All right, so we are starting a series tonight looking at, well, I guess the big picture is gonna be biblical counseling. That's gonna be the goal of getting into more of the biblical counseling. But we're starting with the actual issue of mental illness, diagnosis of mental illness, and the use of medications. So this is a big subject. This is just gonna be the first session of many, hopefully. The medication, obviously, is thought of in terms of being taken in response to the diagnosis of mental illness. And I've got sources for you guys, a wealth of resources in terms of MP3s. I've got a ton of really good lectures collected just on this subject, and I've got a stack of books. whether it just be biblical counseling in general or specifically on these kind of things, the diagnoses, that kind of stuff. So if you want to do stuff outside of waiting once a month, because this should be the first Wednesday night of every month, if you want to do more than that and look at any of this stuff, talk to me, because I've got stuff to offer you. Tonight, I'm going to primarily be drawing from this book here, Michael Inlet, He is a doctor, like medical doctor, family practitioner for many years. He's also a biblical counselor. He's a faculty member at CCEF, which is the Christian Counseling Education Foundation. They've got a ton of good resources if you find their website. But this book is Descriptions and Prescriptions, a Biblical Perspective on Psychiatric Diagnoses and Medications. So that's where we're gonna basically start tonight in terms of When I'm citing stuff like studies or numbers, things like that, they generally come from here. I'm not making those up, I'm just getting them from a guy that knows what he's talking about a little bit more. So I've got other books too, as well, and I'll bring them up here and show them as we go through it. But I'm not gonna be making a determination on whether or not to take cytotropic medication. I'm not going to make any wide-sweeping claims about medication being wrong or never appropriate, anything like that. I think the vast, vast majority of biblical counselors, in terms of not just Christian counselors, but biblical counselors that believe in the reformed doctrine of scripture, that scripture is sufficient for all we need in life and godliness, and for things like our mental health, they would admit and say there are times when medication can be helpful or appropriate. So there's no just claim like that. That's not going to be part of this. So no one should listen to this and go home and stop taking medication if they are, or recommend that their friends do. There's dangers in just cutting off yourself from medication. No matter what it is, you have to talk to a doctor, find out the ramifications of that, and that sort of thing. I wanna make sure that's out there. Don't want anybody doing that, whether they're listening to the MP3 or anybody here that's on something. There's a ton that can be said on this subject. We're not gonna make a ton of headway tonight, but we can spend months on it, and we will if we feel the need to. So if you guys find it beneficial, we'll keep going, and then we'll get into biblical counseling and that sort of thing as we go. So tonight we're just laying some groundwork. Some of it's gonna be piecemeal, just like bits and pieces of information that's worth thinking about, worth knowing, in explaining the framework of how mental illness is thought of in the secular world versus how we think of it from a biblical perspective. There's gonna be some overlap, obviously, between those two, but there are still some key differences. When I reference medication for mental illness, I'm referring to cypertropic medication, which I've mentioned that once already, but cypertropic medication is any medication that is capable of affecting the mind and emotions and therefore having some degree of influence on your behavior. And that it's specifically designed for that purpose, because a lot of other medications can change those things as well. as a side effect, but this is where the purpose of the medication is to change those things. Medications for non-health related issues. can do that, they can affect your mind and behavior. I mean, that's something we, I mean, if you've ever been on pain meds, I've went through, I've had 18 surgeries, I've had a lot of pain meds, I've had a lot of accidents, I've done a lot of narcotics as a result of that, not for fun. So, but one of the side effects of it is there's this strange euphoria, you know, it affects your mood. I can get very talkative. sometimes overly loving. There's times when if I'm being extra kind to Andrea, she'll ask me if I've taken narcotics because I'm acting just very lovey-dovey and stuff like that. So it changes your mood and it changes your actions because of the change in mood. So we're not talking about those, we're talking about the ones that are designed to change your emotions and your mind and therefore your behavior. Psychotropic drugs do change us, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. It's not an exact science. So we'll talk more about that and try and lay out that fact. These drugs are not precisely understood because the mind and the brain are like literally one of the most complicated biological things that you can be involved in. So we don't necessarily know all these causes and effects, and we're sort of learning as we go. There's a documentary somewhere out there about lobotomies. And if you've ever heard about a lobotomy, in the early 20th century, they figured out that you can change people's mental You can affect mental illnesses or when there's mental disabilities by doing a lobotomy. And if you've ever heard of a lobotomy, it's kind of thought of as them cutting open your head and taking out a piece of your brain and you've been lobotomized. It's not actually what it was. It was basically a guy that figured out that you could take essentially an ice pick, you could tap it right through your orbital bone, because it's real thin there, you tap it through there and you just kind of wiggle it around and it affects your frontal lobes. It understandably created some very strange side effects. Sometimes it totally healed people of psychosis, and other times it completely ruined their lives. They didn't really know what was going on. So, medication is more advanced than that, but there's still a degree of this unknown of like, try this, but we're not exactly sure what's happening or why it's happening, but sometimes this helps people, and then sometimes it doesn't. But usually it does, we're finding out that usually it does. So there's a bit of this unknown. I just don't want you to think of these things as an exact science. That's gonna be one of the big points is it's, this is not a super precise area that mankind has figured out. So if I find that documentary, I'll recommend it to you, it's super interesting. But this guy basically went around to asylums where they put crazy people that had psychosis or other mental issues and they would lobotomize them. And sometimes these people were healed and they'd get out It's just crazy that that kind of thing happened in the US, but it did. Non-medical drugs can do this sort of thing to us too. Morning coffee can change how people act. They need their caffeine before they act like themselves, right? But once you have caffeine and you've woken up, once you've had that drug, it changes the way that you act. and