Dr John MacArthur is an American pastor and author of the new book, The War on Children, who believes common mental illness diagnoses aren’t real.
MacArthur was recently in the spotlight for his comments on X (formerly known as Twitter) regarding the latter.
“There’s no such thing as PTSD, there’s no such thing as OCD, there’s no such thing as ADHD. These are all ultimately great lies to excuse people’s medications,” McArthur said in the video, adding, “And a lot of it is run by Big Pharma.”
He has faced strong backlash on social media from Christians who say the idea is dangerous. Allie Beth Stuckey Why did he say that?
“The brain can get diseased. The brain can get damaged. You can get tumors. You can get encephalitis. You can have problems with the brain,” MacArthur tells Stuckey. “The mind is a whole other thing. The mind is transcendent. You can’t fix the mind with chemicals. You can damage the brain. That’s what psychiatry is discovering now.”
According to MacArthur, the idea that drugs could fix “chemical imbalances” in the brain has been a “convenient lie” from the beginning.
“Do you have post-traumatic stress? Absolutely. Is it a brain syndrome? No. Do you have ADHD? Do you have kids who have trouble paying attention and sitting still? Yeah, I was one of them. Is it a brain problem? No. What about obsessive-compulsive disorder, is that a brain disorder? No,” explains McArthur.
“The culture tends to say, ‘Hey, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, you’re disabled,'” he continues. “PTSD is actually grief. It’s horrible grief. It’s survivor’s guilt. It’s seeing your buddy get blown to bits. You have to deal with that grief. But putting brain-altering chemicals into your body, that’s what’s at stake now.”
“If you want to solve your problems of the heart, you have to find love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, faith, gentleness and self-control. These are the spiritual virtues that come from Christ. Don’t turn to chemicals. Turn to Christ,” MacArthur says.
Stuckey is not one of his critics.
“And by the way, the psychiatrist on the show said the same thing as you: We do a lot of harm, especially to kids, by diagnosing or medicalizing every single behavior that doesn’t quite fit into the classroom or fall within this uniform range of normality.”
“It’s actually causing side effects in children and veterans, making them sicker than they were before,” she said.
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