe it.

Yeah.

So what they've done is what's happening is you just have to make a clash of worldviews here. So psychology basically is a competing worldview with the Bible and people don't realize this, but this, this is how it started.

You know, Freud set out to essentially provide a Darwinian materialistic explanation for human behavior that would be a competing explanation with the Bible. So it used to be that people would go and,.

You know,.

If they have a problem of thought,.

Behavior,.

Or emotions, you know, motion's kind of a recent word, but if they have a,.

You know,.

Problem of thoughts,.

Behavior,.

Affections, feelings, they would go and talk to a pastor, but then,.

You know,.

Psychology packaged itself as an alternative to soul care in that way. And it was a materialistic alternative. And so we have two different presuppositions here that are undergirding these various projects.

And so, you know, from a biblical worldview, what you believe is that like we have souls,.

Right?

We're moral beings. We're created in the image of God. And all of our problems are not essentially material. Like we're not materialist as Christians. We're not like, we believe that like we have heart,.

Right?

It's not just the organ that pumps blood. We have an inner man and our problems are fundamentally moral. We have sin problems.

We have,.

Our will is tied in bondage to sin. So like our starting point is I'm totally depraved and I'm a moral being and everything can't be reduced to the physical. That's my starting point. That's the Bible starting point is unashamedly the Bible starting point.

And so then the Darwinian framework on the other side is like their starting point is materialism.

It's,.

It's a brute materialism.

Okay.

And so what that means is that everything has to be a material cause in their worldview. Like that's the way it is,.

Right?

So you look at human beings with a materialistic worldview and what you, what you think is like, we're just complex machines,.

Man.

Like that's how we are. We're complex machines. And so for complex machines and you see one human being curled up in a ball after he witnessed a traumatic event,.

Right?

Curl up in a ball and refuses to move on with his life.

And,.

You know,.

Another human being witnessed the same event and didn't behave that way.

Right?

So you look at a general population, 80 of them don't curl up in a ball, 20 do. Then you're looking at that 20 and you're saying,.

Well,.

It must be, there must be something structurally wrong with them. Does that make sense? Like it has to be something structurally wrong with them because all they are is a computer. So it must be a hardware problem here.

Does that make sense?

Yeah. Like,.

It must be a glitch in the heart. Like it must be a hardware problem. We need to fix something.

Right.

They must,.

Like,.

It must be like, so the presupposition that undergirds it, it must be some sort of brain problem because we know that brain controls all that stuff.

Right.

So you're looking at that and you say, it must be a brain problem. The problem is that like none of our science can prove it's a brain problem. We're just trusting by faith that it must be. Because we have, we put on the materialistic lens.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

And so you see. Like, so you see. Certain people are more prone to depression.

Well,.

It must be genetic,.

Man,.

You know,.

Right.

It can't be that they've been trained by their parents to be,.

You know,.

Worry warts or,.

You know,.

Depressed or,.

You know,.

Have no joy in their life. It must be a structural problem. And so what's happening is like the whole field of mental illness is it's like a, it's basically a competing field to traditional medicine. It's like a, it's another field that's essentially trying to observe people and, and answer the question,.

Well,.

Why do they do what they do?

Right.

So why are they acting the way they're acting? And so when you see any deviation from normal,.

Right,.

So you have normal and you have a deviation. One of those deviations could be like general anxiety disorder. Another could be major depressive disorder. Another could be bipolar disorder. Another could be obsessive compulsive disorder.

These are all deviations from normal. Normal people don't act like that way. They don't act that way. And it must be a glitch. So it must be a material cause that's undergirding this. That's the assumption that's required to do business.

And so then you look at that and you say, it must be something wrong with them structurally. Whereas the Bible would say we're moral, made in the image of God, our mind,.

Our will,.

Emotions, it's all affected by sin. So I look at someone who is engaging in behaviors that the Bible says are wrong. And I'm going to think they have a heart problem. The materialist is going to think they have a biology problem.