some of your emotions, you might be less irritable, things like that. But psychotropic drugs change us and that's the purpose of them. According to uncontroversial accepted literature, that is like in the secular world even, at least two thirds of things such as depression medication produces a placebo effect along with other side effects. So, These psychotropic drugs sometimes are just as easily mimicked by placebo. There's something designed into us that causes the placebo effect to genuinely work. And we don't necessarily understand that. Because there's a lot of unknown here. At least it appears to work. Part of it, admittedly, is probably human beings looking for the patterns that they expect and having a confirmation bias. But some of it is genuinely they're being helped. And it's not because of something that they took. It's because of something that they think that they took, which is a strange thing that we can't really understand. We can't really explain that. So somehow when the human mind has hope and expectation of a treatment or of a drug, which, I mean, it's either one, a treatment or a drug helping them, to get better, then it often does actually get better, even without the drug necessarily changing their body. But they think it's gonna get better, and it actually does get better, so there's some connection there that we can't explain. Even if there's no physical, biological impact stemming from the drug or the treatment, the change is produced, essentially, from the person's mind. purely from their mind, and this, I would say, is part of God's design. He has built us where our minds and bodies are connected, and our minds can change us physically, and we'll talk about that more. So the question arises, what are we putting our hope in? What are we hoping in? What kind of expectation do we have for God to do things, we could say? Do we expect him to work? True hope in God and his promises, that sort of thing. truly trust him to do this work? Do we truly have hope in the promises of God, that sort of thing? Because that can impact our mental health and our physical health. So do we believe that he cares for us? Do we believe that he shepherds our souls, guards our souls, has purpose in suffering? That's a big, big thing about, I mean, the avoidance of suffering is impossible But the avoidance of some of the side effects such as sadness, melancholy, depression, whatever you want to call it, from that suffering can be avoided via the way that we think and what we think about it, such as God having purpose in suffering. That changes how we think about it and therefore how we handle it. So the point about that is our beliefs, our beliefs produce genuine relief, genuine relief from the suffering, an alleviation from the symptoms that come along with the suffering that we experience in our lives. The way we think changes things like our chemical balances in our body. You can change your chemical balances purely on thought. And I'm saying like, you know, this is the power of the mind or something like that, but I'm saying like the way that you think about and process the world can change how your body responds physically. There's a connection there. Your brain can change the way that you feel. The placebo effect is essentially based on faith, we can say, because you trust something's gonna work and then it does. I'm not talking about the power of positive thinking or something. I think that's sort of where that is rooted, that idea is rooted. But that's not what I'm trying to promote. It's just part of the body's design, that God has made us this way physically. It's sort of like how stress and worry, or not trusting based on what we believe, if you don't trust something, if you believe something's not trustworthy, that can have negative physical impacts implications for us physically your body can suffer because of stress levels your stress levels can make you gain weight and it can give you it can add to other physical ailments and that's purely based on how you process your world there's things that stress out Andrea but not me and things that might stress me out but not her it's because of a difference in the way that we think and then I could suffer physical implications from that. It can make you not sleep well. And not sleeping well, sleep deprivation is a huge, huge factor in things like depression and ADHD. Things like that. Things that are categorized as mental illness. Sleep deprivation is one of the primary causes of that sort of thing. And that can happen from stress. So, point being, I would just want you to see that connection from what you think and how you think, connecting to how your body responds. Bad thinking changes your hormones, your body chemistry. It can have an impact on that sort of thing in tangible, visible, visceral ways, like making you gain weight. That can be not exclusively tied to the way that you think, but the way that you think can affect the way your body processes what you ingest. It's very strange. I mean, we don't necessarily understand all these things, but it's a reality. So drugs can help at times. They cannot give people what they really need. And this is coming from one of America's top psychologists. I'm not just saying this. This is what he said. There's a secular guy who said, drugs can help at times, but they cannot give people what they really need, which is meaning and relationship. So drugs often alleviate symptoms, or when they work, they alleviate symptoms, but they can't change the cause. If somebody needs meaning and relationship in their life and they don't have that and they're suffering things from that, a drug can help them not feel that as strongly or feel it differently, but it can't change the thing that's producing that symptom. So understand the mind-body connection, that it exists, not necessarily how it exists, but there's, because there's not a Christian body, right? There's not a Christian way that we look, where we're all a certain height, or a certain body type, or a certain level of health, a certain level of absence of disfigurements, or disabilities, or hair color, any of that sort of thing, obviously. There's no Christian body type, there's no Christian physical way of existing. in terms of who we are in our physical bodies, but there is a Christian mind. There's a Christian way to think and to process the world. There's Christian beliefs, and that mind can impact our body because of that connection. So there's a, the mind is spiritually controlled. Where we're at spiritually controls, will dictate how our mind works. and that will in turn dictate aspects of our physiology. There's a connection. So if you don't think biblically, it's not that you're necessarily being punished with bad health or bad mental health, but there's going to be a greater propensity, a logical and understandable propensity towards hopelessness, purposelessness, unmended relationships, bitterness, things like that. Because the secular world doesn't provide hope or purpose. It has to be completely arbitrarily created. It has to be, I forget this word every single time, where you invent your own meaning. It's gonna drive me nuts. It doesn't matter, what is it? What? Yes, existentialism, thank you. I've taught on it multiple times, and I always forget the actual word. Existentialism, you create an arbitrary meaning, and that's all that they can basically provide, but they can't do it in an ultimate sense, and there's no... You can't have a