Why are more people diagnosed, medicated, and labeled than ever before—yet no better off? Hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm speak with biblical counselor Greg Gifford about his book, Lies My Therapist Told Me. Addressing the confusion at the heart of modern mental health, Gifford exposes how secular psychology replaces repentance with diagnosis and promotes a “therapeutic” worldview that often undermines biblical truth. From the dangers of identity shaped by disorder to the relational fallout of unbiblical “boundaries,” this episode calls Christians back to the sufficiency of Scripture—and the only path to true healing. 

Thanks for checking out the podcast. Just a quick reminder, not to use this as a replacement for the good pastoral leadership and teaching in your local church, but really just an encouragement for quiet faithfulness through the sufficiency of scripture. ["The Spirit of the Holy Spirit"] Scripture. Okay, so Jason, we got Greg Gifford. We're going to talk about his new book, Lies My Therapist Told Me.

Really helpful book. Really helpful book dealing with some things I hadn't really thought about before. Of course, we've both had concerns about the therapeutic trajectory, the psychological community, the biblical counseling community even, particularly, and the syncretism. So we've got Greg Gifford with us to talk about his book. I love it.

Early in your book, by the way, thank you for this, you give some statistics. They're just eye-popping to me, but they give us some sense of scale. Let me give the people who are watching some sense of that. CDC says 20 million American children ages 3 to 17 have mental illness. 20 million.

National Institute of Mental Health says 22.8% of Americans older than 18 years old have mental illness. American Psychological Association in 2008 said 1 in 10 Americans were taking psychotropics. This is medication for depression, etc. Now it's one in four, one in four taking psychotropics. So Greg, since more people are being treated than ever before, and more people are being medicated than ever before, surely we're seeing improvements.

Right. You would think so. You would think that there was a trajectory downward of psychotropics or mental illness diagnoses, but we've never had this many before. And you could also add, we've never had this many therapists, psychologists and counselors practicing. So we were at this, We're at like a watershed moment, it seems, where I think many Christians are skeptical of what they're being told.

We're given another label and another medication. There is a lack of empirical science that's being practiced. And we're starting to wonder, are there better answers? Does the Bible have anything to say about what I'm experiencing? And not only it's, not only, so I think it's us too, Jason, but it's our kids that we're having to protect.

We want to help our kids, but is it helpful to allow them to receive that label in junior high to work through their puberty years, self-conceptualizing with therapeutic terminology? The problem isn't getting better, it's getting worse, yet we've never had so much quote unquote help. And now we wonder, I think many Christians are just a little skeptical about does the secular therapeutic really know what it's talking about? And that's the those are the questions that I raised in the book. You know, you speak also about something that I hadn't really given much thought to in terms of the distinction between the mind and the brain.

I'd like you to talk about that and describe what's happening and how we should think about the distinction. Good, good. That is at the heart of the mental illness, mental health, secular therapeutic conundrum that I think we find ourselves in. Quick history lesson, and then I'll answer that question directly. I wanted to know how did we get to a place where I could sit across from a doctor, verbally describe my symptoms, and then they say, I think you're clinically depressed, here's medication.

But they didn't do any blood work, no labs, didn't scan the organ of my brain. They verbally listened and made a diagnosis based off, I wanted to understand that. As I set off on that trajectory, I found that the mind and the brain were confused, that mental disease and mental health and mental illness started to become accepted vernacular when that is a, that some of those are misnomers or to have a mental disease starts to tug at what is the mind in the first place. So the mental health and hygiene movement started to use brain and mind interchangeably, thus medicalizing the mind. But biblically, we know that the mind, and I say we, as Christians, this is not hard to prove.

I try to share this verse with everyone. Romans 12.2, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind." We know that verse. Almost every Christian I've met has heard that verse, and none think that your brain is being transformed. That term mind is the inner person faculty of your cognition, your intellect, where your reason, your volition is housed. So your mind is being transformed, not conformed.

And that renewal of your mind that's mentioned here in Ephesians 4.23 is the process of sanctification for a believer. But your mind, biblically, is immaterial. You can't touch it. The organ of your brain is material and there are brain doctors, neurologists. You can practice neuroscience and actually study the organ of your brain.

So what I found is that those that were well-meaning and well-intended were using mental health, mental hygiene, mental illness or disease. And as a Christian we should just pause and say but wait a minute, can your mind really get ill with a pathological illness? And if you begin to understand the mind correctly, no, your immaterial mind cannot contract a material disease. So that led this whole clarification that had to take place. There's a bunch of implications that come from mental disease, mental illness, mental health.

