All right, so tonight we're gonna return to... Mental illness issues, descriptions, prescriptions, a biblical perspective on these things. We're pretty much wrapping up the content of this book. It's not the only thing we're talking about. I'm drawing heavily from it, though. So again, I'm going to recommend it. It's Michael Imlett. He's a doctor. He's also got an MDiv, and he's done counseling. So the medical information that I'm getting is from either him or the stuff that he's citing. And this is very helpful. I'm trying to give you the basic, content of this book, which over these past three, this one included, I guess, will be pretty much covering most of it, but obviously it's gonna go into more depth. So if you want more on this kind of stuff, that's the book to read. And I've got some others that we're either gonna go into that or, I don't know, maybe do some other topical thing, but that's gonna be the plan for tonight and for the weeks going forward, the months going forward. So we pretty much have talked about what these diagnoses are, these mental health diagnoses are. We've talked about them, how to think about them. I don't want to convey that mental health diagnoses in the secular world or coming from the secular world are never useful for the church. We wouldn't say that because sometimes things like Asperger's, which is a kind of autism or certain types of autism, things like that, once they've been diagnosed, it will Maybe help us to recognize when somebody has a weakness as opposed to a sin. So it'll distinguish between them being unable and unwilling to do something that they should be doing or would be a mark of maturity even. A difference between can't and won't. So it's not a refusal. That is to say there are some diagnoses that will help us understand those kind of things, recognize those differences in someone. We also want to recognize that those outside of the church that have been dealing with these issues still have gathered a lot of information and observations from various conditions. There's experts in certain fields that will still have good content, things like that. They don't necessarily always have the right solutions, to what these problems are, and they don't really have the ability to explain it as well in some senses, but their observations can be useful. So they might compile a list of like, with obsessive people, here are the patterns of thinking that we tend to see in obsessive compulsive people. And you could read those and you'd be like, okay, I can see that, and it'll start to help you confront a little bit of what somebody might be dealing with that's obsessive. So, there are secular sources that have good observations that still help us. It can likewise tell us when somebody's been diagnosed, it might tell us when there is a physical cause that's more at play, since some of these diagnoses take testing and expertise to discover, and some of them have these physical elements to them that obviously we're not going to have the capability to do in the church. We might be able to pick up on it, but we can't do any of that testing. We don't have a blood lab behind the training room or anything. With all that being said, with all that we've talked about with the diagnoses stuff, we want to talk about the psychoactive medications. Understanding them and even asking the questions of should they be used. Psychoactive medications. Those are also called psychotropic or psychiatric medications. It's all the same thing, same idea. These are chemical substances that are designed to enter the brain tissue from the bloodstream and they cause changes in mood, thoughts, emotions, and ultimately behavior. So that's what a psychoactive or psychotropic or psychiatric medication is. And that's what we're going to be talking about. Most medications will have a psychoactive effect if you take them in high enough doses. So some blood pressure pills, if you have too much of it, might cause drowsiness. You might have difficulty concentrating. Those are symptoms of some of these other mental health issues. That is a psychoactive effect, ultimately. It changes your mood and your thoughts and your brain function. Pain narcotics do this. You'll get a sense of euphoria. I've had a lot of narcotics for a lot of accidents and surgeries. It makes me really talkative. It makes me overly affectionate. I think Andrea would testify, too. She notices a change in my mood. my emotions and a little bit of my behavior when I've had my pain medication. Now, obviously, this has been years, but in the past. So in a high enough dose, it's gonna change, it's gonna have a psychoactive effect, but we're talking about the ones that have been designed for psychoactive effects on the brain. So I'm gonna give you the basic categories of what they are and what they're for, maybe some popular drugs, and just, we'll talk about these a little bit. So obviously, the first one's gonna be antidepressants. Everybody knows about antidepressants. They're for depression. There's commercials you've heard of probably Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, Celexa. There's a bunch of other ones. And these are various substances that essentially all have the same effectivity, but some of them have less sedative effects. So the older ones would kind of make you like zombie-like. Some people that have taken them would describe that they just feel like mush and it dulls all their senses, things like that. So they'll describe some of the side effects like that, but there's varying degrees of how much it makes you want to get up and do stuff versus how much it dulls you. I don't know. I mean, it's got a sedative effect. There are mood stabilizers. So there's another category. This is for stuff like bipolar. Lithium is a major one. There