rationale for mending relationships or you can't use the forgiveness of Christ and the forgiveness that comes from his sacrifice or the command from God to be at peace with all men. That kind of thing doesn't exist in the secular world. So we have reason for hope and purpose and mending relationships and to not be bitter and that sort of thing. So we have a way to circumvent some of the suffering that can come from those things. More frequently, those things come about because of materialistic worldview. They have to, because they are the logical conclusion of it. I'm not saying you'll necessarily have those things, or that Christians will necessarily always avoid them. But if you think logically and consistently through those worldviews, you're gonna have less of it in the Christian worldview, because you can't justify it, and you'll have more of it in the materialistic worldview, it has no grounding to avoid it. And again, those naturally produce worse health, both physical and mental worse health. When Christians are not renewing their mind or thinking and operating biblically, then these consequences will start to show up more in our lives. And everybody has it to a degree because none of us do that perfectly. So oftentimes when we identify suffering, we can usually identify a element of sin that has led to it, an element of our failure. to maintain our relationship with God, maintain an avoidance of sin, and maintain piety and holiness, that sort of thing. That's kind of the point I'm getting at. So that's not to say that everyone that suffers from these issues is suffering because of their sins and failures, necessarily, but they can be a major factor in a lot of cases, especially for those that are more predisposed to such issues because of hormonal or providential or circumstantial factors in their life. Someone that has just lost a close family member or someone that was very meaningful to them are gonna be more predisposed because of their circumstances and therefore if they don't maintain their spiritual health, they're going to have a greater likelihood to become depressed or suffer some other symptom that is associated with a mental illness. Now, We'll say this too, there are widely divergent views regarding diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues. And that goes not just in the church, but I'm talking in the secular realm. There is not a unanimity on their perspective of how to think about this at all. The church has been dealing with this for a really long time before these categories even existed. Gregory the Great, he was basically the last Bishop of Rome that wasn't complete garbage. He wasn't the best, I mean, he wasn't. He was sort of great, but not great, great. They called him Gregory the Great, but not because of how great he was. He was a Bishop of Rome. He wasn't awful, but he wrote a book of pastoral rule that basically deal with these issues. Puritan Timothy Rogers wrote, Trouble of Mind and the Disease of Melancholy. And melancholy is what we call today depression. And he called it a disease back then. We should realize that secular anthropology, the way they view man, their, we'll say doctrine of man, their doctrine of man, the thing that undergirds the entire psychiatric field, is at odds with biblical anthropology. So they don't think of man how we think of man. So, they are thus incapable of a full understanding of man's problems and the correct solutions. Not like they can't contribute at all, but they're incapable of a full understanding. They are, we would say, severely handicapped. The psychiatric categories in medications have a fundamental limitation in dealing with these issues. The secular worldview doesn't even operate with the category of sin. They can't, because they have no fundamental underlying definition of morality, because they can't. Again, it's existentialism, they have to make it up. But they don't call it sin, they don't think in terms of sin. Thus, it cannot begin to evaluate the suffering and the anguish and the depression and the emotions that are caused from sin. Because we know for a fact that sin produces misery in our lives. And that is often mental and sometimes physical as well. Sin produces misery. They do not have the category to evaluate that. and the medications are not designed to handle that. They don't have the category. And they can't offer the hope that the Bible offers, the promises of God. They can't offer the hope that can so often help alleviate these issues. So one of the solutions in dealing with these issues is the hope that we find in scripture, the hope of the future, the hope of salvation, the hope of sanctification, growing out of these things, all this, the hope of being changed, A lot of the stuff that they deal with and that they capture in their diagnoses, they think of as immutable. And Christians say, no, those things are not immutable because we're mutable beings and we can be changed from the inside by the Holy Spirit, changing the way that we think. And changing the way that you think changes a lot of how you deal with the world and the symptoms you experience. Again, this isn't like, uniform across every single possible symptom and diagnosis. These are just general the majority of the time. We'll talk about a little bit more like disease and biology and the causes of some of these things. The secular world has no understanding of the supernatural at all, none. It does not exist in their world, they cannot deal with it, therefore, They can't deal with things that are supernaturally happening. When we're changed by the Holy Spirit, that's a supernatural act. And they can't explain it or even recognize it. That does not mean that the secular world has nothing to contribute. Their diagnosis is not always incorrect, though it is often incomplete. We'll talk about what diagnosis actually is, but it's not like they necessarily get it wrong, like they literally see different things happening all the time. It's just that they have an incomplete understanding and what they consider a diagnosis and what we consider a diagnosis and stuff is different. So their treatments may at times be beneficial or beneficially included in a Christian's process or total plan of recovery, like what they suggest or what they would do, might be beneficial to include at times. So it's not like they literally have nothing to offer. So with that all being said, let's try and understand psychiatric diagnosis a little bit better. Diagnosis is nothing more than a form of classification. Just like if we took a group of songs and we classified them and we say, well, this really kind of has a twang to it. They play a lot of banjo and acoustic guitar. This is country music. That's a diagnosis of that music. And we classify them, we kind of group it together in their similarities and the way they kind of all go together. These instruments are usually used in this type of music, and there's a general trend that you identify, and that's all diagnosis is. It's a classification except it's for patterned behavior and for symptoms that people experience. Symptoms that they experience, patterned behavior that they do, and then they give them a label, and that's diagnosis. So that's what diagnosis actually is. The psychiatric classification scheme is tied to the way that we understand humanity. They don't have the category of sinner, they don't have the category of born again, they don't have the category of being renewed or being