Morning Wire - Why Therapy Can’t Heal the Soul: A Christian Case for Mind Renewal | 12.28.25

Episode Date: December 28, 2025

Does Christianity have the answers for a culture fixated on mental health? Dr. Greg Gifford of The Master’s University makes the case in a discussion with Daily Wire Culture Reporter Megan Basham, as well as in his book, “Lies My Therapist Told Me.” Get the facts first with Morning Wire. - - - Ep. 2554 - - - Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 - - - Today's Sponsor: Quince - Go to https://Quince.com/WIRE for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy morning wire,morning wire podcast,the morning wire podcast,Georgia Howe,John Bickley,daily wire podcast,podcast,news podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Despite living in a mental health culture amid the growing prevalence of psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric medication, we've seen skyrocketing cases of mental health issues in America. How did we find ourselves in this current mental health crisis and does Christianity have any answers? Those are the questions that Dr. Greg Gifford set out to answer, the findings of which he documents in his influential book titled Lies My Therapist Told Me. In this episode, Daily Wire Culture reporter Megan Basham speaks with Gifford about the shortcomings of secular psychiatric treatment, including the growing trend of overdiagnosis and misguided self-care, and how he believes the Bible provides the way to win the battles of the mind. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley. This is a special edition of Morning Wire.

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but yours is a little broader than that. And I wondered if you could start out by telling us kind of this big, hairy question, are Americans overdiagnosed with mental health issues? Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me. And I do agree that it's been a popular topic because the therapeutic self is everywhere, and that's in the church and outside of the church. People are identifying with therapeutic terminology and seeing themselves according to their diagnoses. So are we overdiagnosed? Yes, absolutely. And we have arbitrary criteria to diagnose mental illnesses, and we also have incentivized reasons for a diagnosis. So what happens as that continues is you can't prove a person has a mental illness, a so-called mental illness, or you

you can't prove they don't have it. And then you incentivize receiving a mental illness. So it just, it's inflation and it just keeps growing and growing and growing. And I think we're all at the point where we're just kind of skeptical and we're trying to be discerning about what's true and what's false. What does that do when you see young people, say, putting themselves on the spectrum or absorbing other mental health diagnosis that they may not even have gotten from a doctor. They just sort of read an online article and decided, this is me. What does that do to how we function? Right. I mean, imagine being told since you were 10 that you had ADHD and you actually conceptualize your own giftedness through therapeutic terminology. So what does that do? It changes what really, really matters. So God actually identifies who we are, not secular therapeutic terminology. But if I conceptualize my own giftedness through secular therapeutic terminology, I can't do this, I can't focus, I can't function, I need these things. And before long, it's now my identity.

Like, this is who I am. And I'm just tugging at a little bit of, are you sure that's who you are? Can you give an example of how they might absorb it as their identity? Yeah. So imagine you can be diagnosed as young as three with a mental illness, a so-called mental illness. Imagine being in puberty, guy, girl, and then now you're told this is why you do what you do because you're depressed. or you're anxious or you have ADHD, and those are the top three mental illnesses.

So now, let's say from an 11 or 12-year-old, you just think about yourself with this type of terminology. You know, I can't because of my depression, and I'm sad, I need to stay home today, or I can't function today. I can't sit still. I'm hyperactive because of my ADHD. And why do you believe that?

Well, in part, because that's what you were told you are and probably told by a school psychologist who used arbitrary methods to test you and diagnose you, so someone that's not a medical doctor. So in that way, like your most foundational self-conceptualization is now being informed by therapeutic terminology instead of informed by who God says you are or the truth of scripture. Is it a question of financial gain? Is it a question of ideology? Or why do you see a mental health profession sort of foisting this terminology in these labels?

on people who may not need them. Right. You know, we could make it nefarious and say there is this underbelly of the psychotropic medication industry or the secular therapeutic enterprise. And there is money to be made. But I think what we're seeing, Megan, is that when you believe that all that there is is natural explanation. So when you have a naturalistic worldview, then you're looking for a naturalistic category

to explain what's happening in your inner person. So mental health steps in to that arbitrary inner man or outer man category. We're not sure if this is really a issue of your body or if this is something immaterial in your inner man. And they step in with these seemingly naturalistic explanations and they find a crowd that's receptive to it. It's like, oh, that explains why I'm sad because of a chemical imbalance. I guess I'm sad. I guess it's something to do with my body. So I wouldn't argue it's like a nefarious system.

