95. Freedom in Mental Health Part 4 with Dr. Daniel Berger

Welcome to the For Freedom Podcast. This podcast exists to bring the freedom of the gospel for everyday Christians with everyday issues. Now here are your hosts, John Holyfield and James Safer. Welcome back everybody to the For Freedom Podcast. And it is just me here today. Big James is not able to be on with you, but it's good to be back. And we hope that you've been enjoying some of the content that's been coming out in the month of May as we've tried to address some things on Mental Health Awareness Month. And I hope you've been following with us and not sort of turning us off already. But I really think that this, even though this is coming out after May, this is coming out in June, this is sort of going to tie together with the series and even wrap up the series that we've been doing. But we're very excited today. This is sort of one of the guests that I've been really looking forward to having on and getting. And I don't know, maybe sort of geeking out a little bit that I'm sitting across the Zoom camera from Dr. Daniel Berger. But Dr. Berger is the pastor of Faith Fellowship Church in Clarence, New York. He is the founder and director of Aletheia Ministries. And he is the director of Faith Biblical Counseling Center. He also has written several works, including a five-volume work on mental illness, The Chemical of the Imbalance Delusion, Rethinking Depression, The Insanity of Madness, and I believe one of your latest ones was Saving Abnormal. And from what I understand, working on another one right now. So, Dr. Berger, thank you for being on with us today. Thanks, John, for inviting me. Yeah, well, you tell us a little bit of a sort of about what your ministry is and even pastoring at the church. And tell us a little bit about your family. Yeah, so I kind of wear a couple hats, but my main ministry obviously is to my family and then to our church family here. I'm the lead pastor here in a little town right outside of Buffalo, New York called Clarence. And if everybody came, we have a lot of people that are snowbirds. They go down to Florida during the winter and a lot of traveling people as well. So we have around 300 that are part of our church family. And it's growing spiritually, growing physically, have a lot of neat ministries that God uses to grow us, but also to draw people in. And one of those that's dear to my heart is the special needs program. So we have a respite where we minister to families with children with autism, as an example, or Down syndrome, duplicate Q15 syndrome, things like that. And we just take them for four hours, let the families do what they need to do, get some rest, go on a date. It's just been really, really a neat opportunity. And we have our church family just absolutely loves this ministry. I mean, we don't have a problem getting volunteers. So that's been a huge blessing. Our counseling ministry as well. We right now have several, we actually have 32 signed up for certification with ACBC. And we also have many members as part of the Fellowship of Biblical Counselors, which is kind of, in their words, a kind of the GED of biblical counseling. So it leads into getting certified with ACBC. But anyway, we really believe in the sufficiency of Christ and His Word and the supremacy of Christ and His Word for soul care. So if God speaks on matters, we don't feel the need to delve into secular theory and see if they can do it better. We know that God is really the master designer of the soul. And therefore, if He speaks on an issue, there's not anyone going to do it better than Him. Absolutely. And I totally agree. And we just sort of went through the month of May, which is known as Mental Health Awareness Month. And even though we're just past that month, I mean, I think the time that we live in, even with the social media influencer, the TikToker, whatever, there is so much out there about trying to help people with their mental health. And Dr. Berger, I think in a way we could admit that in the past the church has maybe done a poor job in some aspects of addressing the mental side of what we struggle with, what we go through as human beings. And so we've been talking throughout this week on different episodes or throughout this month on different episodes about really the importance of a worldview, of how a biblical worldview should inform us on these things. So if we're talking about this term, mental health, how should Christians think about mental health? Yeah, well, there's a couple ways. First of all, it is a worldview. So let's start there. You can't actually study. And this is part of the problem with even discussing this topic of mental health or mental disorder or mental illness, however you want to frame it, is there's so much ignorance and so much deceit out there that the moment you start talking, people get offended because you're undermining not just a theory but a worldview, a way of viewing themselves. We probably won't get too much time to go into this today, but the actual philosophy behind this is called phenomenology. So even people thinking that mental health is a biological thing versus foundationally a phenomenological thing is an example of how ignorant our society, and not just our society but our churches are. We are talking about the mind. And so you have to form a theory of the mind, and you have to form a theory of human nature or anthropology from the very beginning. You start studying people like Ronald P.S., who's the editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, or Nasir Gami, who was head over translational medicine at Novartis, which is the second largest pharmaceutical company in the world, and still teaches psychiatry at Tufts University and Harvard medical schools. You start looking at these guys, and they openly admit that what they call the biopsychosocial model or the neocryptalian model is in fact a worldview. In my book, Saving Abnormal, I actually start there, just showing that these men understand that there's an underlying faith here that is established in everyone. So worldview is vital. The Bible talks about two