Dale Johnson: This week on the podcast, I have with me Dr. Greg Gifford. He’s an Assistant Professor of Biblical Counseling at The Master’s University. He earned a PhD in Biblical Counseling from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He holds a Master of Arts in Biblical Counseling from the Masters University and a BA in Pastoral Ministry from Baptist Bible College. He’s a certified counselor with ACBC, the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors. He’s an ordained pastor, and he’s a member of the Evangelical Theological Society. When he’s not teaching, Greg enjoys counseling for Lowcountry Biblical Counseling Center, serving as an associate pastor in his local church, wrestling with his two boys, and eating good food with his wife. Greg, so glad to have you on the podcast today and looking forward to—man, our discussion today is going to be riveting.
Greg Gifford: Thank you for having me. It’s good to be back.
Dale Johnson: One of the reasons I’m so excited is we’re going to talk about Greg’s new book that’s coming out, Lies My Therapist Told Me. Greg, I had a chance to read through this, and I could not be more excited about the content and the way that you’re just face forward, looking at what’s happening in the culture, how drawn we are as a culture toward ideas of secular therapy and not realizing some of the negative effects, the iatrogenic effects, or what opportunity cost is at play.
So, I just want to give you some opportunity to talk about this book. It’s going to be released next week on May the 27th, and we’re looking forward to that coming out. I gave my endorsement, and I’m glad for other people now to have an opportunity to read this book. Just talk a little bit about the book itself, how the concept came about, and how it’s at the point of release.
Greg Gifford: It came about originally as I was trying to figure out what was the reason for the secular therapeutic gaining such traction. As a biblical counselor, I think at times we’re just like, “Yeah. Well, I mean, there’s just something off.” But we haven’t always done a great job at putting our finger on the why.
For those of the listeners that aren’t aware, Dale was my faculty, my chair. That’s the term. He was my chair for my dissertation, and he always pushed me to get at the why. I think I came into the PhD more of like a how kind of guy—like how do we help people? But you taught me how to get back to the ideas that were undergirding that methodology.
Originally, I just thought, “Well, let me get to the ideas that were undergirding this faulty worldview, the secular therapeutic worldview.” As I began to research and read, I’d kind of traced my way back to the father of mental health and mental hygiene, Clifford Whittingham Beers. I read his autobiography and learned that he started to use the mind and the brain interchangeably—and that’s when it hit me like a lightning bolt; a lightning bolt hitting SpongeBob. I was like, Eureka! I mean, honestly, I almost leapt up out of my chair like, that’s the issue. When you read the Bible and you talk about inner man, outer man, that distinction. Even if you’re a trichotomist and you want to have multiple parts of the inner man, everybody knows there is a distinction between inner man and outer man.
But when you read the early days of mental health, which was called mental hygiene. When you read that, there was no distinction. It was the mind being studied by mental health experts, psychiatric hospitals, medical doctors. I just like, I got lost in the research. And then I began to find that permeated everything about the mental health movement. I mean, even the term mental health and mental illness, that’s medical terminology. And so, you’re using medical health terminology. Would I ever say mind bruise, a mental contusion, mental abrasion? Would I ever say that?
And almost all of us as listeners, you’re like, no. Well, why not? Because it doesn’t make sense. Yes, that is what we’re wondering about mental health. Why are we using medicalized terminology for the mind when biblically the mind is not material? So, I’ll get to maybe the nature of the mind and the brain here in a second, but that’s really how it all started, is this trail. And so, a friend/boss, Todd Friel—you know, I’m a fellow at Fortis Institute—I just went to him with my manuscript, and I said, “Hey Todd, you know, this is a little old manuscript.” I mean like, measly me… it’s like crumpled, written in crayon and I’m like, “Hey, you know, Todd, would you be interested in this?” And he’s like, “Probably not, but I’ll take a look.” And he did. And then he pitched it to Harper Collins and Harper Collins said, “Oh yeah, oh yeah, we are super in on this.” And that’s what became Lies My Therapist Told Me.
Dale Johnson: As I mentioned, I’m looking forward to this and it’s always fun to hear the backstory of how a book comes to fruition and the story behind it. You’ve given us a little bit of the history, but as we look now, what has been promised in the mental health world for so long that we’re right around the corner from major discoveries. We see this massive amount of progress in the world of mental health, and we’re excited about what could happen is the sort of secular narrative.
But in recent days, that’s changed. What we’ve seen is actually a mental health crisis. We’ve seen the most unwell generation from a mental health perspective in the history of mankind. Talk about what this mental health crisis is. You sort of alluded to how we got here. And when you think philosophically—like you mentioned, the inclusion of mind and brain being the same—but talk a little bit about what got us here. What is the crisis that we’re talking about in mental health currently?