Now,.

It doesn't matter that they don't know what that biological problem is. Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But explain it a little bit for us.

It doesn't matter if they know or not. They trust by faith. There must be one. So even if we haven't discovered what it is yet, they trust by faith. It has to be some sort of structural problem. We haven't come up with the answer to yet.

And then the only solutions that are going to fix it are going to be material solutions like drugs.

Right.

Right.

So we may not know what it is yet.

Right.

But we know that all we are is just a complicated machine. And so whatever's happening there, you have a deviation from normal. They don't want to suffer from this thing.

Right.

You package it all in the language of illness. It's assumed to be a biological problem. And then when you say it over and over and over again, right, you say it over and over and over and over again. They're suffering from depression.

They're suffering from anxiety. You know, they're suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. You say it over and over and over again.

Right.

It's they're suffering from mental illness. And then people, they've just been brainwashed to not even question what they're being asked to believe here.

Right.

And so they're being asked to believe that fundamentally all we are is matter and a complicated complex machines. And that every problem is structural. And so all of these things like so the Bible has nothing to say to any of these things that you can you can say all day long.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, gentleness, meekness, kindness, faithfulness, self-control. And it doesn't matter because they just it just goes in their ears and out the other ear.

Hey, but they're sick. They're sick, man.

Right.

Right. Right.

They're sick. They have an illness. What part of mental illness do you not understand? And then I look at them. I say, what part of mental illness you do you not understand?

Right.

Like this is the label that you give people when all the medical tests run up empty. And like you're being persuaded that this is somehow like you're being led to believe that there's some kind of there must be some material cause that no one knows what it is.

Right.

And then the chemical imbalance theory has been disproven. We don't all know what it is. It doesn't matter. You just trust by faith. It's an illness, man. And you're just trying to beat people over the head who are suffering from an illness.

You hateful bigot.

Right.

Right.

And like they need to get the help that they need. And you're standing in the way of that. It's like, well, wait a minute.

Right.

And so, I mean, you know, I guess I've always been the kind of person who has unpopular thoughts.

Right.

I mean, growing up, I mean, you know, you thought this, you know, you thought like looking at murder trials and you see like the, you know, the defendant taking the insanity plea.

Right.

And like he was in his right mind killing the person. And all of a sudden he's gone, you know, clinically insane right now. And he's appealing to this category of mental illness. And you're looking at that and you had to have thought in your life at some point, man, that's a convenient excuse, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah.

That sounds pretty good.

Right.

Like, I mean, I could be a normal functioning person my whole entire life. No one ever identified it. But now all of a sudden I get declared, you know, clinically insane. And then I get absolved from all moral responsibility for my action.

This seems like a pretty good deal.

Right.

And so, but then that's like what you're being asked to believe is that a normal person who can go along their life in a normal way can all of a sudden be given this label that, you know, identifies them as sick.

And then that removes all moral accountability for their action, despite the fact that nothing physically happened to them. And so, like, that's what it's just a magic fairy tale. Like that's what it is.

Clarifying What Mental Illness Means

Now, it might be helpful at this point to take a moment and and as clearly as we can define what we're talking about when we're saying when we're talking about mental illness. What exactly are we talking about?

Because in my experience, I feel like I've seen I feel like I've seen that word be used to cover a lot of different things. So I feel like I've I've seen it be used to cover things like anxiety and depression, which it seems like we're probably more talking about those kinds of things.

But then I've also seen it used to cover things like mental retardation, for example. And and probably, you know, other things that are just actually like there is some sort of physical problem with their brain and their development or or whatever.

So so can you just sort of refine the definition for us so everyone knows what exactly it is we are talking about here?

Yeah, yeah. So the DSM DSM is basically the diagnostic and school manual of mental disorders. And what you're going to find is like the DSM, basically all these labels. So the vast majority of these labels are mental illness, basically.

