Christ is Sufficient for All Your Crises (Selected Scriptures)

Grace to You - John MacArthur

It was about a week or so ago that I was in a panel discussion, and it was being videoed, and the question came up about mental illness, and I made the comment, “There’s no such thing as mental illness.” And I was told within a matter of a few hours that blew up the Internet, and one of the headlines was “Doctor and Woman Preacher Take Issue with John MacArthur.” I don’t know about the doctor, but I’m happy to take issue with a woman preacher; that’s fine. But there were lots of other people who weighed in on what a horrendous thing I had just said. And I know it’s been circulating out there because people have been asking me about it.

An interesting phone call came in—I just heard it this morning—from a person who said, “I represent the leading psychologist in this country. And also, we manage the largest facility for juveniles who commit adult crimes. And I’m calling the church to let Pastor MacArthur know that everything he said is exactly true.” Now, you don’t know if I made that up or not; you have to trust me. But I was pretty surprised. And they went on to say, “If he wants to write a book, we’ll supply all the data.”

There’s no such thing as mental illness. That is not a new concept. That goes back to the 1950s, Thomas Szasz, a psychiatrist who wrote the book The Myth of Mental Illness. And that myth has been around for a long time. And it’s been just in the last few years that data has come in, and people in the psychiatric and psychological world have admitted that they have been telling noble lies for decades and decades and decades, identifying, supposedly, mental illness as a way to explain people’s odd behavior, difficult behavior.

But I’m not saying this: I’m not saying there’s no brain disease; there is. But that’s different; that’s pathological; that can be objectively identified. Now, I don’t want to become clinical here, but I just will say enough to let you see the difference.

If you’re talking about brain disease, you’re talking about several categories. The first would be an infection in the brain. That could be meningitis, which is an inflammation of the lining of the brain; or it could be encephalitis, which is the inflammation of the actual brain tissue. Those can be discerned. Those can be seen. Those can be understood. They can be objectively identified.