I would argue naturalism has set the stage for us. to blame things on our brain that are not truly brain issues. Okay, I'm glad you bring that up because one of the key points in your book that was really fascinating to me was how you separated the brain from the mind and said, we are approaching this in the wrong way. So can you talk about that a little bit why they're conflating brain and mind? Sure. We're looking to blame things and find a reason and causation. Now, the idea was with mental health that let's invest in the health of your mind, but as a Christian, have to pause and say, but wait a minute, is your mind material or immaterial? And I think even as

non-Christian, you have to ask that question, what animates your body? Does anything animate your body? Soul, mind, spirit, whatever you're calling it. So biblically, there is a difference between the organ of your brain and your immaterial mind. And what you can see in the book is I just demonstrate how the mental health movement has actually confused the brain and the mind and used medical terminology to describe the immaterial mind. And our mind is not material. You can't touch it. You can't put it under a microscope. You can't study it with scientific methods because it's immaterial. So you're then having to say, but so wait a minute, if there's no evidence that it's coming from my brain, could this really be an issue of my mind and not my brain? That's one of the central

points of the book. And if it's an issue of the mind and not the brain, how do you approach it differently in terms of treating it. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I love that question. Thank you for that. Yeah. Well, I mean, you're not going to use medicine to fix it, right? Like, I'm not going to use physical remedies to fix it. I have to begin to say, well, wait a minute, like what affects my mind, what changes thoughts and reason and cognition and intellect? And we know that God's word is truth, and we know that it is what we are called to conform our minds to so that we have the mind of Jesus. So when I say we, it's saying, okay, a Christian should be thinking very carefully. Romans 12, 2, you're transformed by the renewal of your mind.

And that is what it means to grow in sanctification. So as a Christian, if you're saying, wait a minute, I need to go to my psychologist, my therapist, to help me with my mind. I'm saying, no, I think you should actually go to your church. and look to your pastor and look to the means of grace that God has provided to bring about mind renewal, which is what the Bible calls it. And you're going to see better results than what your psychologist was ever going to provide for you. You know, on a physical standpoint, too, I have to say I've seen a lot of, say, Instagram posts from young women saying, actually I started exercising and I felt better. I started lifting weights and I felt better. I changed my diet and I felt better. What role does that kind of thing play into this, just, you know, the physical?

Yeah, good because it's a stewardship of your outer person. And that stewardship of your body, to include the health of your brain, would affect the symptoms of how you feel. So if you're underrested, eating poorly, you know, like binging on social media and television, then of course what happens is you physically feel worse. But you got to remember, like you can have a healthy body and yet still have a mind that has significant issues. Like you can't exercise away dark thoughts. and you can't exercise away anxious thoughts. So dark thoughts, anxious thoughts. We know that there's skyrocketing rates of depression, medicine use.

We know there's skyrocketing rates of people taking anti-anxiety meds. What does that do to a culture, to a people? And we're starting to see some studies now saying we don't even know that these drugs are working in the way that they think they're working. Oh, yeah. What does it do to a culture? It focuses us on the wrong problem. and then we start to look at that problem with the wrong solutions. And you can't help but look at just some of the fast facts of one in five U.S. adults has a mental illness. One in six U.S. children

have a mental illness. One in ten are taking psychotropics. So the problem's not getting better. Even though the mental health industry is rising, there's never been this many psychiatrist, therapist, psychologists. Even though that's growing, the problem's getting worse. And we should pause and say, So wait a minute, like what if we've misdiagnosed the nature of the problem? And that's why it's getting worse. And that's exactly what I'm trying to argue is, yes, if you confuse the mind and the brain and you make up arbitrary labels and call them brain issues, you're going to make everything worse. And that's going to tank a society and a culture because now we're immobilized with these arbitrary labels that they don't have any scientific grounding. Okay. Now I want to throw maybe a provocative question at you. because obviously a lot of this ideology has come into the church. And to give you one specific example, the group Better Health. They become major advertisers with groups like Christianity Today and other Christian companies.

And yet, you know, personally, when I started investigating them, you go onto their site and they will ask you how you identify in terms of your gender, what your pronouns are, if you're attracted to men or women. And they will then connect you to an LGBTQ counselor. Okay. And that is an affirming counselor. And so I look at the church and I wonder, to what degree have we abdicated our role and how is that impacting this issue? Yeah, to a great degree.

What we have is pastors that are really trafficking in psychological tips and tricks instead of teaching us the Bible, which is what we fundamentally need. So we're now looking at our pastor who should be teaching the Bible and it's more like our therapist on a Sunday morning. So your question I think is very helpful. but there's like twofold reasons why. One is that pastors have been trained in secular psychological methodology. So they're actually employing what Freud has taught or Rogers has taught. And you're thinking like, okay, like I thought I was here for the Bible. And that's a huge challenge.

So I'm looking to my pastor, but then he gives me psychological tips. The other is that we don't see our pastor is qualified to actually talk about those. You know, we need an expert and a mental health expert at that. So when the troubles of life get really deep, some of us think like, oh, like my pastor's well-intending. You know, he's cute. Like, he's been around the church for a while. Like, shh, they're there. But I'm going to go to a psychologist who really knows how to deal with this stuff.