different ways to look at this. One is mental wholeness, being restored to the mind of Christ. And that's not just a cheap little thing. This is essential for us as Christians. Like, this is a central feature of what we call sanctification. You think about even in the book of John, chapter 17, verse 17, that the truth is what sanctifies us, right? The truth is what sets us free. Deceit is our norm. And so what we have now is a conflicting worldview where we're looking at people who are delusional as abnormal versus scripturally that that's actually who we are. Jeremiah 79, that we're deceived above all things, which is the second way of looking at this. Jeremiah 79 says in metaphor that we're incurably sick with deceit. It literally says, if you study out Jeremiah 79, that our hearts are so deceived that they're incurably sick. Of course, we need the great physician to bring us that truth. He is the truth that sets us free. In verse 10, it says that only God can truly discern the heart, right? And we find that out in Hebrews 4, that the word does that, which puts biblical counseling in a position that no other counseling can do, not only to discern the motives and intents of the heart, but the counselor actually may not even know what's going on in the heart. But the word, as he gives the word of God, does that. It discerns that. It exposes that to the person who's struggling. So worldview is essential to this whole process. Absolutely. Yeah. And I think that that's something that we need to be discerning of. We need to think through because their starting point, many, many, and even I think some of the problems come in with Christian integrationists, is that they forget or they don't have a framework of the soul for man. And so therefore, I think I heard, remember hearing, I think I said this in the last episode about how the late Dr. Pallison, David Pallison, had said something in a class where, you know, the problem is we say psychology, but there's not one psychology. There's like, we should say psychology, because there's over 200 approaches. Right. And probably growing now. There's more now. Yeah. Yeah. Because whether the treatments are different because they're not saying this is where the start, because so therefore it balloons out and becomes all kinds of different ways of trying to treat, whether we go down a biochemical model or, you know, you brought up even some of where the origins of those happened with. Would you mind even, sorry, I'm going all over the place here because I'm so excited, but. It's a huge topic. Giving just some background to the, you mentioned neocryplinian, and I don't think many people will understand this, of that origin, where that came from. Yeah. I mean, so Emil Kraepelin, where we get neocryplinian model, the new kryplinian model, is essentially the father of today's mental health theory, the mental health paradigm, the mental health system, if I can say it that way. So constructs like post-traumatic stress, alcoholism, schizophrenia, bipolar, or unipolar and bipolar depressions, those are all Kreplinian theories. Psychopharmacology, the DSM-5, or the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, I actually have the, this is the, this is not the text, Texas Receptus, it's the DSM-5 TR, which means text revived. So it's the new, the new version of DSM-5, where all the alleged disorders live. All of that is Kreplinian. So essentially, Emil Kraepelin's theory is the foundation of the Holocaust. And Ernst Rudin, if you Googled Ernst Rudin, you quickly find out he's, he's the psychiatrist known as the father of Nazi eugenics. And I won't have time today to go into this, but in my book, Saving Abnormal, I actually point out that if you, if you take the word disorder, the Nazis called it degenerationism. It's the same concept. It actually is what stigmatizes people. So you're, you're identifying them as disorder. That's an evolutionary concept. You're saying that, that something in evolution has gone wrong and they, they've actually are abnormal now. They're not progressing like an evolutionist believes that people should be. And so it's entirely based on, on this Darwinian evolutionary theory. And of course, even, even the people ask all the time, well, how did, how did America accept a Kreplinian Nazi theory? Well, that, that happened through Joseph Franz Kalman. And he was actually the right-hand man to Ernst Rudin. And this is, this is, this is again, well-documented. I documented in Saving Abnormal, working on a new book. And I, I have all new sources that I'm, I'm showing that have just recently been translated right out of Nazi Germany documents themselves. And this is widely understood that, that Joseph Franz Kalman, even though he was a Jewish man, brought this to the United States and was a eugenicist, didn't, didn't abandon that. Including Rudin's twin studies that are still cited today as evidence of the genetic theory. And by the way, they call it the genetic theory instead of the eugenic theory. It's exactly the same concept. John, if you don't mind, I'd like to just go back to that worldview topic. Cause I think, I think it'd be important just to quickly discuss there, there's actually doctrines that people have to believe in order to accept the Neo-Kreplinian model. Oh yeah. And, and, and before I do that, um, I, I think, I think it's good to show two errors because, um, I, I know you've, uh, your heart is to address spiritual abuse as well. I mean, that's something that, uh, just in talking with you, I know you, you, um, have a burden that people be freed from that. And I think it's important that we, we don't just, uh, pick on, if I can say it that way. Uh, and by the way, we're commanded to, to destroy every argument raised against the knowledge of God, right? Not, not just to discuss it. So, um, that that's troublesome for some Christians. They don't like talking about theories that are dear to them, but if they're opposing Christ and they're opposing actual healing, we need to talk it. We need to destroy them. So one of those is, is what we commonly refer to as legalism. And what I've noticed in, in a lot of Christian