Transcript
Ben Fallon: Thanks for joining us on the brand new “Ask Paul Tripp Podcast” with pastor and author, Paul David Tripp. My name is Ben Fallon, the Executive Director over here at Paul Tripp Ministries, and I would love to hear from you if you have a question for Paul. You can either email ask@paultripp.com or submit it anonymously on our website at paultripp.com/ask.
Here's today's question, Paul, but first a bit of context, I think. The National Alliance on Mental Illness reports that one in five U.S. adults and one in six U.S. youth experience mental illness or mental health disorder each year. These stats aren't limited to just America, though, because in the U.K., the National Health Service reported that one in five children and young people, aged 8 to 25, had a probable mental disorder in 2023.
With all these numbers swirling around in the media, how should a Christian think about this mental health issue? Someone asked, “How do we engage with the mental health statistics and consider if there's any medical merit without giving way to a secular worldview that ignores or minimizes what the Bible has to say about sin, depravity, and the condition of the human heart?”
Paul Tripp: Well, here are the two extremes that you want to avoid. The culture, because it doesn't believe in the heart in the way the Scripture defines it. The heart is the center of your emotions, your mind, your will. The heart is the causal core, it's the directional system of a human being. Since the world doesn't believe that, the world tends to biologize everything. Everything is biological or physical. That's an unbiblical view of a human being.
The other extreme is in the church, and it's a tendency for us to spiritualize everything; every dysfunction is somehow a sin issue. And neither one of those two extremes are biblical. The biblical view is I'm a duality. I'm a spiritual and a physical being. The language that is more current is, “I'm an embodied soul.” So, there is dysfunction of soul and dysfunction of body.
For example, I was looking yesterday at an antibiotic, and one of the side effects of this antibiotic, this is very interesting to me, is anxiety. It's not an anxiety that's a failure of hope in God. It's an anxiety that is physiological-induced by a medication that causes you to be unable to deal with the things emotionally that you could normally deal with
Now, that is a mental health issue. Does it become a heart issue? Sure, it does because everything is a heart issue because the heart is the control center. In the midst of that experience, I could get angry at God; I could doubt His goodness. All kinds of things can happen, but it's not first a spiritual issue.
I had a counseling experience with a guy who had a huge personality change, became a very angry man, and we discovered it was a result of an accident that affected the limbic area of his brain that was swollen. They call that the ‘rage center’ of the brain. He got medication and was fine. By then, his church had already disciplined him for a sin against his wife and family. I heard what was going on; I immediately sent him to a major hospital for a multidiscipline examination, and they found out what was wrong with him.
So, we can't deny the body, and we can't deny the soul. We have to have a category for things, whether you call them mental health or whatever, we have to have a category for body dysfunction that creates behavioral thought-emotion difficulty. And that needs to be part of a Christian worldview; it needs to be part of a system of Christian biblical counseling.
There are body issues. There are mental dysfunctions. We know that there are people who don't process well. Dyslexia is a mental processing issue. ADHD is a distractibility mental processing issue. So, we've got to have a category that remembers that God not only created souls; we're not disembodied souls, but we have bodies. And the fall didn't just affect the heart and the soul. The fall affected the body as well.
BF: Thank you, Paul. And thank you for tuning into the “Ask Paul Tripp Podcast.” Come back next Thursday and Saturday for new episodes. In the meantime, if you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. Each review helps this new show gain more traction and reach more people with gospel answers for their everyday life.
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