Greg Gifford: Yeah, of course it’s, it’s reaching epidemic status. One in five people have a mental illness disorder. 1 in 5, not 1 in 500, not 1 in 50, not 1 in 5,000, 1 in 5 are diagnosed. 1 out of 20 are said to have a significance—this is the national alliance for mental health. These aren’t Greg Gifford’s numbers. I’m not cooking the books. Here it in Lies My Therapist Told Me, like read the book. I would encourage you to fact check me, look at my footnotes, double check my math.
And you’re going to see that even though the mental health experts are growing in number, the problem is growing as well. And you may say, “Well, of course, because we can now recognize the problem.” But what if we had a group of experts that were studying the lung and treating, you know, like pulmonology issues, and they were making our lungs worse. There was more lung cancer than before they started. Your nose and throat doctors, as they grow—all of a sudden, instead of seeing cures and help, we’re actually seeing diagnosis and treatment with no cure being offered. We would be like, “leave me alone. Like keep your stethoscope off my throat.?
I don’t even know if that’s possible, but that’s the way that the mental health enterprise is rolling right now. We’ve never had this many psychiatrists and now we have more mental health disorders than we’ve ever had. Never had this many therapists, never had this many school psychologists. We’ve never had this many psychologists overall, and we’ve never had these many mental health problems. And you got to think like, isn’t this weird to anybody? Like, aren’t you just a little bit skeptical that they’re not really helping?
And I’ve tried to say this over and over, I say it in the book, you can be well intended and still be iatrogenic. You can create problems even though you didn’t mean to. So, here’s the fundamental question that you as the listener are having to wrestle with. If the secular therapeutic enterprise is getting worse, shouldn’t you step back for a second and just say, “is there legitimacy to what they’re saying, or does the Bible have something else?”
Here’s the crux of the matter. Does the secular therapist genuinely understand people and the mind accurately? And if you don’t, then of course every wrong diagnosis will lead to a wrong prognosis. Every day, all day, every way, by the bay, that’s just what’s going to happen. So, if you get the problem wrong, you’ll get the solution wrong. And that’s exactly where we’re at. And now, we have absurd levels of mental illnesses. Even unbelievers are questioning the legitimacy of certain mental illnesses.
Dale Johnson: And that’s kind of where I want to go. You mentioned several things that I think are critical in sort of assessing where we are currently. You use this word iatrogenic, and that word just simply means the unintended negative consequences that happen. And most people would approach therapy sort of this way, Greg. They would say something like, “well, you know, it can’t hurt. I think I’m just going to try it. Maybe it could be helpful. I’ve tried some other things. They’ve not really worked out. I don’t really want to get on medicine. I sort of want to do this therapy thing or whatever, because yeah, medicine might be harmful or whatever.”
So, they try the secular therapy thing, not realizing that this isn’t neutral. Like if I come out and I’m not helped, it’s not a big deal. But in reality, what we’re seeing, as you just mentioned, is that there are iatrogenic effects because it shapes the way people think about life and how they approach life and what they think is good and bad and true and right and so on.
Talk a little bit about like, okay, we’ve been told this narrative that there’s massive progress happening, yet what we see is growing mental health issues and crisis. How in the world did we get to this particular place where there was so much hype that’s not been realized? As you mentioned, I mean, I could list off a bibliography so long with seculars, total God haters, who are seeing this happen in the secular world. So, talk about how we got here.
Greg Gifford: Well, not to give credit to whom credit is not due, but I think we could give old Charles Darwin a high five on this one and say, “thank you for naturalism, big boy,” because it really does go back to kind of a history of thought. And Darwin was born out of the opportunity from the enlightenment to exalt reason and to come up with this absurd theory that we are the result of natural selection. So, naturalism. We’re all born a naturalist until we’re saved? No 1 Corinthians 2 pun intended.
So, I think by default, we’re looking for naturalistic explanations. And in all seriousness, our counselees think like they’re wondering like, what is it about my body that’s causing this? That’s your default setting. And how did we get there? I think you could trace it back to Charles Darwin, to William James, to now from the father of American psychology. Entering all of these, these different methodologies that psychologists can use now. Even in modern times, when we get sick as Christians, we are typically looking for a physical explanation first. And it’s ironic at times, cause you’re like, “I think this is stress related. I think you’re not sleeping because you’re anxious and stressed.” And the person’s like, “no, there’s something in my body. I got to find the body answer,” and we’re like, “Okay… good luck.”