circles is this legalistic idea that if you're struggling, let's just take depression as a quick example. If you're struggling, there must be a spiritual and by spiritual, I mean a sinful problem. That that's a destructive, that's just as destructive as Neo-Kripplinianism. And I want to point that out because, uh, there is a gracious biblical understanding, again, going back to a biblical theology, a biblical anthropology that forms that, that gracious, uh, approach to the human soul. Legalism and Phariseeism is, is a destructive way. And so is Neo-Kripplinianism. And in many ways, I think Christians have been bought into this deceitful way of thinking that if I reject the medical model of the soul, then I have to embrace this, this legalistic model of everything being sin. What I love about scripture is there's, there's, it discusses our weakness and our wickedness. In other words, uh, if you, if you look at, at second Corinthians, one of the major themes is Astanetto or, or, uh, what Paul, I mean, you look at later in the book, he says, in my weakness, I find grace. That's a, that's a different view of everything's wickedness, right? Everything's depravity. Now, everything is a result of Genesis three, but depravity and fragility are, are split into, uh, John Calvin actually talks quite a bit about our, our human weaknesses, uh, as he liked to call them. And we have, we have abandoned that. If you go to Isaiah 53, as an example, we, we understand that the atonement is for our sins that Christ took upon himself, our sins, but we skip over the whole section that, that Christ was known as a man of, of sorrow, right? The man of sorrow. And he was rejected of men. And then it says he took upon himself our sorrows. Well, wait a minute. That's, that's our fragility. So now we have fragility and depravity. And how many, how many pastors forget or completely ignore teaching the atonement that it's our human weakness and our wickedness that Christ took upon himself to the point where in the garden, he himself wept to the point. He said, I'm sorrowful to, to, to the point of death. And then went in and into the garden by himself. Everyone abandoned him again, which I think Isaiah 53 is alluding to as well, not just his entire life, but at the moment when he needed his disciples, his friends, the most, they were gone. And he went in and he wept and he bled out of his sweat glands. The most intense distress known to humanity. So I think it's important for us as we, we, we talk about these issues that there's, there's a, a unbiblical Christian teaching of, of all of this has to do with sin. So if you're depressed, you've got to be in sin. I would say if you study second Corinthians, again, going back to that, Paul said, I don't want you to be unaware of this. Like, don't miss this, that I was in such distress that I despaired of life itself. Indeed. I thought I'd received the death sentence says that in chapter one. And he said, but that was to make me depend on Christ. In other words, we, we, if we buy into this legalistic system or we buy into this, this godless system of the medical model, we're going to miss that God wants us to, to grow in our, our mental struggles, grow in our mental weakness, both fragility and depravity. So I could go on and on about this, but that's, that's a, I think an important foundation for us to just to start with. There's a lot of damage being done with legalism and there's a lot of damage being done with this, this neo-Kreplenian godless medical model and both need to be addressed. But I would say this, I would say that, that the church is really, really hurting and specifically pastors. I'll put this on pastors and elders. We are, are turning people over to the medical model because we're not being equipped biblically. We're rejecting rightfully the legalistic mindset. We, we need to do that. And if, and if you're a pastor listening to this and you haven't, you know, it's something you need to really consider the damage being done there. It's not a biblical concept, but the medical model, there's three doctrines. I wanted to get back to that, that I think are important for us to understand. If you believe in mental illness, as you would a medical illness, a valid medical illness, illness, and you're going to treat a disease phenomenologically in the same way you would biological diseases. And again, those are two different things. You have neurologists and psychiatrists, for example. They're not the same field, even though we're told that they are. There's three doctrines that you're actually accepting. And this goes back to Emil Kraeper. The first is, is what I like to call bio, bio reductionism. It's also known as physicists, physicalism, naturalism, or more, more commonly materialism. And, and again, people don't realize they're buying into this, but if you believe that the mind can get ill in a biological way, then you've actually accepted what they call the brain dysfunction theory. It was Creplin's theory that the brain and the mind are actually the same thing. Now, now you're talking about driving you crazy. This is actually the theory. They actually believe that the brain produces what we call the soul or the mind. They call it consciousness. And that's part of phenomenology. I know I'm getting a little deep here, but I think it's important for the hearer. No, I think this is this, the brain mind distinction, I think is huge because this is where we, I think like you were setting up, this is where we're failing a lot in our understanding of this in the church. Absolutely. So a biblical perspective is what is called dualism. And I've actually read articles that, that, you know, have thousands of likes on, on gospel coalition type, you know, uh, websites not to pick on them, but that say, if, if, if we understand we're created to be a physical and spiritual dualism, then we have to accept mental health that your brain can, can go bad, et cetera, et cetera. That's actually not dualism. That's actually materialism. It's a rejection of dualism. In other words, specularists openly admit if we accept dualism, we have to, to now listen to what God