“Is it a mental disorder?” MacArthur asked. “No…It’s life. It’s life. This is life. People have grief. Life is very difficult. It’s hard…Life is hard. Life is challenging. Life is disappointing. There’s lots of disillusion, there’s lots of pain, lots of suffering, lots of abuse.”
“How you deal with that is critical if you’re going to live out your life,” he added, saying that it is “criminal” to prescribe “15 different psychotropic drugs to mask the reality that you can’t deal with life and create more problems.”
MacArthur said the result of such treatment is “you eventually [wind] up on Skid Row under a bridge living in half a tent. This is being done to children, and it’s criminal. It’s criminal.”
Rather than mental illness, “absent fathers, devastated marriages, absent mothers, no family support, high rate of divorce, abuse, disappointment, and lack of love,” are a few reasons MacArthur believes “we have a generation of people who can’t cope with life.”
“Particularly the breakdown of the family,” he stressed. “Because the family is where you learn how to live life.”
“It’s where you watch people suffer and handle it,” he continued, “but where you have a society that [doesn’t] have those kinds of resources, don’t have those families to turn to, you’re going to have more dysfunctional people.”
MacArthur said that there was once a time when “people turned to pastors in the church and in religion, and now the new religion is psychology and psychiatry.”
“You turn to them, and they don’t have any answer, because they don’t even understand that the problem is not physiological. It’s not a disease,” he said.
Unlike drugs like insulin that are used to deal with diabetes, “when you take drugs for whatever your disorder is, that doesn’t attack the disorder. That attacks you and creates another disorder,” MacArthur argued. “The inability to cope with life now, because you’re living in some kind of altered state. It’s horrendous, what’s happening to children.”
“All the drugs don’t help people,” he added.
“I think it’s important for people who have these kinds of problems—and we all do—to talk to somebody else,” MacArthur said. “We need help. We need moms and dads, and brothers and sisters, and grandmas and grandpas, and friends and mentors, and teachers and counselors, and everybody who can kind of teach us how to develop skills to live life.”