are others that I've never heard of, and most of us have never heard of. But lithium is a really old drug, but it has some pretty serious and dangerous side effects. There's anti-obsessionals, which you can probably guess are for obsessive compulsive disorders. Zoloft is one of those. There's others. There's psychostimulants. These are things for like ADD, ADHD. Ritalin, Adderall, some others again that you've heard of. These are stimulants though. Remember, they're stimulants. They're psychostimulants, but they're basically amphetamines, which, I mean, that's like what meth is. They're not straight meth, but they're stimulants. So they have a kind of a tweaky effect on you. There's a, I think I've mentioned the documentary I watched recently about the psychostimulants. I forget what it's called now, so it's probably in one of the other lectures, but it's really interesting. But these get abused a lot by young people, high school and college, especially college. A lot of people think like you can't get through college unless you're taking your Adderall, so you really focus in and get a bunch of work done. They find that it makes them, feel like they're concentrating really hard more than they're actually concentrating and getting a bunch of work done, but that's why they get abused. They have this tweaky effect on you and you can just go and do stuff and get hyper-focused on something, or at least it feels that way. Anti-psychotics is another category. This is stuff for schizophrenia, psychosis, hallucinations, delusions. This is the very serious type mental illness stuff. Thorazine and Abilify. Abilify, you may have heard of those. There's a bunch of others. Some of these older drugs they found had, like Thorazine I think is one of the older ones, it had some permanent severe side effects to them. They thought the newer drugs were much safer and new research is coming out that's showing that they have different side effects, but just as severe. There are serious ramifications from antipsychotics, or at least there can be. It sounds kind of crazy, but if you stay on some of these long-term, they have depressive effects on you, the bipolar ones as well. Depression is a side effect of long-term use of some of these drugs. I think antipsychotics are used almost by all mass shooters have been on some kind of antipsychotic. It's either that or antidepressant or both. I mean, don't quote me on that because maybe I should edit that out of this recording. A lot of them are on some sort of psychoactive drug though. It's very, very, very common. Anxiolytics, these are for anxiety. Valium, Xanax, Zoloft, Paxil, Klonopin. Those are popular ones you may have heard of. Long-term use of some of these creates a tolerance. So this is like with the stuff that you learned in DARE, the anti-drug stuff. You become tolerant to it, so you need more and more of it to get that same effect. Your body then becomes physically dependent on it, where if you don't have it, you have all these negative side effects from not doing it, and then you have withdrawal. So these have that sort of effect most of the time. You need to get up up your doses keep upping them to get that normal feeling to feel normal and then They can even have life-threatening withdrawal symptoms. So Xanax is one that actually has life-threatening withdrawal symptoms. And then there's hypnotics, and these are things for, these are for insomnia. Again, you've probably heard of Ambien or Lunesta. The newer ones are less addictive. Some of the older ones were more addictive, but they also can have a a very confusing impact on the mind. If people wake up in the middle of it and they've been on it, they can say and do some pretty loopy things. So ultimately it's to help people sleep, though, for people with this insomnia. You may have noticed some crossover drugs across multiple categories. Things like Zoloft are in, I think, like three of these. So these drugs are not exactly precise and we understand relatively little about the neurobiological, like literally what's happening in the brain, the components of psychiatric problems. We don't necessarily understand it, we can't fully grasp it, and we don't necessarily know what's going on when these medicines get used on people. It's very, very imprecise. It's sort of like the lobotomy stuff that we talked about a few weeks ago, or a couple months ago, I think I might have cited it in the first one, where they started lobotomizing people by going to mental health institutions, taking an ice pick, driving it into their eye socket, and literally wiggling it around in their frontal lobe to change brain tissue. Basically destroy parts of it and alter it and sometimes it really really helped people and sometimes it destroyed them. So it's very very imprecise. They're doing the same thing chemically now. Not that it's literally just as imprecise, but there's significant imprecision with it. It's also important to note that every class of these drugs have common side effects. There are significant side effects that people don't tend to know a lot about. Drowsiness and weight gain are very common. There's also a lot of sexual side effects. Decreased libido and even inability to climax would be one of the side effects. Some of these then lead to an increased cause of depression. There's literally more reasons to be sad and unhappy and anxious when you have some of these side effects. So they can create a cycle almost. I mean, if your sexual life is that messed up, I mean, it creates sadness. And if you gain weight and you're sleepy all the time, that's very hard to deal with. So the potential benefits from these drugs, even when they do help, might not outweigh the negative side effects, the cost of taking them. So recognize that these are not benign