says about us. We, we open the door. And, uh, Richard Lewontin, I, I quote in, in actually two of my books, I quote one of his, his famous quotes. And by the way, he was a geneticist at Harvard. It's written a lot of very famous New York times bestsellers, like not in our genes. As an example, um, he actually says, if we reject materialism and we accept dualism, that we're body and spirit, that we're physical and spiritual. Now we have to start talking about God and we can't do that. So people need to understand that, that accepting, uh, the, the, the medical model is accepting a secular concept that rejects dualism. And again, I'm not, I'm not trying to be mean here. It's something we need to understand. If, if we're going to get back to a biblical perspective of the soul, we can't, we can't accept materialism. We, we can't accept a Neo-Kreplinian model of the soul. So that's doctrine number one. And we can talk about that more in a minute. I actually just, I didn't finish a thought. They actually believe that we're all hallucinating. Now think through this with me a second. Okay. If the brain is producing the soul, literally they say there is no objective truth. So that's postmodernism. They say there is no way for us to come to a consensus of what is true. There's a huge problem with that because the very concept of mental illness historically or insanity, uh, uh, severe mental illness today, like schizophrenia, bipolar, these, these concepts, they rest on this idea of delusional thinking that someone is delusional or hallucinating delusions by definition are false fixed beliefs. Well, if there is no falsehood and everyone's truth is their own truth, you can't have falsehood. You can't have delusions. In other words, the concept of mental illness goes out the window. If you accept materialism, it's a logical fallacy. And even seculars haven't thought through this, which is why we have the cultural, massive cultural mess up we have right now with transgenderism. That's exactly right. So, so, um, hopefully this won't be canceled if we start talking about transgenderism, but, but the DSM four actually held to transgenderism. Now it's not called transgenderism. It's called gender dysphoria. So the disorder is not the delusion. It's not that I believe falsely that I'm a gender that I'm not now it's the dysphoria. So now they believe it's, it's, I'm not comfortable with who I am. Therefore, that is the mental disorder, not the delusion. I hope, hope that makes sense because exactly what you're saying. If I feel a certain way, which is phenomenology rather than epistemology, what is true? If I'm, if I'm, which is going back to Genesis three, right? Sorry, I'm all over the place, but that's exactly what Eve did. That's exactly, Eve said, uh, listen to what Satan said. Did God really say, so there's epistemology and she followed what her eyes saw and what she desired. She went after her heart. That's phenomenology. And literally this is, this is where we're, we've gotten in our society where we're, we're exchanging the truth of God for any lie that, that makes sense to us, what we feel. They don't care about what is true. They care about how a person feels. And that is actually what they call the therapeutic effect. It's not, it's not what the drug is actually doing to you. It's how you feel. That's the, if you're behaving better, et cetera, et cetera, a mechanism of drug action versus getting back to that chemical imbalance. Versus how it makes me feel or how it makes me perform. And we can touch on that later. So that's bioreductionism. You, you are actually buying into, if you buy into the medical model, a materialistic, secular evolutionary concept of the soul. The second doctrine is called biodeterminism. So in, in Christianity, um, especially in reform thinking, we believe in the sovereignty of God. It's, it's a beautiful, beautiful truth. Um, that, I mean, it's just, it's, it's, it's what a blessing to know that we have a God that sovereignly, even, even when we choose things, God is orchestrating them to his glory and for us to flourish. Neither of those are separate from each other. In God's sovereignty and his goodness, he desires for us to flourish. Look at the beatitudes as an example. Right. Um, so, so our, our concept of God's sovereignty, if you reject God, you still have to have a doctrine. And, and of course, if you're humanistic, you've got to put that on demand. Well, how do you do that with man? Do you believe that he has a will? Or, and if you believe he has a will, now criminals are responsible for their actions. Now, what we're calling mental illness, that person is responsible for. But if you don't believe in the will, if you take that away and you put it onto the body, for example, you have bio determinism. In other words, you're just a product of whatever your brain or your genes or your chemicals decide to do. You can't help yourself. That is actually the secular theory of mental illness to the point where they're saying that the vast majority of mentally ill are criminals. Now, I mean, an article just came out last week that there are double the amount allegedly of mentally ill in prison now than there are outside of the prison being treated. They're saying that, that the prisons are just like the, the, the funny farms. And I'm putting that in quotes of old, the insane asylums of old, that this is the new version of that. And we should eliminate criminality because why are these people being held accountable for what their bodies are doing? There's a fascinating book. I won't get into too much here, but Dr. Laurie Resnick, who's a psychiatrist at University of Toronto. He's written a lot of fascinating books, but one particular is called Evil or Ill. And he has a law background as well. And he actually says that the mental health paradigm, mental health system is replacing the legal judicial system. Because you, you, if you, if you think about the plea of insanity, a guy goes in and kills his parents. Could he help himself or could he not help himself? Did his body, because he quote unquote has an illness that made him kill, or did he actually hate