Pastor John MacArthur says there is no such thing as mental illness, he calls PTSD pain

By Leonardo BlairSenior Reporter Wednesday, May 1, 2024

In what at least one critic has dismissed as the Dunning Krueger effect in action, Pastor John MacArthur of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, says there is no such thing as mental illness.

More than one in five American adults lives with a mental illness, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than one in five young people (aged 13-18) have either currently or at some point in their life had a seriously debilitating mental illness. About one in 25 American adults also lives with a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression.

Days before the start of Mental Health Awareness Month, however, MacArthur, who is also the president of The Master’s College and Seminary, called mental illness noble lies while speaking during a panel discussion at Grace Church of the Valley last Thursday.

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Citing the arguments presented by clinical psychologist Bruce E. Levine in his book A profession without reasoni The myth of mental illness by Hungarian-American psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, now deceased, MacArthur urged parents not to believe noble lies that he claims are being supported by the pharmaceutical industry so they can sell drugs to the public.

MacArthurs comments on mental illness were in response to a question about how to help parents navigate America’s cultural disaster.

Just to put it simply, children are sinners. I have great grandchildren, and when they are 3 or 4, their sinful nature starts to show. Then you add that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the generations, the third and the fourth generation, MacArthur said.

In addition to their sinful nature, the California megachurch pastor explained that today’s culture now targets children to trap them in sin.

Homosexuals say we are going after your children. They are not trying to protect them, they are targeting them in schools. They direct them through the media. Disney and companies like it, who develop children’s entertainment, target children for what really amounts to moral and spiritual destruction. So this is a war on children, said MacArthur, who released his new book on Monday The War on Children: Providing shelter for your children in a hostile world.

MacArthur stated that the increased diagnosis of children with mental illnesses today does not teach them personal responsibility and medicating them for these illnesses only turns them into drug addicts and potential criminals.

I was reading a book, interesting book, called A profession without reason. It’s a book that basically shows, and this is quite shocking to some of you, that psychiatry and psychology are finally admitting the noble lies they’ve been telling for the last 100 years, MacArthur said.

And the main noble lie is that there is a mental illness. Now, this is not new. You have Thomas Szasz writing a book, who was a psychiatrist The myth of mental illness. There is no such thing as PTSD. There is no such thing as OCD. There is no such thing as ADHD. These are noble lies to basically give the excuse to, in the end, to medicate people. And Big Pharma is responsible for a lot of that, the pastor argued.

The American Psychiatric Association defines PTSD as “a psychiatric disorder that can occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event, series of events, or set of circumstances. An individual may experience it as emotionally damaging or physically or that threatens their life and may affect the mental, physical, social and/or spiritual well-being”. Some studies suggest that it is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.

Harvest Bible Chapel founder James MacDonald is among those diagnosed with mental illness. Of the 6 million veterans served in fiscal year 2021, about 10% of men and 19% of women were diagnosed with PTSD, according to the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

For MacArthur, however, PTSD is nothing more than pain.

If you understand, take PTSD for example, what it really is, is grief. You are fighting a losing war. Your friends, you have some survival guilt because you made it back, they didn’t. How do you deal with grief? Grief is a real thing. But grief is a part of life, and if you can’t navigate grief, you can’t live life, MacArthur said.

But if you define it clinically, you can give them a pill, a series of drugs, and they end up in Los Angeles, homeless on the sidewalk. This is, as far as children are concerned, the deadliest that has been unleashed on children’s medication, he added.

MacArthur said he has been trying to spread the word through his new book The War on Children: Providing shelter for your children in a hostile worldbut several Christian publishers refused to publish it.

We’re trying to make it clear to parents that behavior is essentially a result of the choices kids make,” he said. “And if you parent them right, they’ll make the right choices. But if you blame something other than their choices and label them as people who can’t do anything but medicate, you’re literally turning your child into not only a potential drug addict, but perhaps a criminal potential because you never learn to navigate life in a socially acceptable way.