Dr. John MacArthur is an American pastor, author of the new book "The War on Children" — and a man who doesn’t believe common mental diagnoses are real.

MacArthur had recently gone viral on X, formerly known as Twitter, for his comments on the latter.

“There’s no such thing as PTSD, there’s no such thing as OCD, there’s no such thing as ADHD. Those are noble lies to basically give the excuse to, in the end of the day, to medicate people,” MacArthur said in the viral clip, adding, “And Big Pharma is in charge of a lot of that.”

While he’s faced severe backlash on social media from Christians who claim this thinking is dangerous, he explains to Allie Beth Stuckey why he said what he said.

“The brain can be sick. The brain can be damaged. You can have a tumor. You can have encephalitis. You can have a brain problem,” MacArthur tells Stuckey. “The mind is something completely different. The mind is transcendent. You can’t fix the mind with a chemical. You can wound the brain. And that’s what’s coming out now in psychiatry.”

According to MacArthur, the idea that a medication could fix “the chemical imbalance” in your brain was “a useful lie” all along.

“Is there post-traumatic stress? Of course. Is it a brain syndrome? No. Is there ADHD? Are there kids who have trouble paying attention, trouble sitting still? Yeah, I was one of them. Is it a brain problem? No. What about obsessive compulsive problems, is that a brain disorder? No,” MacArthur explains.

“The culture’s bent is to say, ‘Hey, it’s not your fault, it’s not your fault, you’ve got a disorder,’” he continues. “PTSD is really grief. It’s horrendous grief. It’s survival guilt. It’s having watched your buddies blown to pieces. You got to deal with that grief. But putting a chemical into your body that will alter your brain, that’s what’s becoming the issue now.”

“If you want to solve your mind problems, you’ve got to find love, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, self-control. Those are spiritual virtues that are available in Christ. Don’t turn to chemicals. Turn to Christ,” MacArthur says.

Stuckey isn’t one of his critics.

“We’ve had psychiatrists on the show say the same thing that you said, by the way, that actually we are causing a lot of harm, especially to children by diagnosing or medicalizing every single behavior that doesn’t fit perfectly into a classroom or doesn’t fall in line with this uniform range of normal.”

“It is actually causing side effects in these kids, in these veterans that actually make it worse than what they were dealing with before,” she comments.

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