sanctified. So they can apply labels such as oppressor, victim, addict, adulterer, narcissist, antisocial, bipolar, OCD, PTSD, ADD, ADHD, things like that. Not that those are never accurate, I'm not saying like those things are fake, but they'll clump together a group of symptoms and they'll give it a name. And like, okay, when people do this, we're seeing that trend amongst people and here's the name that we call it. But they don't have any categories to say like, well, these things are right or wrong. It's just like, there's a group of symptoms and we're diagnosing it and we're calling it a mental illness and mental illness is a disease, is essentially how they think of it. It's a disease of some kind. But those are just, they're just classifications for behaviors and symptoms. That's it. The question is, does our classification system match the nature of reality? That's kind of what we have to be thinking about. Does it use valid categories? If it doesn't, then there's gonna be a danger of misdiagnosis, or at least an incomplete diagnosis. The conclusions of secular psychiatry cannot be accepted uncritically by us. We cannot accept them uncritically because of their incomplete ability to diagnose humanity, because they don't know how humans actually are. They think they do, but they don't. They operate from materialistic worldview, and we believe in a materialistic and supernatural world, both. So again, that doesn't mean that they're always wrong. It's more often that they're just incomplete in their understanding. They might be able to be like, hey, this guy is suffering from such and such and such, and it's He's got PTSD. Well, we can say, well, I see those same symptoms. I recognize those same symptoms, and you give them that label, and that's your diagnosis. But that's as far as they can go. That doesn't deal with any of the causes. So they're capable of identifying a set of symptoms and signs that tend to cluster together. that are self-reported by the person that's suffering or they're observed by the clinician. They're capable of doing that. They're just not capable of the understanding that goes beyond that. An important thing to recognize is that this is subjective. It has to be subjective because there's not like a blood test or a brain scan or a lab test or an objective analysis that can be done to be like, okay, yeah, we did your blood work and it turns out you are depressed. or you have ADHD, that doesn't show up pathologically at the cellular level. And if it's not a pathological thing, where there's something biologically creating it, then it's technically not a disease then. But they tend to think of it as disease. There's not a real physical biological reality. That doesn't mean the person's making it up or lying. It's just that it has to be subjectively diagnosed, subjectively analyzed and recognized because they can't just put you through some kind of scanner that prints off the mental issues that you have because there's nothing physically, not nothing. Usually with many of the diagnoses, there's nothing physically happening that's creating it. There can be physical causes that contribute, but it's not like, oh, this is the thing wrong with your body that's producing this mental issue. That's not usually the case. Sometimes in the minority of cases, it can be. So it just depends, because there's things that are diagnosed as mental illness that can genuinely be called disease, and there's things that aren't. You can't just like pop open someone's brain and measure levels and that sort of thing. So that's all psychiatric diagnosis must be submitted to biblical diagnosis is what we would say. In the past, so mental illnesses have, it was a category for the most severe afflictions such as schizophrenia, bipolar, now called manic depressive. Those two are, they're kind of partners. They're not exactly the same thing. From what I've found out, schizophrenia is probably in the future going to move out of the category of mental illness and into the medical category because they have seemed to potentially have found the brain degenerative disorder that is causing it and potentially that means they can physically fix the part that's going wrong that will then alleviate the symptoms. And that will go for, like Alzheimer's is in that category, schizophrenia, bipolar, those sort of things. So that is potentially gonna happen in the future, but again, they're just starting to figure this stuff out. A lot is unknown. But anyway, in the past, that was a category for mental illness. It was understood as a mental illness. Those type of people were generally put in asylums. Psychosis was an essential element. So psychosis is a break from reality with accompanied hallucinations. So sensory experiences that other people don't see and hear, but you see and hear them from your brain. It's getting produced in your hearing voices, you're seeing people, something along those lines. And then it comes with delusions. You become delusional in the sense that you have fixed irrational beliefs. You say things that are just completely nuts to everybody, like they're watching me, or the government has a satellite that's tracking me, like weird things where it's just like everybody knows it's not true, and you cannot move them off of that belief. So that's the delusional part of psychosis that can sometimes come along with these things. Or they'll have both, and often melancholy was also another category, so severe depression. Not necessarily what we think of as how everybody is diagnosed as depressed so quickly nowadays, but like the severe, more severe forms of it. That was widely recognized. Concept of mental illness has now and has in the past had competing explanations. Sigmund Freud was a psychiatrist. He was a coke addict and also had a strange attraction to his mother. Very weird, tried to justify incest, probably because he had incestuous feelings. But he was a weird guy. Anyway, he had this, he had a perspective that all mental issues were on One spectrum that everybody's on, it's just a question of how severe is it? And that was a dominant approach for a long time. And you can see a danger in this, like, because it's measured against, there has to be some standard of what is normal, and everything is a deviation from normal. Well, who determines what's normal? You know, I hope you would see the danger of that. Sort of like when the government determines what is good and bad for your kids. Like, well, based on what standard? Yours? Like, where are you getting it from? You're making it up. You think this thing that I'm teaching them about creation and God's existence and sexual ethics are all abnormal now in our time and age. Does that mean you're gonna take my kids away? That sort of thing. Who says what's normal? And that's the same issue in psychiatry in dealing with these mental issues. Who determines what's normal? There's an arbitrariness to it if you don't have a standard, and they don't necessarily have a standard other than majorities, and majorities change based on culture and time and preferences and stuff like that. So the question would be, by what standard? Essentially, if most people were psychos, then being a psycho was normal, right? they don't really have a way to deal with that. The idea that all disorders are on the same spectrum of varying quantities of severity, that's what he promoted. So schizophrenia is on the same spectrum of anxiety, neurosis, it's just considered more severe of