From time to time I post a book review on various books I am reading. Actually I aim to make a better habit of doing so as I know the Church is always hungry to be pointed in the right direction. Before I provide my book review below, I want to suggest that you consider listening to Episode 111 of my podcast titled Biblical Counseling vs. Secular Therapy. Many of the themes we discussed in that episode are the substance of this book.
Quick Synopsis
Dr. Greg E. Gifford argues in this book that Christians need to rethink how we engage with secular therapy. The idea is that secular therapy and psychiatry, at best, are only ever able to provide band-aids to much deeper issues. That is because both secular therapy and modern psychiatry are efforts at providing healing for the mind. The challenge is that the mind is an immaterial part of our existence. While medical doctors might be able to treat the brain as a physical organ, they cannot truly treat the depths of the immaterial mind without the clarity of God’s Word and the tools provided in the Scriptures.
Gifford argues that the modern world speaks of “mental health” in terms that completely ignore God’s design for our inner-selves. As Christians, we should seek to build our worldview entirely from the Scriptures up. And by God’s grace, He has provided all the tools we need to sanctify our hearts and minds. No matter how extreme our situation, no matter how much pain we carry in our hearts from the wounds of our past, we serve a God who is able to minister to those wounds, and to bring transformation to those immaterial scars, in a way that no other godless solution could ever come close.
Perhaps the best summary of this book comes from Dr. Gifford himself when he writes (195),
“Maybe you have been told your whole life that you have a so-called mental illness. But because these are not pathological brain conditions, you in fact can change, to the glory of God. you are not stuck with this arbitrary diagnosis or the treatment plans that correspond to it. God is working in you to make you more like Jesus (Phil 1:6). If you will interpret your problems through the lens of Scripture, not the secular terminology, then it brings hope. I don’t mean the hope of just feeling good, I mean biblical hope—confidence and joy in the Lord.”
A Walk Through of the Book
I must confess that over the last few years I have been on a deep dive on this topic. As a Pastor, I am passionate for ministering to people entirely and fully. I want to see the Bible shape not only our worldviews intellectually, but our hearts and minds, so that we might be whole and walk in the “fulness of God” (Ephesians 3:19). I have unfortunately seen firsthand that many secular therapists, trying to help people compassionately, actually hurt them more because they were trying to heal the heart without God or the Scriptures, a task which simply impossible to do.
Section 1 of the book is titled “The Mental Health Industrial Complex.” In this section Dr. Gifford sets out to make sense of the larger modern way in which the world talks about “mental health.” He asks the question why, with such a mass movement of talking about “mental health,” do we have an ever increasing amount of people on anti-depressants. It would seem, at least by the numbers, that the modern “mental health” push, has only increased many of the problems (and by way of increasing the problems has also increased the drug-manufacturers pockets).
In the world of Mental Health, there is a publication titled the ‘Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (DSM for short). Released in 1994, it has since become the gold standard for diagnosing mental illnesses. The challenge is that with each new publication, the list of “discovered” mental illnesses grows. In fact, many secular doctors now openly argue that the most recent publications of the DSM are “stigmatizing normal behavior” (10). In other words, the DSM has provided a seemingly legitimate basis for diagnosing all kinds of regular human behavior as “mental illness” in need of medical care. The problem is far worsened by the reality that these “mental illnesses” are diagnosed by the patient’s description of their own symptoms. In other words, there is no scan of the brain that any doctor can do to confirm a mental illness diagnosis. There is nothing physically wrong iwth the person, hence “mental” illness. Further, the symptoms are often attributes of everyday life in a fallen world (irritability, restlessness, muscle tension, fatigue, etc.). By these symptoms, everybody is mentally ill at some point every year. The DSM’s ever growing list of “mental illnesses” provides doctors with an ever growing list of approved reasons to bill insurance companies for a visit.
Gifford describes a further problem that has developed as a result of our hyper focus on “mental illness,” the incentivization of self-diagnosed mental illness. Youngsters on youtube have discovered stardom by sharing their sadness online. Struggling with a “mental illness” has become something to boast about, as if it were an exercise in vulnerability and authenticity to share one’s weakness. Sympathy sells, and when we discover attention for being sad or being anxious, we can find an unlimited amount of reasons to develop sadness or anxiety. There are even many modern examples of online producers, and many of their followers, resembling Tourette’s syndrome when in fact they do not have real Tourette’s. “To put it another way, when it’s popular to have Tourette’s, more people have Tourette’s” (28).