But as a Christian listening to this or watching this, you have to first start by saying, are the mind and the brain the same thing? So talk, talk about the problem with that confusion when it comes to, you know, people's lives and diagnoses and, and what, and lies people are told about that. Sure. Yeah, sure. That's the epicenter of the mental health problem right now.

So what you do is you medicalize the mind and then you medicate the mind. Medicalize, you start to use medical terminology to talk about an immaterial reality. So you would never say a soul bruise, a soul disease, a soul illness, because you know that that doesn't work. Like those, even if I say I have like a moral wound, I recognize I'm not talking about a physiological reality. But people use mental illness and mental hygiene and mental disease quite regularly without stopping to say, but wait a minute, the mind is immaterial.

So the mind can't have an pathological illness. So if you make the mind material, you begin to medicate the mind. The problem is now we're treating the wrong thing. We don't actually know what we're treating. Mental illnesses are diagnosed using the DSM-5, and it is symptom-based diagnosing, which means you describe your symptoms to a doctor, psychiatrist, and kind of like a game of hot or cold, they say, do you have this, do you have this, how long have you had this?

And then they make an assessment based off of that. But there's no medicine that's being practiced to diagnose us with mental illnesses or kids with mental illnesses or learning disabilities or so forth. So what I didn't say is that those things don't exist. But what I would say, and hopefully so far, even in our short time, that people are at least able to say, oh, that is interesting. If you confuse the mind and the brain, you begin to medicate the mind.

And then now you're taking psychotropics for an immaterial issue. And is it helping? With one in ten, maybe one in four people on it, is it helping? It doesn't seem to be helping. It seems to be getting worse.

So you just mentioned the DSM-5. So for those who aren't familiar and I wasn't, it stands for diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders. The five means they're on the fifth iteration and I found the evolution of it just fascinating. Will you just run us through how this evolved to the fifth edition? Sure.

The fifth edition, excuse me, the fifth edition came out in 2012, 2013. There's even a new appendix TR that's used. Basically, this is the coding mechanism and the classification for mental illness and mental disorder. And that means like an encyclopedia where you have symptoms and then a category, and then also like a disease or an illness or disorder. And some practitioners don't prefer disease, they will say disorder, but usually illness, disease, disorder are used interchangeably.

So clinical depression is in the DSM or ADHD is in the DSM, generalized anxiety disorder, or all DSM diagnoses. The way that the DSM has evolved over the years, you would think it was science-based or evidence-based, but much of the DSM has just grown. In between the fourth and the fifth edition, many of the editors of the fourth edition, they started to be skeptical about what is called diagnostic inflation, where we are stigmatizing normal behavior. And there's no scientific evidence to add that abnormal, that seemingly abnormal behavior to this DSM. And now what one of the editors said is that when the DSM was published, people that were healthy woke up sick in 2013.

Why? Because the DSM changes what is normal and also changes what was once considered abnormal. So that's the DSM. It's used for coding, it's used for billing, it's used for diagnosing, it's used for all that. So if anybody who's listening missed it, what you just said is that's not the critique of Christians who were skeptical, that is the critique of the people who put out the fourth version.

That's correct. That's correct. And when the fifth version was released, those at the National Institute of Mental Health themselves said this is arbitrary diagnosing. I found a really interesting portion of the book to be the experience that you had with your son. Could you talk to us about that?

Sure. I think many listening and watching this have heard of ADHD. It's a tension deficit hyperactivity disorder that is diagnosed most in young men. And of course, you could probably guess this, but in a class who is diagnosed the most with ADHD? It's the youngest individuals in the class.

Long story short, there's been two occasions even since the writing of the book, but the first occasion that I wrote about, my son was going back to school after COVID and at the time he's in fifth or sixth grade. And he is, I mean, frankly, he's doing terribly at school. He's doing basic tasks poorly, like he wasn't writing his name, like his teachers were somewhat terrified. There were huge academic problems for him. This is a public school in California, 35 students in the class, the girls have already gone through puberty, and there's no helper in the class.

So just to be candid, my son wasn't then and is not now this academic giant who just loves doing score. But I go and they show me all of his work and they say we'd like to get him tested. And that's code word for school psychologist test sim for ADHD or learning disabilities so they can get him resources. What I found through that is I pushed back a little bit and said, well, what kind of testing are you going to do? What are the outcomes that you're looking for?

What diagnosis would be made? They're testing to get him resources because that's a public school requirement under the Individual with Disability Educational Act, IDEA. And in order to qualify for certain resources, you have to have a diagnosis, and that's what they're trying to do. So the teachers weren't trying to be harmful, but what they were attempting to do is get a label so they could get resources. And what I told them is, look, hey, why don't we just get him the resources and not use those labels right now?