a mental illness. And both problems find their origin in anxiety arising from conflict within the individual subconscious, which is then intensified by social and environmental factors. That was the Freudian idea. Once that concept became popular, way, way more people fell into the category of mentally ill. And it expanded beyond just the people that are worthy of being put into an asylum because they're unsafe to themselves or people around them because of their delusions and hallucinations. So the category of mental illness expanded pretty broadly. From there came a rise in descriptive psychiatry, which generally led to a biologically oriented view regarding the origins of mental problems, and this grew with the invention of the first antidepressants. They went hand in hand. The antidepressants were not created in response to this way of thinking. It was more the other way around. Antipsychotics and stuff like that, they started coming around in the late 1950s, and they sought to seek a biological means to control these symptoms. In the 80s, the DSM, which I haven't really mentioned the DSM, that's the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and this is like the psychiatrist, psychologist handbook, Bible, it's their Bible. This is the categorization of all mental illnesses. And it's gone, I think they're on number five now, so it's changed over time. And they recategorize and they remove stuff that becomes politically incorrect and they put new stuff in to come up with more and more and more and more diagnoses. And so it's grown rapidly. And they list more and more detailed lists of symptoms and signs and They're created for all these injuries and the focus is increasingly on detailed descriptions for problems encountered by psychiatrists. They saw like a 300% rise in diagnoses, stuff like that. So the diagnosis and the mental illness is shooting up. Not necessarily because people are crazier than they used to be or suffering more than they used to be, but because they're diagnosing it or at least calling it mental illness more than they used to. So that's the current dominant approach. We would say that biology is one of the multiplicity of factors that leads to symptoms experienced by those that suffer. In some rare cases, it can be like almost the primary reason they experience certain symptoms. But it's usually just one of many factors, biological, physical factors. Usually circumstances, providence, experience, the way that they think, stuff like that. Those are the additional factors. And it all plays together as this giant stew that impacts people differently. Some people can have the same experiences, but because of a difference in biology, not experience the same symptoms. And some people can have the same biology, but have different experiences, and therefore have different symptoms. It's just an amalgam of all these things put together. Here's one of the big things that we need to understand. Psychiatric diagnoses are descriptions. They are not explanations. They are just descriptions. They tell us what is happening or what they see, but not why. Not why we are seeing them or why they're being caused. It's what, not why. If we see these symptoms, for instance, what is the diagnosis for this? Red face, bulging veins at the temples, a scowl, a raised voice, speaking hurtful words, clenched fists, stomping feet. What would you diagnose that as? Generally, anger. Somebody's angry, right? Well, that's a diagnosis. It's a description of these symptoms that we're seeing. But it doesn't tell us why the person is angry. It doesn't explain it, and it doesn't justify it. Some anger is justified, some isn't. And being angry itself doesn't necessarily justify all the symptoms of anger, or all the things that you do when you are angry. So it's just a description. So if you take a Valium, or if you take a narcotic, or if there was an anti-anger drug, Does that solve the symptoms? Well, maybe, at times it can alleviate them. It can prevent your mind from feeling those effects as strongly. But does it solve the cause of the anger? No. Of course not, it can't. You can't solve the cause if it's not just, you can't just take a pill and make anger go away in terms of what's producing the anger. So medications usually, for the most part, alleviate symptoms but not the cause. And that's not always the case in the medical field, but in the mental illness field it generally is. So it doesn't fix it because it can't make some of the causes go away. In rare cases, and again, this is why I'm saying usually and for the most part, there's some things that are almost exclusively biological and it's a genuine disease and the medications change it enough where the person can pull out of it and that sort of thing. But usually, the guys that I was hearing were saying things like, for instance, 90% of diagnoses of depression is usually just understandable, regular sadness. Like there's a reason for it. And again, it's not that the drug won't help, because it can affect your symptoms and it'll have other side effects as well, but it can't change the cause. It doesn't make the thing that's making you sad go away. And things that happen to us can make us spiral into depression. And there's physical factors that go along with that. Again, like we've talked about. And if somebody repeats these symptoms, so like for instance, the ones I just listed, if somebody repeated those symptoms back, it doesn't deal with the problem. You're not getting any closer to a solution. If somebody said, why are you angry? And they were like, well, look at my face, I'm red, I'm angry, and my hands are clenched, and my blood pressure's up, and I'm yelling at people. I'm like, yeah, yeah, you're angry, we understand. Why? It doesn't get at the why. It doesn't get underneath the symptom. So it doesn't deal with the problem. Finding the symptoms doesn't find the cause or the cure. It just, okay, we see that you're angry. Now let's find out why. So that can apply to things like depression as well. The question is raised of why you are feeling depressed and the answer is a list of symptoms of being depressed that doesn't get at why you're depressed necessarily. and that can go for a whole host of issues. You're not getting any closer to a cause and solution. So you can see how fallen human nature may be described accurately, even sometimes by the secular world, but it cannot be explained. Diagnosis does not explain, it just sees what's there. Someone very well may feel overwhelmingly compelled to do something dumb or to do something bad or to do something that's not even in their best interest. They can feel overwhelmingly compelled to do it. And that can be diagnosed and called a mental disorder. You can give it a label. Recognize free agency. We recognize that feeling compelled to do something doesn't make you do it. It makes you more likely to do it because we generally do what we feel like we want to do, but it can't make you do it. We recognize free agency. Our minds are not controlled by the compelling feelings that we have. Decisions aren't made for us, they're not forced onto us. Something's not forcing our choices. So a guy, for instance, experiencing psychosis, and he's hearing voices in his head, and these voices say, kill. Kill yourself, you're not worth it. Go kill that guy. Okay, well, we can diagnose that, and we can all collectively agree, okay, we see these symptoms, we recognize them, but He's the one listening to the