And I would argue that your pastor, when trained in theology well and they have godly character, they are more qualified than your psychologist or therapist to speak into those deep inner-person issues. So give them a chance. go talk to them and see what wisdom they would share on the issue. So what role has the DSM played in this? I mean, you're pretty heavily critical of it in your book, and I wonder if you can kind of walk us through that and why. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, first of all, its intent was to provide categories,

but it's entirely symptom-based diagnosing. And what that means is we don't have an empirical way to validate that you have a mental illness. you describe your symptoms verbally, and then we try to match those to a category in the DSM. So it's played a very foundational role because it's somewhat like an index, a code, the common language of the secular therapeutic,

and that common language is one that's very arbitrary now, but it's still the common language. So we're having to now deal with the ramifications of a DSM that keeps changing. Through each addition, you have new diagnoses or you have changed diagnoses. I mentioned that in the book as well. There's no scientific evidence to demonstrate why one diagnosis was dropped and another was added.

So now we have this like weird, clunky, symptomatic book that we're using to articulate problems when that book has significant problems in and of itself, especially in terms of verifiability. Like how do we know that's true or how do we prove you have that? So a patient comes to you and says, I'm struggling with depression. I'm just having dark thoughts. These are the issues I'm going through. What are the first things you're going to do as someone who has concerns about how the therapeutic community has handled these issues? What are you telling them to do first?

Yeah, you're going to ask them good questions on what they mean by depression. And you're going to then start to dig into when did it start? How long has it been going on? Has something changed in your health? what's going on in your thought life, which is your mind. And you're going to get all of that data, and then you're going to begin to help them synthesize what's happening through the lens of scripture, not using therapeutic terminology. In all fairness, there may be medical issues, actual medical issues, that are influencing your moods of sadness. That's totally fair. But we're not going to immediately

jump to a medical explanation, especially if there's no evidence of one. And that differs a lot from what you describe in the book, from how, a secular therapist is going to approach this issue. So, I mean, at that point, if someone is not a believer, what do you say to them in terms of, okay, you don't trust the Bible. You're not a Christian. You're not following this. But you're struggling with depression. Can that person be healed through secular means? Not ultimately, no. They can trade symptoms and they can alleviate pains, but they can't really deal with the root of the issue. The root of the issue is that you have an estranged relationship with God,

and you can't expect your mind to feel well when you are not submitting to the Lord, ultimately. And there can even be an argument made that sadness is a natural result of rejecting God's will for your life, so you're not going to be happy and peaceful and joyful if you're rejecting God's good plans. And that's part of his means of drawing, you to himself. So no, you can help rearrange fruit. You can help deal with symptoms, but you're

not really treating the root of the issue. Okay. And to throw another provocative question at you, I have read a number of essays that describe the book, The Body Keeps the Score, as Junk Science. There was a pretty famous essay in First Things recently that dealt with why they don't take this book seriously. And yet a lot of people do. A lot of people take it very seriously. So talk to me about the body keeps the score, its influence, and what you think about its premise. Yeah, good. I mean, I do mention it in lies my therapist told me because Vander Kolk has become like this pop culture expert, quote unquote expert in the way trauma affects a person. The significant challenges that he faces is that he can't identify what is traumatic and what is not. And that's not to get

rid of trauma altogether. But he's not talking about like a brain injury or he's not talking about an explosion where you've actually been physically hurt in some way. He's talking about how you see and perceive trauma and how you interpret worldview challenges and the way that that now imprints itself onto your body. So the whole thesis is your body actually keeps the score of traumatic events in your life and so you've got to treat the body in order to deal with your trauma. But the linchpin in that is how does your body get the trauma? And that comes through your immaterial mind the way that you interpret traumatic events. In fact, Christians with a biblical worldview know what to do with suffering.

We know what to do with sin. We know what to do with afterlife. Like, we have a worldview that can support traumatic moments. So there's greater evidence that a Christian can deal with trauma better than someone without a biblical worldview because we know how to deal with the big questions of life. So what Van der Kolk was doing, it's similar to like the chemical imbalance theory that became so popular. Vanderkoke was more hypothesizing the way that trauma affects a person, but there are significant problems not only with his science, but with his basic worldview, which is how does the trauma get to your body? That comes through your inner person. That comes through your mind.