drugs. That's not like no big deal. It's not like taking an ibuprofen. You're changing what's going on in your brain. It's pretty serious stuff. They might help you and they might also harm you. So I want to ask the question, are these drugs treating chemical imbalances? We hear that idea talked about a lot, like, oh, I have a chemical imbalance. Or you might have a chemical imbalance. You might need this drug to help that chemical imbalance. So to talk about that, we sort of have to know a little bit about how the brain works, some neuroanatomy stuff. what's actually going on with these, or at least what they think might be going on. There are nerves in our brain. It's the nerve center of our brain, right? There's neurons. And these neurons communicate with each other with chemical substances called neurotransmitters. So they transmit information between neurons. neurotransmitters, right? And it's a chemical substance that goes between them and various things happen once that happens. So the idea might be to like block some of that transmission from being received or cause more of it or things like that. You've heard of some of these neurotransmitters too, like dopamine or serotonin. You can affect some of these just by things that you do or ways that you think. Dopamine feels pretty good. I like dopamine. You guys all like dopamine, you probably just don't realize it, because things that you do that make you feel good probably create dopamine in your brain. Some theorize, so this chemical imbalance idea is, some theorize that there's imbalances or dysfunctions in this system of how that works, and those are the cause of psychiatric problems, mental illnesses. So they'll say, oh, you have depression because you do not have enough serotonin. Either it's not being created or it's not being received, something along the lines of there's a problem with the serotonin neurotransmitter. Therefore, take this medication and that should treat that issue, should fix that depression. Now ultimately, if that worked, if like Xanax or Prozac or something like that, did that thing, and that was the problem, then depression would be cured by taking that pill. And that does not happen. You look at the studies of what happened when Prozac got introduced, and if you look at the, it doesn't fix it, basically. So it's not that simple. You cannot measure neurotransmitter levels in the brain of a living person. You were just not capable of doing it. You can't do that. You can't find out what the dopamine or the serotonin, like what's happening in a living person with those neurotransmitters. So it's impossible to definitively prove that these drugs successfully change a person's mood, even when the symptom is created. So this is different from other medical conditions where levels of substances can be measured in your blood, for instance, if you have diabetes and you can measure blood sugar and you can figure out if a thing is happening or being solved or hypothyroidism. You can take blood tests and figure these things out. We cannot do this with the brain. We do not have the ability to do this. We don't even know exactly how these drugs work in humans, which is a little bit of a scary thing, but We see how they work on animal brain tissue in a test tube. And then we extrapolate to that from humans of, if it does this to an animal brain in a test tube, it could possibly do this to a human brain too. And sometimes that's true and sometimes it's not. So nothing is proven. And I wanna quote a pharmacologist here. He says, we do not know the enzyme, the receptor, or the genetic deficiency in any given psychiatric disorder. So there is a lot of unknown in this world. we don't really know if they are fixing chemical imbalances. It's probably not the case that we are, that these pills are doing that. They do seem to have some impact on our neural networks, and they have some effect on neurotransmission. So whatever that communication process is with those chemical substances, if you alter those chemical substances, or alter the way the neurons do that thing, then you're having some impact on it, but it's very, very imprecise. We know that that happens, and we know that that does reduce symptoms in some people. But even when it does do that, we don't know how it's doing that, or if the drug itself is what's doing that. Zoloft might impact serotonin interactions in the human brain. It might. But we don't know and we can't know. We don't have the ability to find out. It's not going to be possible to do that in the human brain. And if it does do that, if it does affect serotonin levels, we don't know if that will create an antidepressant effect. So even though, even if we could figure out it is doing the serotonin, messing with the serotonin, we can't say definitively that's making the antidepressant effect either. So these systems are extremely complex. They are far beyond human capabilities to research or understand. I think it's gonna be that way permanently, maybe a thousand years in the future. I don't know if we're gonna have enough of a window of time between now and when Christ returns to develop the technology to actually do some of this stuff. I think the human brain is so far beyond our comprehension that we're just not gonna. And part of that, I think is because of the scientifics' world's inability to deal with the mind-body connection the way, because they deny any non-material existence of things like a soul, the spiritual realm, but that has an impact on the brain, and we're going to get to that. So God designed the brain in this incredible way, and we're not going to be able to understand it, and we also have to remember that correlation does not equal causation. So the correlation of taking an antidepressant to seeing antidepressant