So why does that matter and how does that connect to this? Because basically in the eighties, there were these promises of psychiatry, biological psychiatry, that there must be a brain issue. A lot of talk about the brain, problems of the brain, and we’re at the cusp of identifying that these are really illnesses of the brain. So, in the late nineties at a white house conference, Hillary Clinton, Stephen Hyman, there was one more name I’m forgetting off the top of my head, but it’s in the book. They talk about mental illnesses as brain illnesses. And these are real illnesses of a real organ, the brain. Just like there can be heart disease, there can be brain disease.
But even in that, you’re confusing brain disease with a mental illness. Like we know there are brain diseases, Alzheimer, dementia, like of course there’s brain diseases. So, what biological psychiatry did is promised it was about to find a cure and it never did. Oh, this is awesome. I love this. It makes me laugh. Now you go to a medical doctor, i.e. a psychiatrist, and they don’t even study the organ of the brain. It’s like a game of hot and cold with the DSM. How do you feel? Depressed. How long have you felt depressed? Six months. All right. This is becoming a chronic problem. Instead of looking at the organ of the brain, which the psychiatrist is supposed to be treating in the first place.
So, I don’t recommend the Daniel Amen’s clinics. I think that there’s a secular attempt to now put it back all in the brain. But Amen is known for this, this wacky statement where he says, “Psychiatrists don’t even treat the organ they’re supposed to be treating, which is the brain.” And so, you had these promises that biological psychiatry was going to find something which it never found. And then now we just assume, you know. I’m just going to talk about myself as a commoner, a layman in the church. We just assume there’s a brain issue when there’s no medical evidence, there’s a brain issue. And how did we get there? Well, back to Darwin, to the eighties of biological psychiatry.
And now we just think something is there when we have no evidence. So that’s what popularized ideas like the chemical imbalance theory—serotonin must be connected to depression, so we’re going to give you antidepressants. But there was no medical evidence. There’s still no medical evidence that that is the case. So, we are by default looking for a body answer. And this kind of gave us a hook on which to hang some of our presuppositions. It’s like, oh, that’s why I’m sad. I must have a brain issue. And yet we have no medical evidence to suggest that you do have a brain issue and that’s why you’re sad.
Dale Johnson: Yeah. What you’re describing are ideas that became prevalent. I call these their explanatory power. They give us some sort of concept that makes us feel like our life and what we’re experiencing can be explained in some way. And so, you’ve given us a sort of how we got here, what the landscape really is. Talk a little bit about solutions. Obviously, you can’t be exhaustive in the few minutes that we have, but give some form of solution. How do we even start to combat the overwhelming tidal wave that is hitting us now? And people are starting to realize that there’s emptiness in that secular idea. Where do we begin with solutions for some of the problems you’re describing?
Greg Gifford: Let me try to turn a corner and I’ll try not to be Mr. Storytime today. I feel like an old man over here. I do think it’s rude at times for biblical counselors to say, “Well, that ain’t true.” And we’re like, “Okay, well reconstruct something for us.” It’s like, “Well, I don’t know, but that’s dumb.” And we’re like, “Oh, well, thank you, Mr. or Mrs. Helpful.” But I’d never wanted to accomplish that in this book. I never wanted to just critique and not correct.
And the book, Lies My Therapist, told me it is really about biblically clarifying the mind and the brain. In fact, that was what my proposed title originally was, let’s call it Mind Vs. Brain. And the publisher was like, that doesn’t make any sense at all. Like you’re, no one knows what you’re going to be talking about. And I was like, okay, fine. Transformed Mind. And they were like, “Nooo, stop talking.” And so finally I was like, “Okay, well, what do you think it should be?”
So, this is the progression of what’s the solution. The solution is to start to use more accurate biblical language. That’s the solution. And this is junior varsity use of the Scripture. This isn’t even sophisticated scholarly. Junior varsity is the mind is not the brain and the brain is not the mind. Like let’s cut that straight. Number one, are you talking about a brain issue? And if you are, what evidence is there from the brain that that is a brain issue? Or are you talking about the mind? The mind is the immaterial seat of cognition. It is where your reason is. It’s the faculty of your intellect. That’s your mind.
Romans 12:2: “You are transformed by the renewal of your mind.” Ephesians 4:23: “By the renewing of your mind.” So, the mind is not the brain, and the brain is not the mind. So instead of just saying, “Well, that’s dumb.” I think what we can start to say is, “Yeah, they don’t really understand the mind and the brain, do they, huh?”