The big idea of this section, which permeates the whole book, is that we have confused the mind and the brain. As Dr. Gifford says it, “The war for America’s mental health is being fought by those who don’t understand the true nature of people” (51). What he means here is that the mind is an immaterial aspect of the human experience. You can touch the brain, and scan the brain, and perform surgery on the brain. But you cannot touch, or scan, or perform surgery on the mind. The mind therefore, as an immaterial part of us, cannot get an illness. But the medical complex around mental health consistently blurs the lines between the physical brain and the immaterial mind. Psychiatrists, who write prescriptions are therefore claiming to “use medicine (material) to treat the mind (immaterial)” (56).
“Psychiatry actually means “healing of the soul.” Psychiatrists have usurped the clergy’s role as a source of help people go to with the cares of their souls. Really, they are secular pastors.”
Gifford, 63
“Psychiatry actually means “healing of the soul.” Psychiatrists have usurped the clergy’s role as a source of help people go to with the cares of their souls. Really, they are secular pastors” (63). And as “secular pastors” their worldview is not neutral, it is filled with religious biases and moral frameworks. With the guiding light of making a patient “feel” better (experience less sadness, less anxiety, less grief, etc), but with no clear objective guidelines to define right or wrong behavior, therapists often give wildly ungodly, unethical, and contradictory counsel. “Pursue that divorce…” “That person does not deserve forgiveness…” “You need a new church.” All three of those are personal example from my own pastoral experience pastoring those who are navigating the often confusing landscape of their therapist’s counsel and their pastor’s.
In Section 2, Gifford then builds out the biblical framework for thinking about the immaterial mind. While there is a term used in scripture to speak of the mind, more often when the mind is spoken about, it is in reference to the entirety of our inner-being, our substance, the immaterial self. And yes, living in a fallen world, our immaterial self is corrupted by sin. We think brokenly. We feel brokenly. We love brokenly. We act brokenly. And all of this is done in the context of a broken world that causes us to experience real pain, real grief, real anxiety, and real discomfort. Our “minds are sick with sin” (77). The only true healing for that brokenness is the overwhelming love of God that satisfies the hungry soul. This is made available to all people through Christ’s death on the cross and resurrection from the grave.
The Gospel is not only good news that we have been forgiven, but it is good news that we have been “born again to a new and living hope” (1 Peter 1:3). The Gospel is good news that God has started the process of transforming our hearts and minds into alignment with Him. We still live in a broken world. And we still have the old flesh that wages war against our new self. But our hope in Christ is real. His promises are real. Real enough to speak into and bring healing into every area of the immaterial self. Christ is truly able to meet us in our grief and minister to us. Christ is truly able to minister to our sadness, to our delusions, to our wounds, to our anxiety, and anything else we will face in our immaterial self. In fact, Christ is not only able to do these things, the Scriptures have shown us how to see these transformations experienced.
One of the key points made in this section, is that we are responsible for our decisions. The world of mental health has concluded that we are not truly responsible for the way we feel or act or think. We are products of our broken selves. But the Bible teaches us to take responsibility, by the grace of God, for our decision, our feelings, and our emotions. It is not that the physical brain has no impact on our immaterial self, but the physical brain does not control the immaterial self. When describing how a physical brain issue could impact our mental states, Dr. Gifford writes, “It seems best to say that the body, including the brain, is encouraging a mind response, but the mind still has all the resources it needs to honor the Lord… I still have to choose what I let my thoughts dwell on, and evaluate whether my attitude is biblical.” (103). This is not to dismiss prolonged seasons of melancholy or sadness as simply some weakness in our faith. But the Bible claims to give us all the tools we need to labor through that kind of trial, to see what God is perhaps teaching us through that trial, to cling to God’s promises as we endure that trial, and to choose godliness even as it hurts.
One of the great problems with therapy is that it usually has the end goal of making us feel better. But the Scriptures do not teach us that God is out to make us always feel better. In fact, God often leads us through many trials and tribulations that cause us to feel all kinds of human pressures and anxieties. God desires to form godliness in us, and he will use trials and difficulties to accomplish those purposes. True biblical counsel is able to place our hardships in the larger framework of God’s story, and use the Scriptures to teach us what to do with our hardships in order to honor God and experience sanctification along the journey.
