Why John MacArthur is Dangerously Wrong about Mental Health but Everything is still a Mess
Agency, diagnosis as identity, and obsessions with mental health
It is an interesting time to suffer from a mental illness. Over the last ten years or so the stigma surrounding mental health has declined and the number of people suffering from mental affliction has increased. Much of this is probably due to social media, or so Jonathan Haidt argues in
Bill Barnes
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3d
Loved this! A really balanced piece brother. Thank you. My own story is that I am a former Marine (5 years active duty) and graduate of U.S. Army Ranger School. That may seem an odd preface but it is to establish that I have done really hard things in my life and am far removed from a mindset of not dealing with my own problems. John MacArthur doesn't intimidate me in the slightest. But when I turned 54 I developed chronic insomnia. All the training and self-will that had allowed me to kick doors down throughout my life was to absolutely no avail. To cut to the chase, I started to become unwound. I sought out a psychiatrist for help. After a couple failed attempts, which completely underscore your point about agency, I found a good one. To give you an indication, she told me in our first interview, "you need to listen to your God". She found some medication that allowed me to sleep again. I am now 65 and, thanks be to God, Who created human beings that could "sub-create" Mirtazipine and Trazadone, I have a wonderfully productive, God-honoring life. I've been doing Prison Ministry for 6 years, I've started a non-profit at my church that does homeless outreach every week and I am able to reap where I have sown over the last few decades regarding the gospel. I am sorry that you haved encountered these struggles so much earlier in life. I praise God that you have the courage to share them with us. We're with you. Christ is with you. Keep going!
Josh Kezer
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Balanced and provoking. Thank you.
I've read MacArthur's May 5, 2024 message titled Christ Is Sufficient for All Your Crises. Well, most of it. One can only stomach so much ipecac. If you don't know what ipecac is, Google it.
As for the title, amen. Christ is sufficient in all our crises. Setting the title aside, we could spend hours, perhaps even days critiquing everything MacArthur missed the mark on in his message.
You've offered us an exhaustive and thoughtful response to his entire message, and, perhaps as an olive branch, explained why MacArthur may have said what he said and why he might have had a plausible reason to say it, but my concern is when MacArthur's position on mental illness, whatever his reason, crossed over from ignorant and arrogant to dangerous when he said, "You can recover, and you can recover without medication." How's that for a run on sentence?
I knew a pastor who preached this. A young woman in his congregation decided to believe this and stopped taking her meds. A few evenings later, the young woman sat confused, scared, lost, and handcuffed on a curb outside of her home while police had to explain to her that she'd stabbed her mother and best friend, the same woman, to death. She was shattered. The local prosecutor had pity on her and didn't prosecute her to the full extent of the law. She was sent to a mental facility where she resumed taking her meds. The pastor told me he regretted saying what he said in his sermon. He wished he had said something differently. I pray a similar young woman hasn't listened to MacArthur.
My mother was bipolar and had PTSD and alcoholic dementia. Her inability to cope with her son being wrongly accused and convicted of murder, wrongly facing the death sentence as an innocent teenage boy, wrongly sent to prison for 60 years, and wrongly incarcerated for 16 years permanently damaged her mentally. Despite her son eventually being fully exonerated and becoming the first person in the history of Missouri to be given an Amrine Actual Innocence decision, she couldn't cope with what had been done to me and how that impacted her life. She couldn't move on. Had I never been wrongly involved in the injustice I experienced, she may have had a difficult time navigating life, but what I went through and what she went through with me exacerbated her mental health and illness. Heartbreak over my trauma pitched gasoline on her existing trauma. She has textbook PTSD and via or by means of it developed alcoholic dementia. I've been diagnosed with PTSD. Leading psychologists in the field have diagnosed me with it. Prior to her passing, my mother needed medication. I haven't. I may need medication in the future, but I haven't needed meds yet.
To further look into my experience, Google The Murder of Angela Mischelle Lawless: An Honest Sheriff and the Exoneration of an Innocent Man by Stephen R. Snodgrass with Joshua C. Kezer and The 700 Club/Josh Kezer. You might also search AMC+ for It Couldn’t Happen Here season 2 episode 1. It aired on April 18, 2024.
Many of us can recover without medication, but many of us need medication, and God has blessed us with medication. Medications helped my mother refrain from alcohol to silence the demons of past trauma and, you might say, by definition, cope. Medication would've spared the young woman from murdering her mother and spared her mother from being murdered by her daughter. The miracles God gives us are often found in medication, and rather than dismiss the miracles God gives us, we should and would be wise to accept and embrace them.
I love Amy Mantravadi's response to MacArthur.
"I’ve learned something from my years of dealing with anxiety and depression while simultaneously studying the history of humanity and theology: No one is able to cope with life, actually. If we could have somehow coped, there would have been no need of the Incarnation.
Those who can cope better are actually more prone to pride and self-righteousness, which are antithetical to the gospel. So while I’m all for helping people cope with life, I also know how dependent, weak, and disabled we all are. We need gospel, not just law."
The God of peace will soon crush Satan under our feet. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is with us. Romans 16:20