What would they have tested him for? Most likely, he would have qualified for what is called ADHD and maybe a learning disability. I'm not sure how he would have performed on that written test, but here is what's unique. He's not doing great in school, so we're going to give him a written test and a reading test to see how he does and if he qualifies for disability or for the resources that come from idea. Of course he's going to do poorly on that, in all fairness.

So the teachers weren't awful, the school psychologist wasn't awful, They were all part of, I call them the foot soldiers of the secular therapeutic or this mental health culture trying to propagate mental health ideology. So the success of that story was that we said, you know what, we're not going to go that route. We're going to get him the help, the tutors, the resources that he needs, and we're just going to watch maturity and time do what it does. And to God's glory, that's exactly what happened. So the 11, 12 year old wasn't diagnosed with ADHD and didn't grow up into his teens.

He's in high school now. He didn't grow up into his teens thinking about himself with ADHD. In the introduction, it was written by Todd Friel. Todd says, in 1980, if you had a fidgety little boy, we would call that ants in your pants, and you give them extra chores and make them exercise a lot. Today, you call it HDHD, and you actually prescribe expensive psychotropics to treat it.

And your experience is exactly that. Right. Right. And think for people that see ADHD as a problem that has to be fixed, they're often not seeing the gifts that come with that. And just because you're a busy body doesn't mean that you have a mental illness.

And God uses that type of energy level. Seriously, God uses that to be an entrepreneur, to be self-motivated, self-driven. So you're probably never going to be a librarian, in all fairness. That would drive you crazy. But I don't think God's called everyone to be a librarian.

Right. We don't have that many libraries. Yeah, they're all digital now. So in chapter three, you talked about this confusing new religion. So why are you calling it a religion?

Well, there's alternate deities, and sometimes it's Maslow, Rogers, Freud. It's our self, if we're not careful. There's alternate plans of salvation, which is you need meds and CBT instead of repentance and faith in Christ. There's alternate sanctification. You need ongoing therapy instead of your mind to be renewed and to be obedient to the gospel.

So it's not a... Many of the things the secular therapeutic are saying are not just neutral alternatives, but they're actually in competition with what the Bible says. And take self-care as an example. If you use the self-care movement of you need to focus on your health, you need to eat well, you need to sleep well, if you put yourself at the center of your worldview, you're actually going to make yourself more miserable. And the biblical worldview is not to place yourself at the center, but to place Christ at the center.

And you depend on Christ for your sustenance and energy and health. So think the secular therapeutic is not just an alternative, but a competitor, is the word I'm looking for. You're competing with what the Bible actually says on many issues. So, hey, I think we'd like to do a lightning round if it's okay with you. And we've plucked some important sentences out of the book that seemed important to us, and we'll just read the sentence and then if you'll unpack it for us, that'd be great.

Here's the sentence, instead of talking about the gospel, grace, forgiveness, repentance, and finding mercy in God through Jesus Christ, secular pastors give arbitrary mental disorders and medications. Imagine meeting with a man who is using pornography habitually and never using the term repentance, but using the term disease and treatment. That's what psychiatrists and that's what secular therapists are doing right now. That's not your fault. You need to try not to harm people, but you need to learn how to manage this.

Yeah. It's a rejection of the fall and the remedy. That's right. And if you don't understand that sexual sin starts in the heart, which is immaterial, Matthew 5, then why would you talk about repentance and forgiveness and the need for change? Yeah.

Here's another one. Modern therapy is focused on symptom relief for this life. Symptom relief is not bad in and of itself, but if you're not dealing with the root of the cause, then potentially it's not helping. It's like taking Tylenol for dental pain. Sure, that can help you today, but you can be exacerbating the actual problem.

So if you're not treating the root of the problem with Christ as Lord and the scriptures as authoritative, then I can be fruit-swapping or managing symptoms. And that's why many Christians are not finding true transformation, because they're not addressing the root of the issue. They're doing talk therapy and they're doing medications, but they're not looking at their problems and solutions through the lens of the scripture. You know, this is part of the problem with this whole confusion over boundaries. Years ago, Henry Cloud wrote this book, Boundaries, And how to take control of your life was really, how to avoid toxic people, how to avoid problems.

And basically, what you need to do is build boundaries and get them out of your life. And you've got this wave of people disowning one another, kids disowning their parents, parents disowning their kids because they're just causing them so many problems. And it's all really based on a corrupt view of handling disagreements. And it's this blending of psychology and scripture and really an overemphasis on your personal happiness. Anyway, I'd like you to talk about that because this new religion actually creates really false relationships where people are willing to blow up their relationships because they're uncomfortable.

Like, is it always bad to be uncomfortable? Right. Yeah, I want to be so candid. And then there's a couple of balances that come with this. The first is that when we talk about boundaries, that's not an inherently biblical concept and every relationship brings risk with it.