effects does not mean the antidepressant caused the improvement. So that means like improvement in depression does not necessarily, even if it correlates to taking depression medication, doesn't mean that the depression medication is causing the improvement in the depression. Remember the placebo effect that we talked about from the first lecture, I want to review a little bit about that. This is uncontroversial accepted literature that at least 2 3rds, at least 2 3rds of depression medication produces the placebo effect. This is just something that's designed into us that causes the placebo effect to genuinely work, or at least it appears to work to us, at least. So somehow when the human brain has hope and expectation of a treatment or drug helping them to get better, then it often does actually get better, even if there's no physical or biological impact stemming from the treatment or the drug. So the hope and expectation can create a biological impact, which again is a very, it's just the complexity of these systems. We don't know how that is, but it is. The change is produced from the mind, from the thought of what might be or the hope or the expectation of what might be. And that's just part of how we're designed, apparently. Again, the brain and the neurological system is extremely complex because We can know and scientists cannot know that it's not merely physical. We know this as Christians with a Christian worldview. We know that it's not merely physical. We have a soul and somehow the brain and the soul are connected. Our mind and body have a connection and the way that we think and our soul interacts and science can't measure that because they deny their materialist. They don't believe in a metaphysical reality like a soul. We do. And because it's real and it has a real impact, we can have an understanding that they can't have. It's outside of their purview. Science can't measure metaphysical things like a soul. You can't measure it, contain it, size it up, tell you what color it is, none of it. It's metaphysical. And they only can do physical stuff. So, because we understand that we are spiritually, we're spiritual beings, we're not just highly evolved animals, that highlights one of the handicaps of the scientific realm. They can't explain things like this. And not that we can't explain them, but we know at least a little bit more of like, yeah, the soul has an impact on the brain and vice versa. They can only analyze that physical world, and so they can't react to the spiritual impact of the physical world, and they can't suggest solutions in the spiritual realm, even if one of the problems might be in the spiritual realm. So they don't have that ability. They can't talk about sin and temptation and how that affects the brain. We can. Or at least we can know that it affects the brain, whereas they don't even have that category. So they can't do that sort of thing. So bottom line, These drugs might change some symptoms in some people, but they cannot deal with our sin, they can't deal with our soul, they can't deal with our spiritual state, and all of those things have an impact on mental health. There's mental health ramifications from the morality of your life, how biblically you think, and the spiritual state of your soul. And that will result in a biological impact in the way your brain works. Where we at? Oh, and here's another thing that we need to think about. When these drugs do work, because sometimes they do, or at least they remove the symptom, not necessarily the cause, but they can downplay the symptom, it can give a false sense of success when it's merely masking the problem. So you could potentially mask a problem with a drug and not realize your problem is still persisting. It can demotivate you to address the spiritual struggle as well, because the symptoms no longer there. There's a spiritual struggle, it's contributing to this problem and to a symptom, and if you match the symptom, you don't really have any motivation or zeal to deal with that problem in your life then. If it's a spiritual problem, that's an issue. We're not zealous to do spiritual work when we remove the negative consequences or symptoms of those spiritual problems. So let's say you're anxious from not trusting God, or you're doubting God's promises, and it makes you anxious, and you encounter some bitter providence, some hard providence in your life, and that makes you really anxious, because you're starting to doubt that God works all things together to good. Well, anti-anxiety drugs aren't really doing you any good if you start to feel less anxious, but still aren't trusting these promises of God. You can remove that symptom of feeling anxious where the cause of the anxiousness, the anxiety, is still there. And it's a spiritual problem that you ought to address. So that doesn't mean don't ever take anti-anxiety drugs. You can see a danger there. Or if you're depressed from constant immoral behavior, that should depress a Christian. Not necessarily like put you in a depression tailspin or something, but you're gonna be more sad. You're gonna be more depressed if you have constant immoral behavior. And you could maybe mask some of that, take away some of those symptoms to a degree by taking antidepressants. Maybe they help and maybe they do get rid of that. But you're still just muting a sadness that's there because you're doing something wrong. And if you take away that sadness, then you are then tempted to ignore that problem that's causing it. Or at least not seek it out and dig in and do that work to figure out that you're doing something wrong that's causing this problem. So that still, that doesn't mean that these drugs should never be used. But before using them, we need to do much more in educating ourselves on what's