his parents? And so now this paradigm is set up. Yeah. A great case in point for that. The Menendez brothers. There you go. What you got going on right in the 80s, they were convicted of murder, but their defense was an insanity defense based on the abuse that they suffered. Correct. What you have going on right now, I don't know if you've seen this, but a massive TikTok movement of trying to get them released because they should not have been found guilty based on what was done to them, regardless whether it was premeditated revenge. Right. Well, and that's part of the polyvagal theory of trauma. So this is, I mean, you see this played out in the whole concept of trauma right now with Bessel van der Kolk, who I won't go into that, but there's a lot being exposed now about him. He actually stole his theories, et cetera, et cetera. But essentially, it goes back to materialism again. And it goes back to biodeterminism. That's what the polyvagal theory is, that once you're traumatized, you can't, your body is so damaged, which by the way, when you go through trauma, your body does react to. But the whole idea of biodeterminism is that can't be undone. In other words, you're now a victim of what was done to you, and you'll never recover from it. And that's just simply not true by science or by scripture. Both of those, and by the way, those are never in conflict, right? We understand that, but that's what we're told. And so this whole concept of biodeterminism and bioreductionism or materialism and fatalism that you can't help yourself, that whatever your body decides to do is what you're going to do. Again, it's replacing God's sovereignty. And you start seeing materialism replaces dualism. Biodeterminism replaces God's sovereignty and man's will within God's sovereignty. So you see this. The third doctrine that people don't realize, again, part of this worldview that they've accepted is it's called biodegenerationism. Or again, as the Nazis called it, individual degenerationism. The idea is, again, if you take the first two concepts, that we're just material masses that have evolved, that our bodies determine who we are, that even our souls, our minds are just hallucinations that our brains produce. That's literally what they're teaching. The Bayesian theory, that's what it's called. Then you also have to accept biodeterminate or, excuse me, biodegenerationism, which is exactly what the eugenic theory teaches, that some people have degenerated to a lesser form of evolution. That is exactly when someone is labeled as disordered. That's actually what they've accepted. Now, that sounds horrific. But yet people in our churches are promoting this eugenic Nazi concept as if it's the most loving and helpful thing. And here's what I want to say very clearly, because I don't want anyone to walk away thinking, oh, you know, Daniel's saying that people who are struggling with mental struggles don't have real struggles. I've never said that. What I'm saying is there is a much more gracious, biblical, but clearly effective. I mean, I can show you countless people in our church. We're actually going to start filming. People want to share this. They're getting trained to counsel. People have been labeled as schizophrenic. People have been labeled as bipolar. You would never know that are leading people in biblical counseling now or now getting trained and certified in biblical counseling. And the world doesn't know how to explain this, but we do. And so what I want to draw us to is that if we label people and stigmatize them with this disorder or degeneracy concept, they miss out on the entire biblical idea of being restored to the image of Christ. So they teach individual degenerationism that is somehow related to the body, again, based on materialism and biodeterminism. Scripture teaches universal degenerationism, and it has to do with the image that we're created in, the design of God. So now we're going back to ontology, right? Now we're going back to how are we designed and created? What is the real substance of humanity? And if I can do it this way, secularism teaches that some people, that most people have it together. Not that we don't struggle, but at some point, normal sorrow or normal deceit becomes abnormal. Now, the question is, at what point? And you start studying their theory, there is no point. They don't even know what normal is. And they tell us dogmatically what is abnormal. Now, that's a logical fallacy in itself, right? But this is part of the eugenic theory. So if I can't help you and I don't know how to explain to you, now you're abnormal because you're actually outside of their evolutionary theory. And it would undermine evolution to say that, well, not everybody's getting better and the stronger are surviving. You're a degenerate. Scripture teaches that we're all degenerate compared to Jesus. Like we've all gone against the order. We're all disordered if you look at the Genesis 1 and 2 order of creation. That means that regeneration is the only remedy to degeneration. That's what the scripture teaches. And then that the renewing of the mind is a process. In other words, becoming mentally whole will not happen until we see Christ face to face. In fact, let me prove it to you. Revelation 21 says, when we finally see him face to face, all sorrow and tears and death and pain will be done away with. We're going to be, that's our hope. You know, we sorrow, like 1 Thessalonians 4 says, but not like those who have no hope. I mean, this is our internal struggle. What we bought into is somewhere there's a magic bullet that if we take it, we're going to get better. And we're going to get back to normal. And not only is the secular system not working. And by the way, this isn't my theory. If you study the leading seculars, they're saying not only is, since neocruplinianism was introduced in the 70s, not only is society getting worse, but individuals' lifespans have gone down. I mean, people are being diagnosed with more and more things. There's a huge study right now of kids being diagnosed with ADHD taking psychostimulants. They're now realizing that the psychostimulants are