Do you see trauma escalation? Because I see that term thrown around all the time now, where people are saying I was traumatized by this difficult conversation I had with someone. And it feels like we've just gotten, I don't know another word to use for it other than soft. Like, I am traumatized by having had an uncomfortable confrontation with someone. What does that do to us to sort of think that we're all traumatized? Yeah, right. I mean, what does it do for us to lack tenacity is what you're asking? You know, like, what does it do for us to not have perseverance in difficult times? And is that a positive thing? You know, there's two elements. One is that I think we can be compassionate and yet still call a person to persevere all the more. And as difficult as that

circumstance was that it doesn't have to define them. And they can grow through that. I mean, that's that's the biblical understanding of trials. God uses trials to make you stronger in character and fortitude and persevere through that. So if you weaponize trauma as a means of being unfaithful or to use your term soft, or to shield responsibility or deflect responsibility, you've overstepped the line because even if you've been traumatized, and some people have significant,

if we're using that term trauma, some people have that. But the reality is that you don't have to let that define who you are. And that's biblically, that's practically, that's fundamentally. Your trauma doesn't determine who you are. God has given you the grace to choose how you're going to respond to that traumatic moment. And if you're going to get flaky, then the reality is that's not because of your trauma.

That's because of your response to your trauma. That's a good point. I mean, I just see the term used so much now to apply to so many things. And, you know, as someone who's been through some stuff, I look at it and go, you know, these things brought me to where I am. They have made me stronger. And yet so many young women are kind of buying into the trauma, self-care ideology. And to me, they kind of go hand in hand.

So I'd love for you to maybe just comment really quickly. on the self-care trend, too. I'll be honest, it kind of irritates me. There's, I don't know, there's maybe an edge of selfishness to it, but maybe I'm wrong. What do you think? Oh, it's totally myopic. It's me at the center of my life. And, you know, there's a such thing as stewarding and trying to be faithful and

steward your body well. But self-care is often, I need this in order to be such and such. You know, I need my gem time. I need my whole food lunch. I need this. I need this. So I think the reality is that, yes, you want to be a good student. but your life is not about you ultimately. And that sounds like a great way to be miserable to just

focus on how you feel and practice your self-care all day. Rather, you're called to give because that's better than receiving, or you're called to have the mind of Christ, which is to consider others' interests more important than your own. So self-care is more like self-worship for many people. So when you have a patient come to you and they're sitting there and they're telling you about the issues they're struggling with, how do you like quickly, I guess, or maybe you don't do it quickly. Delineate between I am dealing with what I think is a physical problem here versus I am dealing what I think is with what is a spiritual problem. Yeah, good. We try to rule out all medical issues. So our first step is, okay, whatever testing we can get you through MRI, CTs, labs,

let's get those and rule out any medical issues. And if there are none, then let's turn the corner and say, okay, what's happening in your inner person that's encouraging these things. So depression is a great example. If a guy's looking at pornography and there's no physiological issue going on, then we're going to dive in on, hey, man, like, how should you think about pornography from God's perspective? And you'll see that the sadness, the shame, the guilt, some of those things that come with looking at pornography, those are going to go away. And that's not an issue of your body. That's an issue of your mind and your soul that really need to be dealt with. So we're kind of redefining things like sin as psychological issues. Like, I feel guilt and that's not good, whereas scripture would say,

well, you feel guilt because you're sinning. Yeah, right. Right. And it's like, well, do we want you to just feel better or do we want you to turn from your sin, which will result in you feeling better? And so if I just focus on the feelings, I'm missing the root cause. So it's not to say all depression comes from sin, but some of it definitely does. Okay, so one more maybe provocative question. You said that on the last one, by the way. I know. Did I go say one more? I don't know, but... Well, obviously, when you look at the DSM, when you look at the mental health field, it has been used over time to justify aberrant sexual behaviors and identities

and to legitimize things that a lot of people think should never have been legitimized. So as someone who actually works in the mental health profession, but has biblical convictions, how do you grapple with that? I think that's the skeleton in the closet of the DSM, that the DSM is not made sexual addiction. a mental disorder. And why is that a skeleton in the closet? Because you can't define what normal sexual behavior is if you don't have absolute truth.

If you don't have a biblical worldview, it's increasingly hard to say what's aberrant and what's normative. So that's the whole crux of the issue. It's like, well, we would love to say the wackos of the world that have gone to an extreme have a mental disorder, but you can't define what right looks like to begin with.

So that skeleton in the closet is, it's part of the book. It's one of the explanations that I show, like the arbitrary nature of mental health diagnosing. So in that way, I would just, I would zoom out and say, if you don't have absolute truth, you can't define what aberrant sexual behavior looks like, which puts back. You need a ruler. Which is where the Bible is and has always been.

Like we need a ruler to say, okay, what defines right and wrong? Is it your preference? Is it my preference? Is it what's hurting a person? Or is it that there's a greater truth outside of ourself that really defines sexual purity or sexual deviancy. Well, I enjoyed the book very much, and we appreciate you so much for joining us. Thank you.

That was Dr. Greg Gifford, author of Lies My Therapist Told Me, and this has been a special edition of Morning Wire.