happening and looking at the things that the medical world and the psychiatric world can't touch on. That sort of thing. They're not gonna be able to tell you about your spiritual problem and how it's causing depression or anxiety. They don't have that ability because they don't have those categories. So how effective are psychoactive medications? I'm gonna focus on antidepressants here because the statistics show that there's more benefits. We just encounter that the most. Antidepressants are the most commonly encountered thing in the church in terms of mental illnesses. The statistics show there are, they seem to be more beneficial the more severe the depression is. So if you have very severe depression, then you can, you usually have more substantial effect. The antidepressants will help you more. But it is actually minimal to nonexistent benefits for those that have moderate or mild depression. So unless it's severe, it likely won't do much for you, or at least it will do very little. That doesn't change, this is unfortunate, but it doesn't change the difficulty in getting a prescription. If you go into a doctor and you say, I'm depressed, I want an antidepressant, you're probably gonna get one. Whether or not it's severe, whether or not it'll probably help you. If you do that, you'll probably get one. They're not difficult to get, but the benefit is heavily, heavily weighted on the severe cases. There's, again, moderate to minimal to nonexistent benefit for moderate or light depression. We can also ask if antidepressants are more effective than counseling. for depression. Individual studies show that while medication may aid in the immediate time frame, so say like the first four months, sometimes it aids in those first four months, but after that four months, counseling is shown to be just as effective as antidepressant medication, even in cases of moderate to severe depression. So that is significant. Evidence also shows that counseling is superior to medication in preventing relapse, like falling back into severe depression. Counseling is superior to a drug once they're stopped. So once you get out of counseling or once you stop an antidepressant, you're more likely to fall back into depression with the medication and not with the counseling. Now there are some studies that show that counseling and medication together are the most superior, so there's some conflicting in terms of preventing relapse, but counseling at least helps significantly and in most cases is better. Ultimately. And that's just from reported cases of individuals with it that have done it and what they report. So that's what they say. So for us in the church, this is important, let's apply this, for those of us that have friends or maybe if we mentor someone that has depression or is depressed, remember that forms of care that we can offer them actually have been shown to be effective. and they're sometimes just as effective or more effective than medication. What we can offer to a depressed person can be just as good or better than medication, and that's things like listening, questioning, reasoning, dialogue with them, helping them to evaluate it, evaluate their thoughts, challenging their assumptions and their behaviors, and then helping them to change those thoughts and behaviors, because if you change the thoughts and behaviors, you can change the way their brain is working, because the brain is very, very plastic. If you do these things and you can help someone's thoughts and behaviors, then you can potentially help someone deal with depression. I'm gonna repeat that, if you do these things. This is just common stuff that happens in the church. If you do them, you can help someone deal with their depression. So in other words, helping them grow in spiritual maturity, or just a basic maturity of life, and trusting God's attributes, trusting God's promises, who he really is, who he said that he is, what he's really doing with the world, helping this person to become more sanctified, can help depression. I'm not saying this is the cure-all. I'm saying this is something the church can do that you can do if you have friends or if you're dealing with it. That's a thing that has shown to help. Because counseling is going to... Counseling is very beneficial. Therapy is very beneficial, and sometimes often better than medication. What are they doing? They're correcting incorrect thinking, more than anything. They're reminding them of what the Bible says. Like, they'll say a thing, like, well, what does the Bible say about that? It says you're wrong. I know they don't do it that, you know, ham-fisted, but that's basically what happens. You're not thinking biblically. Start thinking biblically. God has said this about bad things that have happened to you. God has said this about suffering. Believe it. and that will help you not get into this spiral of depression. There's other issues like schizophrenia and mania or bipolar. Those almost always need some kind of medication for the initial stabilization and then even long-term management. Although, even in those cases, counseling is still shown to be significantly helpful. The bottom line, though, medications are not a silver bullet. that they are not a silver bullet, especially when it comes to depression. Though they may, for some people, at some times, for a period of time, be part of the solution. Medications can affect us biologically. They change our brain patterns, right? We can measure brain patterns by PET scans and functional MRIs, and they prove this because counseling and therapy do the same thing. It changes us biologically. Our brain changes through counseling and therapy. And that means without some sort of medical, biological intervention. So they both have an effect on us