voice. A voice in his head can't make him do something. And we have to recognize that difference. Experiencing a symptom doesn't make you do the thing that your symptoms make you feel. So somebody that obeys a voice in their head saying to kill is still doing an immoral act. Even if it's a psychosis, he's still deciding, okay, I'll do what that voice says. There's not a thing that's taking over his body and making him physically do things. So we wanna recognize that. Brain dysfunction and circumstantial factors can both produce the same set of symptoms. So depression can be caused by the death of a loved one. And a drug may assuage particular symptoms that are being experienced, but it can't stop, it can't bring back the loved one. The cause of depression can still be there. we must acknowledge the complex interaction of multiple factors that combine in causative ways for a given individual, and that includes physical, spiritual, relational, situational, and cultural factors. Just like any other medical problem has a multiplicity of factors, like genetics and lifestyle choices, your diet and exercise. There's a multiplicity of factors that go into any medical diagnosis, and it's the same for mental illness things. There's often a group of causes working together, and alleviating one can help, and if you alleviate two, then they work together in a complex way, then that can really help, stuff like that. We have to see that mental disorders do not simply have a biological root. So there may be a biological factor involved, but you can't just, this is the biological reason for these problems. For instance, when Eli Lilly came out with What's the popular antidepressant drug? Prozac. When they invented Prozac, it was basically put forward as like, we've done it, we've cured depression. It's these imbalances and this will put those balances back and it'll go away now. That should have been the expectation. And the levels of depression are no different. from before and after the invention and the constant prescribing of Prozac. And that's not to say that Prozac never helped anybody. It's just saying it doesn't solve depression because things, most of these mental issues are not just a purely biological root. There can be a biological factor, but not the cause exclusively. The Bible, expands our understanding of humanity. It does not reduce it. So understanding all this from a biblical perspective should expand the possibilities and our wealth of understanding towards humanity. It doesn't reduce it where it's just like, oh, well, all your problem is because you're not reading your Bible and praying enough. That doesn't solve every one of these issues, but it expands our understanding of humanity to recognize that it can be a factor. Your relationship with God, and the guilt that you should or should not be feeling, and the bitterness that you may or may not be experiencing, all these play a factor. That's a big factor in things like depression and other mental issues. Sin patterns can make our brain work a certain way. You can pattern your brain to think and experience certain symptoms, If you practice certain sin patterns, you can literally change your brain and the way that it functions. Our brains are very, very plastic. They're moldable, they're changeable, they're mutable. Beyond our understanding, but you can change. Frequent use of pornography changes your brain. It changes how your brain literally functions. So understand that sin patterns can change your brain and the way that it functions. Your brain is not immutable, even if it's factually correct that your brain biologically works and now corresponds to a set of symptoms that are categorized as a mental disorder or categorized as a sin. Your brain might function in a way that produces those things, but your brain can be changed. Very, very plastic. The brain circuitry is mutable. And the mind can be renewed, as we know, by the Holy Spirit. So we're not slaves to the way our brain has developed to this point in your life. Whatever your brain is like now doesn't necessarily mean that's going to be the way your brain always works. It can be changed by patterns of behavior and ways of thinking. I want to read something from a Zoloft commercial. This is what it said. It said, social anxiety can be overwhelming. You might shake, sweat, or feel panicky. Again, those are physical symptoms that are happening based on something that somebody thinks. You may feel embarrassed when you are in a group. You may worry you are being judged. You may feel so isolated. These are some signs of social anxiety disorder. It's a real medical condition that can get in the way of your daily life. The cause is not known, but it may be when natural chemicals between the brain's nerves are out of balance. Prescription Zoloft works to correct this imbalance. So what this does is it conveys the idea that I don't think people listen very closely that they admit the cause is unknown. And there's, well, it might be this. They've identified a thing that goes along with it often. They don't know that that thing, that biological thing they identified is a cause or a symptom of the thing that they've identified as a disorder, such as social anxiety disorder. Therefore, changing those doesn't necessarily change the cause of it. You might be changing a symptom, like these imbalances, but it doesn't fix the problem. So, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like you might be judged, feeling isolated, those can be spiritual problems. If you think wrongly about certain things, those might be some of the ways that you think wrongly about the world and who you are and who the people around you are. So, You can see how they sort of get at things that are like identifiable and sometimes right, but they're not tying it all together the right way. Chemical imbalances may happen when symptoms arise or other mental disorders. When you have them, it might correspond to a chemical imbalance. But that doesn't mean that the chemical imbalance is the cause. It can just as easily be the symptom of the disorder. The disorder, or the way that you think creates an imbalance. The things that you desire, the things that you think and the ways that you think create an imbalance. The way we think affects our brain chemistry. I'm thinking of an instance of a night before I was going skiing and I was so excited to do flips the next day, and I kept running it through in my head. I was going to do these flips, and I did, but I thought about it so much that my adrenaline was just, my adrenal gland was just pumping out the adrenaline all night long, and I did not sleep that whole night, purely because of the way I thought, and I had these physical symptoms because of it and those physical symptoms could resulted in tiredness and much worse backflips when I was trying to do them the next day because I was so tired and It was purely all of it all of it based in what I was thinking. That's it Nothing physically changed except for the thing that I thought in my head over and over and over and it changed me physically And there was very, very likely a chemical imbalance resulting from the way that I thought. My adrenaline balances and my hormones and probably the steroids being produced in my body were very, very out of balance because of what I kept thinking of. Does that make sense? So notice the difference between saying something like, I struggle with anxiety in social situations versus I have social