causing people to have psychotic breaks because they're not letting them sleep. And then they're getting labeled as schizophrenic. And this is happening over and over and over again. Cannabis use is another one that is well known in all the scientific literature to cause people when they go through the withdrawal. It'll allow them to sleep when they're smoking it. But as soon as they go off of it, because of the dopamine damage that's done on cannabis, when they go through withdrawal, they can't sleep. And then they get labeled a schizophrenic or with some type of psychotic disorder. So we have the science to explain the struggles. We have the scripture to explain the struggles. And there are physical and spiritual reasons why people are struggling. But again, we have to go back to scripture. And you say, well, how does the Bible explain the physical struggles? The actual passage is slipping my mind. Maybe you can help me with that, John. But in Proverbs, it says, do not look on the wine when it is red, when it stirreth in the cup. And it proceeds to tell us that when a person gets drunk, they'll end up uttering perverse words. Literally, they'll say delusional things. That's essentially what they're saying in the Hebrew. They'll crawl up the mask and say, who is beating me? And there's no one there. That's hallucinations. Literally, you can have a psychotic episode from taking – and alcohol is a psychodepressant. It was actually the first psychiatric prescribed drug to treat depression and anxiety. A lot of people don't realize that. It depresses just like a, quote, antidepressant, like an SSRI or SNRI. So it has the same exact effect. And scripture is pointing out that these drugs do that. So the science is now catching up with scripture, which happens all the time. But I want to say this. The drugs aren't causing people to be deceived or delusional. They're revealing our deceit. Again, we go back to what is normal. We go back to anthropology. Scripture is clear that we are deceived above all things in Jeremiah 17, 9, and incurably sick. So there's a lot of things that can expose our deceived nature. There's a lot of things that can expose our hopeless condition apart from Christ. There's a lot of things like COVID did. There's a lot of things that can expose who we really are. If we buy into the Neo-Kreplinian model, we're assuming that everything is – we've all got it together. And when something goes wrong, we're abnormal. If we look at scripture and really accept what it's saying, we realize without Christ and even – and we're going to have struggles in Christ. You look at Psalm 77. I mean, what we call major depression is listed there. You go to Psalm 88. Same thing. Sleepless nights. Such distress that he can't even close his eyelids in Psalm 77. To the point where he feels all alone and isolated. Sees no reason to go forward in life. I mean, you start looking at these characteristics. And again, to go back to Jesus, I would graciously argue that there is no one. Because Jesus took our sorrows upon himself, as Isaiah 53 says. There is no one that has experienced the sorrow of Jesus. Like, you want to talk about a depth of sorrow that humanity has not experienced. Because he took upon himself our sorrows. And that's why he was bleeding out of his sweat glands, which is a valid medical condition of the greatest distress. It's incredibly rare for people to go through. So I just threw a lot at us. But I guess the point I want to make is how we interpret our mental, emotional, and behavioral struggles is determined by our worldview. And a lot of Christians have not realized that they've accepted a secular, godless, eugenic concept to interpret these. Where God speaks on these very clearly. And not in a legalistic way. In a gracious, loving way that highlights our human weakness and our human wickedness. And both of those are relevant. Yeah. And I'd say you sort of worked through even giving hope and help there. And that's what I want people to understand. If I can simplify what our goal is in biblical counseling. It's not that we're trying to legislate people to be better or any type of thing like that. It is simply that we understand there are sinners and sufferers. And we are to give help and hope. That's right. And if we can simplify that, then in understanding what that is provided for in Christ and how helpful that really is. I want to be respectful of your time. But as we close up, I feel like you've given some good hope and some good help. I want our listeners to sort of understand as well that you're not in a vacuum in a lot of your work and even research and that kind of thing. You've actually been interacting a lot and have developed some relationships and friendships with some in the secular field. So would you mind just saying a quick word about sort of your work there? Yeah. And I don't think he minds me sharing, but Dr. Paul Manow, who he will tell you up front, he's not a Christian at all. He actually read my book, Saving Abnormal, and wrote me that. And this was not the point of my book, but he said, you've convinced me of two things. One is that psychiatry is a religion that is attempting to replace Christianity. Now, that's not the point of that book. And I don't say that in that book, but that's the conclusion that he drew. The second thing he says is that being a clinician, he also writes for Frontiers in Psychiatry, which is one of their trade journals, a very kind of the cutting edge of psychiatry. And he said, you've inspired me to write my own book because I know we're hurting people. Now, again, this is coming from a clinician who teaches at esteemed universities. He's currently writing his own book. I think it'll come out next year. He's actually allowing me to be involved in looking at and helping. So definitely something to look for. I don't know if nobody's going to entitle it at this point. But Paul Manow, M-I-N-O-T. I just really appreciate his honesty there. You know, we wouldn't agree on everything. But, you know, we've established a relationship where we write each other. We're still in contact. Dr. Peter Bragan, who's another