biologically. Medications do it directly, and then counseling and therapy do it indirectly. It changes something about the way that we think and what we believe, and then we start thinking different, and your brain will then work different. differently. So in God's design, the body still plays a role in the sanctification process. That's pretty important. Anyone can help a struggling person by helping them to evaluate and correct their thoughts, their emotions, their behavior, bring them into line with God's law, help get over immoral behavior. Immoral behavior or distrust of God's providence or his control can affect your brain chemistry. You can have a biological impact based on your beliefs in that area. when those things happen to you. If two people are in a car accident together and they're both paralyzed. It could put you into a depressive state, right? That could send you into a depression downward spiral. But if one person believes something differently about what God is doing with that, it can prevent that sort of thing from happening. Whereas with the other person, they might not have the worldview. And then they could put them into a PET scan and a functional MRI and see that their brains are functioning differently. It changes your brain biologically. Just like, think about it this way. If you think about a thing that gets you very, and I've used this example, if you think about a thing that gets you really excited, it can. create the way that you're thinking, the thing that you're thinking about can get you very excited in your brain and it can change the chemicals that are produced and it'll change your heart rate, things like that. And I gave that example once of the night before I was going skiing, I kept staying up all night thinking about doing back flips and going off these big ramps and I couldn't sleep because my heart rate was just all night and I couldn't let my adrenaline go down. Purely my brain, purely what I was thinking about with a biological impact. So that's what we're talking about. Our thoughts and our emotions and our desires and our motivations and our actions will correspond to neural activity, your brain patterns. And we can control those, or at least not like we become the master of them, but to a degree, but we can shape our brain activity by controlling Those things, by controlling your emotions and desires and motivations and actions, you can help shape your brain activity. That doesn't mean like it's completely at your whim, but you can have an impact on it, and it can be a significant impact. And then you can improve your brain activity, ultimately, with the Spirit's help, and thus you can change your neural activity. Now this isn't, this isn't something of like you're gonna master your body and make your brain do whatever you wanna do. I'm saying, Your spiritual state has a significant impact on how your brain works, and that can be biologically measured. Not necessarily perfectly described, but the impact can be measured. Also remember when you're interacting with somebody that this mind-body connection exists. Struggling, we don't bypass the body. So in 1st Kings 19, God prescribes for Elijah, he's extremely depressed, he's moaning to God about these things, and he prescribes for him sleep, food, and water. Like he was exhausted. He needed to lay down, get some rest, he needed to get fed, and he needed to improve. 1 Timothy 5, Paul advises the medical use of wine. And we know things like exercise are extremely helpful in our brain chemistry in making you feel better. Like literally in the neurotransmitting work, the things that are happening, it helps you feel better. Not necessarily just your body's more fit, although that happens too. But the immediate effects of exercise do that. When it comes to eliminating suffering, because that's ultimately what this is. These issues are forms of suffering. It is a good thing to eliminate suffering, but we have to also remember that suffering is used to transform us in the Kingdom of God. They're both goals in the Kingdom of God, to eliminate suffering and to be transformed by suffering. It's a little bit like money. I think suffering is like money, that too much of it or too little of it can both be very hazardous to our spiritual state. So, if you never ever suffer, you're likely not growing very much spiritually. Extreme suffering makes us want to question God. It makes us want to give in. Kind of the curse God and die mentality of Job's wife. It makes you get fearful and angry. But at the same time, too little suffering causes us to lose our sense of dependence on God and to forget him because we just tend to do that. We can become complacent and we become self-reliant. We see this pattern with the Israelites. Whenever God made it go good in the land, they slip into idolatry. They're just like, okay, we're fine. We don't need him. What do we need him for? Well, he's making it go good. And then they slip into idolatry and then they get judged. There's a really good proverb here. And ladies, you can use this for the women's retreat. Proverbs 38 and nine. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is my portion, that I may not be full and deny you and say, who is the Lord? that I not be in want and steal and profane the name of my God. So that idea of like, don't give me too much or too little. There's danger in both. And that's actually true with suffering as well. So, what does that have to do with medications? Well, when it comes to using them, don't be too quick to immediately alleviate any and all suffering. Because God uses trials, God uses our trials, right? So do that hard work of maybe finding the source, or maybe some of the problems, or at least the spiritual problems that might be contributing to those mental issues. Not that you, this doesn't mean you don't use them, but be careful to just, you know, oh, this'll fix it, this'll fix it, get rid of it immediately, be careful about that. That doesn't mean we never use them, obviously, We also shouldn't think that we're being more spiritual by prolonging suffering unnecessarily. I mean, no one here is probably going to not take the ibuprofen in the cabinet just because it's a spiritual thing to suffer through their headache, right? But at the same time, learn through your headache. So just don't go to one extreme or the other. These medications can be a gift, and they can be an idol. So be thankful that we have them, that they can sometimes alleviate symptoms. Sometimes they're appropriate to take. But if you are in a position where the benefits of taking them outweigh the negative side effects, then be sure that they're only part of your treatment. Do not rely on them exclusively. Don't think, I'm dealing with my depression by taking this antidepressant and that's it. If you're not treating your spiritual state while you're dealing with these issues, with any of these mental health issues, then you're likely idolizing the medication, or at least you're trusting it in an improper way. So do things with your spiritual state that Be as faithful to coming to church as you do taking your pills. Be as faithful of being in the word and going to God in prayer as you do taking your antidepressant meds, right? That sort of thing. Feed your spiritual soul and make sure you're in spiritual health and let that factor contribute if you're in a state where you need to take pills. Don't take medication as an excuse to avoid examining yourself spiritually. We're looking closely at underlying issues. Don't just be like, I'm going to take this and then I'm not going to ask myself why I'm depressed. Don't do that kind of thing. Don't take it because of pressure from friends or family, because you're a pain in their neck. Don't do that. And then don't take it to attain victim status for yourself of like, I am a depressed person. I have depression. Look, I have this. I'm taking an antidepressant. All these things that I'm doing that are wrong are fine because I have depression. Don't try and get the victim status on yourself and then excuse certain types of behavior or patterns of thought. It'll make patterns of thought more difficult, it doesn't excuse it though. Remember we talked about that before. It makes things more difficult, it doesn't control your brain in the sense of making you think things or making your body do things. But at the same time, there are cases, though these are usually more extreme, where a failure to take a medication makes it more difficult to address spiritual problems. We all struggle with patience and anxiety and anger when we don't get the proper amount of sleep or rest, right? We have a shorter temper, we're not nearly as nice, and if we cannot get rest, if you have severe insomnia, but you refuse to take a sleep aid because you're just like, hey, I'm too spiritual for that or something like that, then you're making it more difficult to solve the problem because you're gonna stay in that constant inflamed state that's very, very difficult. Even though your exhaustion doesn't excuse those kind of sins, but... There's times when you might need to take a medication to kind of calm those down. The way he described it, it's like it's calming the surface waters for a deep sea exploration. If you need to take it for just to stabilize, take a medication to stabilize it in some form so that you can dive in and figure out what's going on. So they can be helpful in severe cases of depression or anxiety or when experiencing delusions or hallucinations from schizophrenia. You usually, you can't, Talk someone out of delusions and hallucinations. You can't talk someone out of that. So there's times when these meds are very helpful for actually doing that counseling work and analyzing the thoughts and stuff like that. I haven't given a lot of direct quotes, but here's one from page 86. It's not that you can buy holiness in a pill, but using medication in certain situations may help bodily conditions that allow for a greater spiritual flourishing. And the idea is, if you want to flourish fully, you have to do that hard spiritual work, and sometimes you have to calm down these bodily issues to enable that sort of work to start happening. They can help, they can aid in that case. All right, so wrapping it up, getting some conclusions here. Psychoactive medication may help a certain percentage of individuals, but the benefits of psychoactive medication do not meet the level advertised by pharmaceutical companies or believed by popular opinion. Most people have the idea, if I'm depressed, I take an antidepressant and I'm basically fine. It's not even close to that simple, not even close. Also, the side effects are frequently far more severe and pervasive and hazardous than most people realize, and a lot of these studies are coming out to clue us in on that. Let us know that, wait, this is far more severe than we realized. These drugs are still pretty new, and this idea of tinkering with your brain and how little we know of what's actually happening is a very, very serious thing. Nobody should just be going to their doctor just like a general practitioner and saying, I'm depressed, I need an antidepressant, and getting it and taking it. That shouldn't happen. It should not be that simple. That happens all the time. When seeking relief, one ought to target both the body and the moral, spiritual aspects of your life. So not just what's going on with your body, not just what's happening chemically in your brain or biologically, not just how much sleep and exercise you're getting, but the moral spiritual aspects