And when you're loving your enemy, it's not easy to do that. And there's potential damage that they can cause to you. That is not the same thing as saying stay in an abusive relationship or accept mistreatment towards you. So what boundaries did is it got all the way to the form of, if anyone opposes you, they are hurting you. And if anyone disagrees with you, they're toxic and they're not affirming what you believe to be true.

So what's the solution? Cancel them. And to cancel the person now means that you don't agree with me, you don't support me, so my response is to remove you from my life. And that's where we're at. That's like an evolution of boundaries.

Even the early days of Henry Cloud wasn't that strong of like cutting people off even though it was trying to identify. Biblically, the solution is we expect of people what the Bible expects of them. If the Bible expects them to be kind and they're unkind, then we practice conflict resolution, Matthew 18, 15, and we go to them. And yes, we may be unreconciled, but that doesn't mean that we're ever unkind. For family, many times I'll see that adult kids have canceled their parents, to which I would say that's a direct violation of Ephesians six to honor your parents.

And also first Timothy five, verse three and four, which says that children must practice piety in regard to their own family. If you had a dad that was awful, you may not be his best friend, but you still have an obligation to honor him and do good to him. So the Bible expects that of kids, and some can actually go to an unbiblical extreme and then remove family members because they do not affirm what they're doing. And now they're not being faithful to the scripture because the scripture calls you to treat your family in a certain way. So we gotta get it right.

This is not stay in a bad relationship and accept mistreatment. It's expect what the Bible expects of them. Yeah, and respond the way that the Bible teaches you to respond. That's right. James 1 says, count it all joy when you encounter various trials.

And those things are testing your faith, rather than just rejecting the person to recognize how God is using that trial, you know, to shape you. Right. And one of the things I talk about—so I host a podcast called Transformed, and we talk about it all the time, which is understanding roles. And some people, they don't understand that in order for us to have a friendship, we both invest in each other, but if we're talking about family, we're always going to be a part of each other's life. We may not always be best friends, but we're always going to be part of each other's life.

We have obligations to each other. Yeah. I mean, you know, the Boundaries proposition says ditch your enemies, and Jesus says love your enemies. I think that there are just some real satanic messages in that book. And so many people have embraced that book.

I've seen marriages blow up because of it. Totally, totally. And family separated. It's really tragic. If you get a woman in a counseling room and she's read boundaries and, and she's with a confused counselor, she's going to blow up that marriage.

So a couple of thoughts on that. We can also think romanticism and me having the right answers within me. And that means you have to affirm me in order for you to be right. Carl Truman called it expressive individualism where you can't critique me. And if you do, you're toxic, I cut you off.

Right. So people actually think that you're dangerous. Seriously, you're dangerous by disagreeing with me. And because you're dangerous, I can't allow you to be near me because you're going to hurt me." And now that has now shifted the authority of truth to inside of me instead of the authority of truth being the scripture. So we really have like an epistemology problem, who or what is the authority in your life?

And if you think you are the authority, you will be inclined to canceling people that disagree with you. I want one last sentence from the book, and this is a humdinger, this sentence might be worth the price of the book all by itself. When your disorder becomes your identity, you fossilize in unfaithfulness. It's unfortunate for some, but they are no longer a person who struggles with PTSD, but PTSD identifies them. They're not a person whose giftedness is similar to what's called ADHD, but they can't do that because they have ADHD.

And you'll notice Christians slip. I'm not talking about unbelievers, I'm talking about Christians slip from talking about themselves as being a believer, adopted, redeemed, chosen to I'm depressed, I'm anxious, I have PTSD. So If your self-conception is informed by anything other than the work of Christ on your behalf, it is a wrong self-conception. Amen. Amen.

Okay, well, Greg, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. Really glad you wrote this book. I hope a lot of people read it. Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and I hope you can join us next time.

Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and I hope you can join us next time. Just kind of hang for a second while it renders. It won't take very long. How's your podcast going?

Okay. Is it weekly? How frequent is it? Okay. Mm-hmm.

So we're sitting right here about a five-minute walk to Southeastern Seminary, and we've seen the biblical counseling slide here as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Right, right. I used to be a fellow elder with one of the guys who's leading the charge over there, 25 years, 25, 26 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Alrighty.

Well, hey, thanks man. We hope you have a great day. Appreciate it. Okay. This, this will launch probably in a four, we're probably in a several week cycle.

Yeah, we're about three or four weeks out. Three or four weeks out. Okay, thanks. Okay, thank you. Take care.

We'll see ya. Okay, are you ready? Fantastic. Would you like that? Yeah.

Okay. Okay, are you ready? Did you like that? Okay. Okay.