anxiety disorder. or I struggle dwelling with sadness and being motivated versus I have clinical depression. These are different things, right? The way that we think about it is different. It's a thing that happened to us versus we have this struggle with this thing and you can work to overcome it. There's not necessarily exclusive of all this secular stuff, but there's a thing that can be changed versus a thing that's happened to me and I'm a victim of it. So we don't wanna be reductionistic and assume that the biological piece is primary and ultimate in the diagnosis and treatment for all categories of psychiatric disorders. Do not reduce it to just like, oh, it's just some biological factor and that's it. Sin and mental disorders will have a corresponding brain chemistry or corresponding hormones that you would find if a person is in the midst of an extreme lustful period and you were able to, pop them open and measure all the balances of chemicals and hormones going on, you're gonna find something way out of balance than what it normally should be. But it's caused by the sin. And not necessarily like, oh, now they're lusting because this thing got out of balance because I ate a potato or something, I don't know. Whatever, you ate something wrong. So that doesn't mean that the brain chemistry or hormones cause the mental disorder. They can play a factor, but what we do, how we think, what we think is gonna have an impact on our hormones and our body will create and have a corresponding chemistry in our bodies and brains that result from how and what we think. So, I want to cite Philippians 4, 8, and 9. Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there's any excellence and, if anything, worthy of praise, dwell on these things. Think on these things, right? The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. The God of peace will be with you. You're gonna experience more peace when you think of those things. That verse, if you could obey that verse, if we were only thinking on things that were true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, of good repute, things that are excellent and worthy of praise, that will have an impact on your mental health. I guarantee you it will have an impact on your mental health. It'll have a corresponding brain chemistry that comes as a result of that. It's not gonna solve every problem, but I'm saying if we could do that perfectly, your mental health is going to be exceptionally better. Spiritual health will impact your mental health. It might not change your circumstances, it's not gonna necessarily mean that you'll never suffer from bad things happening and you'll never be sad. Of course you're gonna be sad, because sad things are gonna happen in your life. It's not a cure-all, it's not gonna solve every problem, but consistently obeying that command will produce, generally, good mental health. And when those bad things do happen, you're gonna minimize your symptoms and handle your symptoms in a much better way It's not gonna necessarily make your symptoms go away. You're still gonna get extremely sad when someone dies, but you're gonna think rightly and not suffer all of these symptoms that go along with it. You can keep your body physically more in balance with the hormonal stuff and the chemistry stuff that we don't even understand, but you can keep it more in balance by obedience to that command. Contrast that with somebody that's constantly consuming horror movies. their mental health is going to be impacted by that. They're always thinking on death and gore and violence. That changes how they think. It changes what they're thinking about and it's going to change their mental health. It's going to have some impact on it. And these aren't things that just can be mapped of like, doing it this much will result in these exact things. Because it's just this multiplicity of things all working together that no one's ever going to figure out because it's such an inexact science of stuff that is beyond our understanding. Think of someone that's constantly consumed with lust. And they think on essentially perverted sexual things frequently. It will produce in them, very often, they're gonna get more and more lonely because that need is not gonna be satisfied. They're creating a felt need in themselves by thinking on these things. It's not gonna get satisfied. They're gonna feel more lonely. They'll feel more dissatisfied. That will cause them to be more angry. And then that behavior, That thinking and those symptoms will result, depending on what circumstances arise in their life, it can result in unhealthy sin and potentially criminal activity. But that's where it starts in how they're thinking. It's going to impact their mental health. Now a lot of that, I'm not saying they're never gonna suffer from lust, but a lot of that will be alleviated if they are always thinking on that which is true and honorable and right and pure and lovely and of good repute and excellence and things worthy of praise. If they're dwelling on those things, that cycle is not gonna begin and those factors wouldn't be able to come together to produce in them the behavior It can likewise produce, this is, okay, I wanna, this is gonna be the only, we're gonna finish on this section. This section is longer than I realized. It can produce physical unhealthiness. So there's a reason that there are sexual dysfunctions that are associated with and tied to the use of pornography. There's a reason for it and it's mental. Now there's real physical health issues that can produce those same dysfunctions like heart issues and blood pressure issues, but there's also purely mental issues that can produce those same dysfunctions and it can be associated with it. So you can have a physical implication based on a thing that's purely us and how we think, right? And that's just an example, but there's all kinds of stuff like that. There's a mind-body link that we recognize because we are a mind and a body, and the way that our mind works affects us physically and vice versa. We're dichotomous, right? We're dichotomous. We are a body and a soul. When we die and we're separated from our body, we are incomplete. We have a soul, but we're not who we are in the resurrection when our mind and body are reunited. because we are our body and our soul in unity. The body's not just a vessel for our soul. We're both body and soul, and there is a connection that's far beyond what science can explain yet. So the physical can exacerbate psychosomatic issues, and psychosomatic issues can exacerbate physical issues or produce physical issues. But things like high or low testosterone can lead towards anxiety and depression in men. That can be a factor. I'm not so much sure as in women, but I'm sure it is in them as well. Women have testosterone too, but obviously very different levels. The whole thing is an educated guessing game, is the point. Everything that you put in your body or on your body is a drug or a medication. And one medication may alleviate one symptom and cause a whole host of other problems, because every one of these has side effects that sometimes are just as bad as the thing they're trying to solve. And every medication affects people differently. So if I take something and Andrea took something, we might not react the same way because all the other factors working together are different. So it's an educated guessing game. It doesn't mean like they don't know it all, I'm just saying. For