Christian Denialism of Mental Illness is Inexcusable and Dangerous

Anthony Morris was a hero of war, a seasoned veteran who served four tours in the Middle East, saving numerous lives and sustaining injuries ranging from vision and hearing loss to arthritic knees and tension headaches in the process. Still, he reported for duty out of deep sense of personal obligation to help the younger soldiers find their way in the chaos of war.

Until one day Anthony snapped. It all became too much for him. He couldn’t keep the trauma demons at bay. When a fellow soldier tried to play a practical joke on him, Anthony came unglued and responded violently, ultimately being shipped off to a military hospital in Germany where he was diagnosed with severe PTSD and continued to decline every day thereafter.

In 2021, Anthony became convinced that his wife and children were plotting against him, so he attacked his wife with a kitchen knife in front of their kids, who recorded audio of the altercation from another room. When he finally regained his senses, so horrified by what he’d done, Anthony reported himself to the police, checked himself into a local hotel, and took his own life. Tragically, he’s just one of more than 30,000 veterans who have died by suicide since 2001.

This week, celebrity pastor John MacArthur took the internet by storm with a now viral video in which he confidently declared, “There’s no such thing as PTSD. There’s no such thing as OCD. There’s no such thing as ADHD. Those are noble lies to give the excuse to, at the end of the day, to medicate people.”

He continued, “Take PTSD, for example. What that really is is grief.”

This is the place where I pause to encourage anyone who subscribes to this type of thinking to give their heads a good shake. Snap the heck out of it.

What Anthony Morris suffered wasn’t garden variety grief. He wasn’t just really sad that his friends were gone. He didn’t just need to cry it out and go for a few walks and eat a good meal and spend some more time in the Psalms. No. He had an actual injury requiring expert care, not condescending spiritual rebukes. The brain is an organ. Like all the other organs in the human body, the brain can become ill. And when it does, it will need the expert care of the people who’ve taken the time to understand things like neuropathways and the communication between cortical regions.

John MacArthur is no more equipped to give advice about PTSD than he is to give guidance on navigating bone cancer. He has not earned the right to presume to speak as a subject matter expert. Studies show that PTSD radically affects the inner workings of the brain. Take, for example, this study which asserts,

Brain regions that arc altered in patients with PTSD include the hippocampus and amygdala as well as cortical regions including the anterior cingulate, insula, and orbitofrontal region. These areas interconnect to form a neural circuit that mediates, among other functions, adaptation to stress and fear conditioning. Changes in these circuits have been proposed to have a direct link to the development of PTSD.

In the video, MacArthur goes on to essentially say, “You need to suck it up and get over it.” Those aren’t exact words, but make no mistake, that is his exact message. “Grief is a part of life,” he says. “And if you can’t navigate grief, you can’t live life.”

He has similarly callous and ignorant things to say about both OCD and ADHD, which he largely attributes to sin and bad parenting. The thesis of his message seems to be, “Mental illness is a crock designed to prop up the pharmaceutical industry. If you think you’re sick, you’re not. Psychiatry has nothing to offer you. Put your big boy pants on and cope.” At one point, he even warns people that if they medicate their kids for anything, their kids might turn out to be criminals.

And listen, as much as I cringe to acknowledge any hint of an overlap in MacArthur’s and my own Venn diagrams, honesty requires me to acknowledge that I do tend to think the whole of the pharmaceutical industry is as crooked as the day is long. I do think that as a society we tend to overmedicate people, and I do think we have miles to go in terms of finding solutions that actually help people. Anthony Morris received an official PTSD diagnosis, but none of the interventions proposed by the experts were enough to save him. There is a kernel of truth in the message that medicating everything won’t magically solve everything.

The difference is this, though: Back in the day, the medical experts used to treat impotence by administering shock treatments. Eventually they wised up and someone said, “Hey, this isn’t working. Let’s try another route.”

But what they didn’t say was, “Impotence isn’t real.” Because impotence was real. And it still needed a solution. So is PTSD. So is OCD. So is ADHD. If not medication, what? More time memorizing Calvin and the TULIP of greatness? Perhaps a steady diet of Francis Schaeffer? Foxe’s Book of Martyrs to remind ourselves that suffering is normal and someone always has it worse? How in God’s green earth is this useful shepherding?

My own son has epilepsy and a number of correlating neurological challenges, including OCD which runs in my family, and which, apparently, doesn’t exist according to MacArthur. The real issue must be my parenting, right?. I’m just a failure as a mom if my kid can’t manage to silence his recurring intrusive thoughts without medical assistance.

And I had prepared to write out a long heartfelt account of the things we, as a family, have endured as a result of this neurological imbalance. I could produce EEG images that very clearly showcase the electrical misfirings in my child’s brain. I could show you video evidence of some of the OCD episodes that kept us grown-ups taking shifts throughout the night to sit with the child in order to prevent a complete and meltdown. I could tell you about the half a dozen intercessory prayer sessions we called on his behalf. But what’s the point? Why sign up to be cast my pearls before swine who enjoy trampling them?

A Facebook friend agreed with me that what JMac said was erroneous, but he didn’t see it as a big deal. And honestly, I’m at kind of a loss as to how to help people see why this is such a big deal.

Why does it matter that the figurehead of the arguably the largest, most influential group of Protestants in America is setting this example? Because where he goes, the masses follow. And when we have millions of Christian leaders encouraging their congregations to spurn the very help that could save their lives, people are actually going to end up dead. As a Christian, I kind of care about that.

Pastors are responsible for the shepherding of souls. Telling a hurting person to suck it up and get over it when they tell you they suffer from PTSD is about as reasonable as telling them to suck it up and get over it when they tell you have cancer.

To make matters worse, MacArthur is a pretty vicious cessationist who denounces any hint of deliverance ministry, so not only does he coach his congregation out of pursuing treatment for their mental health, but he also ridicules the types of healing ministries that could help ease the burdens they carry. The only option left for MacArthurites is to white knuckle it all the way to kingdom come, regardless of how dysfunctional you become in the process.

“You have dressed the wounds of my daughters lightly, crying ‘Peace! Peace!’ when there is no peace” is the Scripture that comes immediately to mind. And “They tie up heavy loads and place them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves do not lift a finger to help.”

What John MacArthur said is wreckless. It’s arrogant. It’s ignorant. It’s wrong. And my Lord am I weary of watching prominent Christian men make excuses for it.

You know what made King David a great leader?

How sensitive he was to the Lord’s correction. He was as bold about his own repentance as was about defeating evil in the world around him.

When he screwed up, he owned it in a massive, public way.

We don’t see even a hint of this godly humility in the theobros who dominate the public discourse.

We see John MacArthur giving criminally negligent advice about mental health, and we see swarms of his fan base tripping over themselves to defend it, as they’ve done for years whenever he abused the vulnerable people under his care. It should have ended with Eileen Gray, but it didn’t. It should have ended with the rape victim from Masters, but it didn’t. It should end here, but I’m not optimistic that it will.

Pick a prominent theobro, and the story will be the same: countless hurting people in their wake while their platforms grow and grow as bolstered by the masses who, like biblical Israel, are willing to compromise righteousness in exchange for a king to lead them.

You guys, if your leader refuses to be as bold about the pursuit of his own righteousness as he is about everyone else’s…

If he refuses to model the repentance he demands of everyone else…

Then something is very, very wrong.

Repentance begins in the house of the Lord. And John MacArthur needs to repent of this reckless, destructive teaching.

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