As a Christian, I want to understand the world the way God describes it. And the solution, the starting point, is to say, Is this a mind or a brain issue? Mind or brain? The secular therapeutic has swallowed both and collapsed them on themselves where it’s brain here, mind there, mental illnesses or issues of the brain… but there’s no proof it’s a brain issue. So, what you do as a Christian, you have to start to be discerning and skeptical. What are you discerning? What’s the baseline of your discernment in this area? The mind brain distinction.
Because guys, if we’re just paying attention a little bit and the school psychologist says, “I want to test your kid for ADHD, which is a mental illness/disorder,” you should be discerning to say, “Well, don’t you want to take their temperature? Don’t you want to scan their brain? You’re using medicalized terminology and a written paper test to diagnose them.” Like, don’t you want to bring in a general practitioner here? That’s the discerning part. And if you’re discerning, then you will be more skeptical and you will push back on this. It’s like I’m looking for the right word, an inundation of the therapeutic. We’re inundated with there must be a therapeutic reason for why you do what you do. So, I think your solution is to start to say—and even people will joke with me now, your solution is to say, “Is that the mind or is that the brain? Mind, brain, brain. And that is the starting point for good, accurate biblical help.
Dale Johnson: I love it. I think that’s well said. Just a couple of things. I want to get your maybe last thoughts on this, Greg. Because some people may hear this and they say, “Well, you’re just creating a dichotomy between mind and brain,” when the reality is that anything that happens in the mind, we’re going to see flesh out in the body. But just because something can be demonstrated in the body doesn’t mean it was caused by the body.
This is demonstrating this healthy interaction that the Bible describes in a holistic way from mind to brain. But we have to see that the brain is not dictating the inner man. 2 Corinthians 4 makes that very clear—that even when the outer man is decaying, the inner man can be renewed day by day. There is a consistent flow in Jesus’s anthropology, where he describes flowing from the inside out. This is building from Old Testament Scripture, Proverbs 4:23: the heart is a wellspring of life guarding it with all diligence, right? In Matthew 15:18, Jesus picks up on this idea. He uses concepts agriculturally to talk about trees and where this fruit comes from. So, we’re not saying that these things are in two totally separate worlds. But what we are saying is when we’re looking at the cause, we have to start asking the question, because the secularist is describing one thing that’s really unfounded. And you’re helping to see how they’re making this mistake. So, just a final thought on that concept of mind and brain.
Greg Gifford: Yeah, this is an important distinction. And it was actually, I forget, I think it was the 2024 ACBC, maybe the 2023 conference. I did a session on the mind and the brain. Afterward, a guy came up to me who was speaking to me through an American Sign Language translator, and he said, “What about dementia and Alzheimer’s?” And I hadn’t made that clear and it wasn’t really clear in my own mind at that time.
Well, the brain is best to be understood like a filter through which your mind is expressing itself. But easy, this is easy money. You could prove this all day, that you can be brain dead and yet your mind is operational. I just think that through. Think even if your timing is different from my own in times, there will be a future resurrection of your body and your body includes your brain, the organ of your brain. So why does that matter? Because you can be brain dead, and your mind can be operational.
Oh, all right. So, think of those that have genuine brain diseases and there are genuine brain diseases. Their brain, as you just mentioned, is deteriorating, but yet their mind can actually be renewed day by day. So, you have a brain that’s deteriorating. That doesn’t create a worldview problem for a Christian. In fact, all of our brains are deteriorating. Some are faster and slower than others. It depends on how many cartoons you watched as a kid—I think that’s the empirical reason. I’m doomed, in other words.
When we think of that, which gives you causation. What’s the driver? You are not hijacked by your brain. You’re not the sum total of what your brain is doing to you. It’s, at least, a very close relationship for sure. And at times it’s not always clear what’s the source, but biblically we can say your mind is the driver. And even I think plasticity of the brain speaks to this, the plasticity that your brain can heal and change and grow.
Just look at a drug addict who gets clean and watches their brain actually rehabilitate. How does that show you that the mind of Christ actually promotes a healthy brain? Why? Because of causation, man, causation. That’s easy stuff. So, guys patch together what you know about the mind and the brain, and then you’re able to attribute causation. Of course there’s influence from the brain, but where does causation come from? The mind.
Dale Johnson: Very helpful. I appreciate the clarity. Listen, we’re getting into so much here and there’s so much in the book that I want to make sure we get to. I’m going to ask you to come back next week. We’re going to deal with this subject a little bit more and even further. So, thanks for your time today. Looking forward to next week as we continue to talk about Lies My Therapist Told Me. We’ll see you guys again next week.
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