instance, the past nine months I've taken steroids for poison ivy over and over and over. And the steroids have an impact on me physically. It changes the way food tastes, it changes my heart rate, and therefore it changes how I sleep. And a lot of these nights I don't sleep as well or I'll sweat in my sleep or something. I don't really remember why I'm not sleeping well. and that lack of good sleep affects my mood, and my attentiveness, and my ability to get work done as well during the week, which can affect my stress level because I'm not making the progress that I want. And so I have mental and behavioral consequences from a physical medication that I took, and that's true of all medication, and we have to understand that everything that we do affects us in some way physically, and we're never gonna understand all these complex factors. A good example of this, being on antidepressants for a long time produces bipolar symptoms. So is it worth it? At times, it might be worse. Bipolar, somebody that's initially diagnosed as depressed and having depression, and then put on an antidepressant, like, that might be all well and good, maybe they do, and maybe they needed that, whatever, but then it can produce in them bipolar symptoms, and then they'll get diagnosed as bipolar when it's really just a side effect of a drug that they've taken. And some of these antidepressants and some of these antipsychotics can produce suicidal thoughts. And if you look at school shooters and things like that, almost every single one of them is on some sort of psychosomatic drug. I'm not saying that that's going to produce in something everybody, but there are side effects that come along with it. And I want us to understand that there's a degree of educated guessing that goes into these things. All that chemical imbalance stuff, of like, oh, this is just a chemical imbalance, and that is the cause exclusively. Like, that's all debunked. At this point, it's not believed to be the case. You can just as easily ask the question, which comes first, the chemical imbalance or the sin? Well, every time we get angry or lost, we have a chemical imbalance of some kind. Something's going on in our body that corresponds to the way that we thought or the way that we're sinning. So chemical imbalance is a symptom more than a cause. Good. psychological or physiological issues, we should say. What goes on with our body can contribute to that. So getting the right nutrients and the right blood flow to the brain can contribute to alleviating mental issues. There's something about the level of oxygen that gets to the brain based on the level of blood and what your oxygen levels are in your blood, and that changes your brain, and when your brain is changed, it's gonna change the way you think and behave. And these things are just, it's just a complex thing to understand all these factors. Those physiological issues can make it easier to worry or to be anxious or depressed. And sometimes it's because of something that's going on physically to your brain. And when those, you might take an antidepressant that doesn't necessarily increase your blood flow to your brain. It might change the way that signals are received. Your body's telling it, producing this depression and telling it not to receive the understanding of depression at the same time. You see how complex this gets. So handling depression, we're not getting into depression. I use it as an example, but stress, exercise, rest, things that you eat can contribute. All those things can contribute. Causes can be, worrying if you're holding a grudge, whether or not you feel forgiven or you're forgiving someone else, things you're being bitter against, guilt that you feel, mishandling of a trial that you've experienced, grief, sorrow, loneliness, anger, anxiety, all those things are causes. They can be causes of depression and put someone into a depressed state. But we'll say this, if you take proper care of your body and soul, it is very likely that you will still suffer symptoms associated with mental illness because we're all gonna experience life. Bad things are gonna happen to us all, you're gonna get sad at times, you're gonna get angry at times, and those are symptoms of certain mental illnesses. And I'm going really long here, I'm sorry. I'll try and wrap this up here, we're almost done. You will still experience these things, but you will often not reach the point of needing medication because you will be able to handle them and understand them in a way. It's not creating a pathological depressed state in you, though you may experience symptoms associated with depression. That doesn't mean that no one ever gets depressed and needs medication, I'm not saying that. But if you're taking proper care of both body and soul, you can avoid a lot of these issues and you won't reach that point. You'll prevent yourself from reaching that point because we all fail to take perfect care of our body and soul, we recognize that, so sometimes we might reach that point where we need medication that's necessary for our bodies and minds. We might need medications for certain physical issues or mental issues, but our first line of defense is taking proper care of body and soul. So this is not a purely Christian critique of a secular field. Many secular psychiatrists and psychologists continue to grapple and debate in how to define and classify mental disorders. People perceive the system as more definitive than it actually is, and that's what I want us to understand. The system is not a super-defined, precise science. There's false impressions of of precise diagnoses that should and can happen in cause and treatment. That's not the case. It is not the precise science that people have the impression that it is. There's not just pills that change our body that physically then fix our mind. It's not that simple. I just want us to see the complexity of it, and I want us to see that diagnoses is just a classification, and that that psychiatric system is based on a materialistic worldview that is gonna incompletely diagnose and treat these issues. And I am sorry that I've gone a little over an hour. I've gone far longer than I anticipated. I probably only made it halfway through this. So you can see there's a ton to talk about. And this is just a starting point. And I forgot to pray at the beginning. So we'll pray now and close it up. Heavenly Father, I pray that you would give us more and more understanding of these things. Help us to benefit from men that know what they're doing, that take your word seriously and have a biblical view of man and of who you are and have a biblical understanding of hope and the things that can cause all these symptoms that we recognize in us as a result of sin, not necessarily our personal sin, but sin entering this world and making us broken people. I pray that you would grow us in our understanding of these things so that we can better deal with these issues as we experience them personally and as we seek to disciple each other and as we seek to sharpen each other as brothers and sisters in Christ, and as our loved ones experience these symptoms and these issues that we talk about. I pray that you would make us better at handling them in a compassionate, loving, and wise way, and that you would guide us through this study as we go, however long it may go. We thank you for Jesus that gives us a hope that we can set our minds on. We pray all this in Christ's name, amen.