John MacArthur Under Fire for Questioning Mental Health Diagnosis: “There’s no such thing as PTSD”
Pastor John MacArthur of Grace Community Church has come under fire for comments he made questioning the mental health diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), suggesting that at least in the latter, it is being clinically defined and pushed to give Big Pharma an excuse to make money off medicating for it.
During a recent Q & A panel at the ‘For the Valley’ conference , which also featured Jonny Ardavanis, Costi Hinn, and Scott Ardavanis, MacArthur shared:
I was reading a book, an interesting book, called A Profession Without Reason. It’s a book that shows basically- this is pretty shocking to some of you- that psychiatry and psychology is finally admitting the noble lies that they’ve been telling for the last hundred years. And the major noble lie is there is such a thing as mental illness.
Now this isn’t new. You have Thomas Szasz back in the 1950s writing a book (who was a psychiatrist) on the myth of mental illness. 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 basically give the excuse to, in the end of the day, to medicate people. And Big Pharma is in charge of a lot of that.
If you understand, take PTSD for example, what that really is is grief. You were fighting a war, you lost your buddies, you have a certain amount of survival guilt because you made it back (and) they didn’t. How do you deal with grief? Grief is a real thing. But grief is part of life.
And if you can’t navigate grief, you can’t live life. But if you clinically define that, you can give them a pill, a series of medications, and they end up in LA homeless on the sidewalk.
MacArthur has been critical in the past of much of the discussion and treatment of *some* mental illness and afflictions, previously noting that “more mental illness and a lot more aberrant and abnormal behavior can be attributed to demonic work than we ever imagine” and “I do believe that much of mental illness is a result of demonic and satanic activity, but it’s hard to just isolate it because it’s a result of sin. It’s a result of willful choices made by human beings, and it certainly involves Satan, and if we knew the truth we would know that standard psychological answers don’t solve that problem.”
While he does have his supporters praising him for his assessment, the vast majority of the discussion so far that we’ve seen has been largely critical, including from many people who say they are supporters and fans of MacArthur, but believe he’s missed the mark with this one.
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