Right. As distinguished from physical illness. But then like the problem, though, is that there's you know, there's a few outliers and they're like, you know, dementia and all that that are smuggled into there to make it sound more impressive than what it actually is.

But the vast majority of these labels are simply this category of mental illness as distinct distinct from biological illness. And so what you have is you can just take almost any label in the DSM and you're going to have a cat, an example of a mental illness.

And basically all these labels, as you read through all these labels, the vast majority of them, you're going to see that no medical tests are being done to perform these things. And so just look up any any instance in the DSM, like general anxiety disorder, look that up.

And what you're going to find is that it rules out any medical organic cause. So this is the label that they give people once all of the medical tests come up empty. So there's no medical tests that anyone has ever performed to determine a person has general anxiety disorder or major depressive disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder or obsessive compulsive disorder.

These like they're not running medical tests to to to come up with these things. And so what these things are is they're just simple descriptions of behavior. Right. So you take something like general anxiety disorder, take something like that.

It's just a simple description of behavior, meaning if you have a person who for six month period of time, persistent six months, more days than not, they are filled with excessive anxiety and worry in that affects their life in a statistically significant way.

Meaning it's just like if they if they if they're characterized by life dominating anxiety for more days than not, like for a six month period. And then there's a few other I mean, there's some other checklists that you're going to look at that.

But I mean, yeah, it's just sleeping too much or not sleeping enough or eating too much, not eating enough.

Significant weight gain or weight loss, you know, psychomotor agitation, all that kind of stuff. But none of that's medical. So it's just a simple description of a phenomenon that's being described in the language of disorder.

And so what mental illness is, is just problems of thoughts and behavior that, you know, and mood that people are suffering from. And so you just put a label on it and all that is, all it is, is a description.

Yeah, that's it. So it's just a description like so, you know, major depressive disorder, two week period of time, unexplained sorrow and sadness. Right. Right. So it's just a description of like a person who for two weeks feels unexplained sorrow and sadness is affecting their life.

Right. Moving slower, you know, and there's, you know, other symptoms of it. But that's that's all these are categorizations of phenomenon. Nothing more. OK, so when you're talking about mental illness, you're talking about your category, simple categorizations in the main of behavior that have no medical tests that are being run to demonstrate them.

And so then, you know, they're worded in the language of disorder. But then the problem is that like, you know, this is psychology's Bible. They're basically just giving us an alternative explanation for the phenomenon that we observe.

So if you look at someone who like is labeled with clinically depressed, like you can look at what the Bible says about that. And you would describe them as, you know, a person characterized by despair or, you know, worldly sorrow, guilt, shame, condemnation.

But the problem is that none of those moral labels can stick once you have the scientific pseudoscientific label that's put on it.

Yeah, it's basically serving as an excuse or like a cover for you.

Well, but then it's, you know, this is how psychology formed. It's like this is an alternative worldview here. And so what's actually happening is like these are two competing views of the world. So do they have general anxiety disorder?

It sounds medical, despite the fact that no medical tests are being run to show it. Or are they sinfully worried, right?

Right.

And so if you come along and say they're sinfully worried, then the person who buys the materialistic label, they're going to say you're a hateful bigot. You hate these people and you're, you know, leading to their deaths and all that, right?

Yeah.

But they're just two different categorizations. One is a moral categorization. Right. That assumes that we're culpable. Human beings were responsible for how we respond to the world, how we think, how we feel, you know, how we respond to the world.

So once a moral label, the other is a materialistic label that is packaged in the language of illness. And so, you know, what worldview do you want? Do you want the Bible's worldview or do you want the materialist worldview?

And those two things can't meet that mix. And that's where, you know, you have all the, you know, the psychologists come along and say, hey, you know, I've accepted the materialistic worldview and I throw some Bible verses in there.

And so what's wrong with that? It's like we have two worldview. We have a worldview problem here, right?