secularist, who, by the way, after we've talked, he interviewed me on his podcast. We've done conferences together. He actually says that theology is the best degree for soul care. Like, this is a godless man. He says, if you're going to reject the Kreplinian model. And so he's pushing what he calls the empathetic model. Like, we need to really love people and put ourselves in their shoes. And my question to him was, if evolution is true and we're just blobs of dirt, materialism is true, why would empathy be like, why? Why would I not just live for myself and cut anyone and everyone else off? It doesn't make sense to show any type of love, to truly put someone else ahead of us, if you don't have that reference of the god of love. Which is exactly what 1 John tells us, that you can't love, you can't genuinely love without first knowing love, right? And so there's a problem. But he and I have become friends and his wife, Ginger, and we still are in contact with each other. There's other psychiatrists who are Christians, actually, who have gotten out of psychiatry. I spoke in South Africa last year. They're actually going to endorse my new book. Same with Brazil. I teach a course where 30 of the 50 members, we close it off of 50 in the class every semester. They are actually physicians in some type of area. And a lot of them are turning to a biblical model, and it's an incredibly exciting time. And I could go on. And it's my book, The Chemical Imbalance Delusion, for example, that I never really answered your question there. There are three pharmacologists that endorse that book. Two of them are secularists. One is Dr. Joe Cummins, who taught at Ohio State University in biochemistry and actually was the chief engineer on interferon. He actually, I mean, huge, huge discovery, and his son was diagnosed as schizophrenic. And I can say that publicly because that was part of his endorsement. So I'm not betraying trust there. He is turning from the entire neocrypillinian model. He has not come to Christ yet, still praying for him. And again, I don't mind saying that publicly because he knows that. But he's been reading Lee Strobel's A Case for Christ, and really God is using that book. Just exciting things. I wish I could share everything. But, you know, what concerns me is that many Christians, in their ignorance, and again, I'm not saying that in an arrogant way. I hope that that doesn't come across that way. They think that they understand what's going on, and they've accepted the neocrypillinian model, and they're not seeing the wrestle against principalities and powers that are going on. They don't see what is really going on here and what they do see. When I usually get people in my office that have been diagnosed, it's seven, you know, three, seven, ten, fifteen years down the road where they have exhausted and more the secular system, and everything's gotten worse. And they are so desperate for answers at that point. And my heart in this, and you can judge me however you want. I know you won't, but, you know, the hearer may judge this and say how horrible this is. You know, what I've seen over and over again breaks my heart. You know, and my heart in this is saying there is truth that can set you free. You've got to accept how God describes you, which is, again, is phenomenology. And if I can end this, you know, with just taking us back to Matthew 16. I mean, think about what Jesus says to clear, I mean, he says it vividly. If you're going to follow me, if you're going to be my disciple, not Kreplin's disciple, not Freud's disciple, if you're going to be my disciple, you have to deny yourself. So not humanism, right? Not turning inward for self-esteem, self-actualization, self-realization, all these self-things that are so prominent. Nicholas Ellen has a great book on that, undermining this humanistic, therapeutic philosophy of turning inward. Which is, by the way, the crux of secular phenomenology. God says that you have to deny yourself and take up your cross daily and follow me. And then four times he uses the word. It's translated as life the first two times and then sold the second two times. It's the word sukkos, where we get the psych. He literally says, if you want to find your sukkos, you have to lose it in me. And what I'm graciously saying to us, and seculars say this, it's not me just saying this, is the number one reason what we're calling mental illness is actually a crisis of identity. That's the crux of phenomenology. It's interpreting our phenomena of the soul in a worldview, in a faith. But it's also identifying who I am. It's a crisis of identity. And you start looking at schizophrenia and bipolar, and the DSM doesn't actually record this as a symptom, but all the theorists do. They're saying that person has come to a place of a crisis of self. And they're not knowing who they are, either because of trauma, because of something they have done. It could be sin. It could just be, again, a loss of relationship or broken relationships, especially with parents. And Jesus is saying the only way that we can find life, that we can find our souls, is to lose ourselves, lose our souls in him. It's to literally have the mind of Christ. And that is a process. It's not an overnight thing. And I can show you in my own life. I can show you in my wife's life. I can show you in numerous people in our church that are growing in Christ in such a way that even their psychiatrist is saying, I had to have misdiagnosed you eight years ago and seven years ago. Because I don't understand how you can't recover from bipolar. You can't recover from schizophrenia. So it must have been a misdiagnosis. But for 12 years or eight years, they were saying, you dogmatically have this, and it's a biological defect, and there's nothing you can do about it. And you have to take these drugs. And now that they're completely off of them, and it's a process, again, I would never encourage you. You have to go. Your physician has to work with you. These are dangerous, dangerous drugs, both getting on and getting off. And so I want to say that. I think it's important to say it's got to be a process. And that's