of life. Those are a significant factor to these issues. Address sin, address personal relationship with God, address how much you're trusting God, what you believe about the gospel, what you believe about sanctification and providence, all those things, moral spiritual aspects of life. They both need to be part of treatment. Like with various leg injuries, he gives a good example here. Sometimes it's like using crutches in a time of recovery. There's a period of recovery where you need crutches and meds can be that way for mental issues. Some mental problems are not severe enough to require it. Maybe you need a walking boot, but you don't need crutches. You don't need to be on meds. But then some are. If the leg is broken, you probably need a crutch for a time period. And then sometimes crutches can be used to prevent recovery because the person is kind of refusing to bear the pain that comes from strengthening like if you have a leg injury an ankle injury and it hurts when you walk well sometimes you have to like strengthen those muscles back up because you haven't been using them so you need to get off the crutches and start bearing that pain until you learn your body re-acclimates and strengthens itself and And meds can be like that, where you might need them for a period, but maybe people tend to lean on them like a crutch at times too often. Most psychiatrists do not recommend taking an antidepressant more than nine to 12 months before probably stopping it or weaning off of it. Again, we talked about how general practitioners are usually the ones prescribing these kind of drugs, but if you go to an actual psychiatrist where it's their field of expertise, they know a little bit more about the danger of being on them long-term, and they don't recommend more than a year, usually nine to 12 months, and it's like, all right, we need to reevaluate and probably get you off of these. So it's only in very severe cases where it's gonna be a long-term, some sort of medical intervention with medications. You may or may not be able to solve some of the mysterious causes of mental problems, because like we said, our brains are incredibly complex and we cannot explain the soul-mind connection fully, but you can always develop a more spiritually mature framework for dealing with the symptoms in a truth-saturated biblical way. So if you're dealing with depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms, you can still, even if you don't even have access to meds, let's say you don't have health insurance and you don't even know how to go about getting them, you can still go about developing a spiritually mature framework to think about these things in a biblical way, by attacking them with truth. Because if we believe all true things, you're not gonna be anxious and you're not gonna be depressed. Almost all of it is going to be rooted in some untrue thing that we deal with, or that in combination with bad things that have happened in our lives. It's a combination of factors. But if you always believe true things, which obviously no one's going to do, but you can get closer and closer to that through maturity, you can be dealing with these things. So whether you are dealing with mental problems personally, or if you're meeting with someone who is, or if you know someone in this church who is, or one of your friends is, know that godly thinking and behavior will always help those who are suffering. You can always help. You don't have to be a doctor that has access to these meds to help your friends or to help yourself if you're struggling in these issues. You can help yourself through sanctification. It's not going to always cure it, but it's going to be a significant factor, and it can help very, very much in this process. So that's all I had for tonight. Again, if you want this book, It's pretty small and super easy to read. You can read it in like a night or two. So I hope that equips this church a little bit more for dealing with these. If you guys want to keep going on biblical counseling and depression and anxiety type issues specifically, let me know. And we'll keep diving in because I got more books I actually want to cover, things like ADD, ADHD, and depression specifically, and talk about those in a very direct way, because we're talking, we're laying the groundwork to do that by talking about diagnoses and medication, but I think there's a lot more that we can do talking about specific things that are dealt with more often. So let's pray quick and then have a closing hymn. Heavenly Father, we do ask that you would help us in this church to be more and more equipped to deal with those that struggle with mental illness, or if our friends do, our family does, or if we ourselves do. We pray that we would first and foremost trust in you and your promises and your truth to deal with these issues. We pray that we can exercise extreme discernment and wisdom and care when it comes to the question of whether or not to take medication. And I pray that if we are having negative side effects, we would have the courage to come off or to change, whatever it may be. Give us wisdom here, Lord. These are things that are beyond most of our understanding, but we do trust that you have endowed each one of us with a soul, that each one of us is an embodied soul, and that you have made a connection between our bodies and our souls. It's very, very complex because you're an incredibly creative and amazing designer. And we're not going to fully understand these things, so we pray that we trust in you and combat them with what we do have, the fruits of the Spirit and godliness and holiness and the fruit that comes from that and how that can help us in this area. So help us to do that well in this church. We pray it all in Christ's name. Amen.