Dr. Gifford writes, “Because modern mental health theory does not have a right understanding of sin, often ignoring it altogether as a resource of our problems, secular therapists often focus on either symptom reduction or improving a person’s quality of life, often by their own standards” (113). In other words, through secular therapy, the real issues are given a band-aid through behavior modification or medication, but they are not truly addressed, because only God can address them properly.
In Section 3, as well as in the appendices, Dr. Gifford gets very practical. He deals with all kinds of “disorders” and labels that are common in the mental health world today: Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Binge Eating Disorder, Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder, Insanity, Addictions, and Autism. With each “one”disorder” he carefully walks through the challenges the secular world has in addressing the issues, and how the Bible provides a better framework for speaking into them. For example, when speaking about Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) he writes, “The Bible would say that anxiety is a sin, not a sickness… GAD is not a so-called mental illness; anxiety is rather a matter of having “little faith” (Matt 6:30b). While some may bristle at this, it is not only biblical, but better than the alternative” (185). I agree with Dr. Gifford completely. These kind of statements indeed do make us bristle upon first reaction. But we should ask ourselves, why? Is it because we have approached the topic of anxiety from the Scriptures up, and developed a thorough understanding of the topic from God’s design? Or is it because we have drunk perhaps a little too deeply from the secular godless playbook.
I particularly appreciate his approach to medication. He leans very strongly into the promises of Scripture. He challenges us to see our issues as spiritual first and therefore in need of spiritual care first. He is not an absolute hard liner on medication though. Through a series of examples, he provides thoughtful responses on when and if medication is necessary, and who should be brought into those decisions. But, he is against long term medications that function as band-aids, with no solutions to bring healing to the inner man. “The Christian does not have to choose to sin, not even once. If you are struggling with a besetting sin, something the world calls an addiction, you do not have an incurable illness. You can be set free” (227). Oh, what hope the Christian has!
Final Thoughts
I am deeply grateful for the effort this book makes. As a Pastor, I want to train every Christian I meet to truly build their life on the pages of Scripture. God’s Word is sufficient! When it comes to the conversation of “mental health” many Christians mistakenly believe today that God’s Word is only a secondary tool at best. Dr. Gifford lays out in a very accessible way, the pitfalls of modern secular therapy and psychiatry, and how the Bible offers something of an entirely different kind. While at time the tone of the book is a bit aggressive, the content provides an insightful and thought provoking call to examine how we have been trained to think about therapy.
This book is not a “how to” guide on sanctification. So, while Dr. Gifford lays out the argument for biblical counseling over and against secular therapy, he does not lay out any structure for what biblical counseling ought to look like. He provides the general foundation, that we are to learn to apply the Biblical promises into our life, but he doesn’t necessarily teach us how to go about doing that. While, this allows various schools of biblical counseling to each build off the same foundation in their own ways, Christians who read this book should know that real biblical counseling is not simply, “Read the Bible more, pray more, and have more faith.” No, it is far more robust and filled with compassion. There are very real and very meaningful processes to root out the idols of our life, to turn to God, and learn to allow the Holy Spirit to transform us.
Further, I wish this book had a chapter on the various tools God has given us in Scripture to address our inner-man. In biblical counseling, we recognize that many of the tools most important tools of sanctification are easily accessible and simply need to be utilized properly: repentance, putting off the old self, putting on the new self, biblical fellowship, corporate worship, church discipline, pastoral care, the promises of God, prayer and devotion, scripture memory, renewal of the will, etc.
In short, this book is very helpful for the health of the Church. Christians should own the market on “mental health.” Not because we all are happy-go-lucky people who never struggle with grief, pain, anxiety, restlessness, or sadness. But because we recognize these aspects of life for what they are, products of the fallen world we live in, and we have been trained, through God’s Word, to know what to do with them. The Church must remember that God is Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals. This is not some esoteric language detached from reality. Jehovah Rapha is His Name, and if we follow his ways, and submit our experiences to His storyline, to His design, to His Spirit, we will discover personally why He is called by such a marvelous name.
