How should Christians think about mental illness on this edition of Truth and Love?

I'm Heath Lambert, and you're listening to Truth and Love, a podcast of the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors,

where we seek to provide biblical solutions

to the problems that people face. Our guest this week is Dr. George Sanders. He is a physician

in the Los Angeles area, and he is a certified counselor with ACBC. And this week, Dr. Sanders and I

are talking about the issue of mental illness.

This is something that Christians have talked about a great deal because it's a topic of conversation in the wider culture.

And so we want to, as we do about everything, want to have a uniquely biblical approach to thinking about this issue.

And so, Dr. Sanders, we are so glad that you're with us this week.

And I wonder what some of the ways you believe mental illness is misunderstood in our popular culture.

Nice to be with you, Heath, and thanks for the invite.

In our popular culture, many people think of mental illness as a brain illness.

They don't think of it as mental as much as they do the brain.

And I think that's really a product of evolutionary thinking. We're a group of molecules that have

been acted upon by natural selection to yield a human organism. And our brain is really the

endpoint of all that. So just as other parts of the body may become ill, you can have diabetes,

you can have heart failure. So the medical model of illness really carries over into brain

illness, if you will, and people think of mental illness as brain illness. And the implication

for that is medical treatments would be effective, things like medications.

So if you have a mental illness, the thought is, well, I should be able to take a medication and that should make it right.

The reality is that most of these medications, if they help good, but many do less than that,

and in fact, many of them have significant side effects that are

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