what they wanted to do. I do work with physicians because a lot of physicians are not. They're only taught what big pharma tells them. And there's a lot of new stuff coming out by leading seculars that are saying, here's how to deprescribe. There's actually new systems coming out, which is really exciting that they're even doing that. They're seeing the value in that. But I just want to encourage you. There really is hope to understand your soul and what you've been through. One of the lies Satan tells us is that nobody else has experienced this, that I'm alone, that, and God says that there's nothing uncommon to me. Yep. 1 Corinthians 10, 13. That's it. That's it. And that's the deceit. Satan wants to isolate us. That's what the roaring lion does. He isolates those who are struggling in their fragility or in their depravity. Guilt and shame. There's hope for that. Our fragility of having anxiety, of not being able to get through this life. Paul expressed that. Jesus said, and again, it's not a sin. Jesus said, I'm so sorrowful to the point of death. And if Jesus got to that point, like our sorrows, we can cast on him. We can depend for him. He really did atone for those. I could go on. But there's hope in Romans 15, 13. Now the God of hope comfort you in all joy and peace. Who doesn't want that? That through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, you may abound in hope. In other words, hope is actually not normal and hopelessness abnormal. Hope is supernatural. It only genuine hope, not false hopes that when they're deferred, make the heart sick, but genuine hope that restores our mind, our soul, to look more like Jesus and to give us stability like James 1 talks about when we go through every trial, including trauma. That hope is supernatural. And it comes through the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Yeah. And it's the gospel. And what is the literal translation of what we call the gospel? Good news. The good news. Good news. I was just reading this morning about a counselor that was working with a couple, and the lady had been sexually abused as a child and even raped by an uncle as a previous child and just struggling and struggling. And he opened up Psalm 22 and walked her through Psalm 22, and in that she found words for the language of her heart. She found a way that that's what was screaming from her heart, and she didn't know how to say it. And that she said somebody understands as she was reading those words from Psalm 22. And when he gets to the part where it says that they shamed me and ripped my clothes and cast lots selling for my clothes, the connection in her mind went to, wait a second, is this talking about Jesus? And then the healing part began because she didn't realize Jesus understands. Well, if I can add to what you're saying, too, if you look at how the medical model thrives, and this is maybe a whole other podcast, but they rest off of what's called descriptive psychology. In other words, if I can describe what you're going through, then somehow that explains it. So psychiatric labels are actually re-descriptions of already known descriptions. And so when someone walks away saying, I am bipolar, they accept that as an explanation when, in fact, it just re-describes what they already knew. They were going through a manic pole and a depressed pole. That didn't explain anything. It doesn't show what is actually wrong with them, but that's how it's misinterpreted. It's just a re-description. I've heard, sadly, even biblical counselors, they'll spend 50 minutes of a workshop simply describing a human condition or human phenomena, and people walk out going, wow, that was really helpful. He really gets it. What was helpful? So that identity of describing, depression is a descriptive word. It describes how I'm feeling or where I'm at. You know, the Bible has over 20 descriptive words and phrases that describe even better, like a crushed spirit or downcast or being raped through the cold. You know, the scripture is far superior in describing. You want to talk about descriptive psychology, not humanistic psychology. The scripture does that. That's what you just alluded to. Oh, yeah. If we really take the time to let the word describe us, we're going to start seeing ourselves through that lens instead of the secular lens. Absolutely. Absolutely. Thank you, Dr. Berger, for being with us today and discussing this. And I'm going to put a link to his website, and you can find access to his books there. And I highly recommend them. If this sort of whets your appetite, then I definitely recommend picking up one of those books and reading them. Also, if maybe this sort of upsets you a little bit, that's not what we're trying to do. Reach out. Just send an email. Send a message. We'd love to dialogue with you. This is not something that we're trying to just—we want to get you to think and question just a little bit about this subject and maybe point you to the scriptures for maybe the answers. So that's sort of our goal here is get the church back to thinking biblically about these subjects because we truly believe. I mean, I know Dr. Berger has—I've staked my life and my career, my ministry on the Bible is sufficient and the work of Christ is sufficient for our lives. And superior. And superior. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Well, thank you for listening today, and thank you for just staying with us through this month of Mental Health Awareness Month. Thank you, Dr. Berger, for being with us. Thank you. And until next time, sola deo gloria. To God be the glory. I found my new name. I found that good grace. I found that healing. And the tears fell down my face when I found my beginning that has no ending. I found that second chance. I found my best friend. I found my forgiveness. I found my happiness. I've been singing ever since. I found my freedom in you. Thanks for listening to the For Freedom Podcast. If you enjoyed the content of the podcast, please do us a favor by liking, subscribing, or sharing the podcast on whatever podcast platform you listen to. 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