Can I Trust Psychiatry?

In this episode of Wake Up, Look Up, Pastor Zach unpacks a growing conversation around mental health, psychiatry, and the reality that many psychological diagnoses are more complex and evolving than most people realize. He explores the value of therapy, counseling, and medical care while challenging the idea that every struggle can be solved by a label or prescription alone. Pastor Zach encourages believers to embrace both practical help and spiritual truth, reminding us that while medicine can support healing, lasting transformation ultimately comes through the renewing work of Jesus Christ.

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Creators and Guests

Host

Zach Weihrauch

Follower of Jesus who has graciously given me a wife to love, children to shepherd, and a church to pastor.

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Check out new episodes of our daily podcast, Wake Up, Look Up, with Zach Weihrauch as he interprets what's happening in our world through the lens of the gospel.

Hello everyone, and thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch and in today's episode, we're asking the question, can I trust psychiatry? This is prompted by an opinion piece I read in the New York Times recently by, believe it or not, a psychiatry professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. And it was a great article, a great opinion piece, and what he was basically saying is helping people to understand how psychiatry works. He was talking about diagnosis like, adhd, bipolar, autism. He was saying, hey, these kinds of diagnosis, they're not like when you go to a doctor to check out your heart or your liver or your brain and you're told you have cancer or you don't, you have this condition or you don't. A. psychiatry doesn't work that way. It is about brain imaging and brain chemistry. it's about spectrums and conditions that evolve over time. So basically, he's saying when you're told you have adhd, adhd, he's saying you have more of these kind of, manifestations than not more than an, average person. So we're gonna label it under this umbrella term to describe what's going on with you, and then we're gonna try some medications and therapies to see what clicks. In other words, he's saying psychiatry is an inexact science. And, things like anxiety, sadness, they can be, the cause. They can also just be an adaptive warning system for something else that's going on. In fact, kind of his central claim is that your mental health problems are not caused by a simple thing that you either have or don't have. I resonated with this opinion piece because I attended, a, talk once at Cleveland State where I heard a professor of psychology talking. He was saying, hey, you need to understand we don't know what healthy brain chemistry is. Not really. There's still so much about the brain we're discovering. So when you're told you need these medications to raise your levels, we're guessing that isn't a bad thing. By the way I title it can I trust Psychiatry? And on a personal level, the answer is yes. People who give their lives to helping other people get healthy, are doing a good thing. I guess what I'm saying is if we think about psychiatry like it is thinking about having high cholesterol, we're thinking about it in a way that psychiatry itself doesn't think about itself. And I Say that because sometimes people, not always, but sometimes people that go down the psychiatry rabbit hole, and this is coming from someone who has gone to therapy, tend to make everything a psychiatric problem or a mental, social, emotional health problem, and then go looking for a one to one solution which may or may not exist. Certainly psychiatry has its purpose, therapy counseling has its purpose, but it's not the one size fits all concrete thing that maybe popular media has presented it to be. And I appreciated the humility and honesty and vulnerability of a professional who's saying, look, we're doing the best we can, but, but there are some things we don't know. And because the audience of this podcast is made up of Christians, I want to encourage you that even if you pursue psychiatric labels and psychiatric solutions, not to shelve spiritual ones. Because the promise of new life in Christ, what it means to be born again, to be made new, is not that we will be given mediciphins medicine for something even though that's okay, or labels for something even though that's okay, but that we would actually be changed. You know, God says in Ezekiel 36:26, I will give you a new heart and a new spirit I will put within you. I don't think being made new in Christ means you shouldn't go to the dentist or the doctor or even the psychiatrist, but the ultimate promise of being renewed, of being restored, of having the old go away. And it comes fundamentally through Christ. And I say that because sometimes we think about spiritual solutions or seeking counsel in scripture as being a little lower than a hard science like psychiatry. But what psychiatrists are saying is, hey, our science is not as hard as you think. There's still so much we're figuring out. And so I just want to encourage Christians away from an either or approach, either psychiatry or spirituality, and more of, a both. And there are good reasons to go to the dentist, to go to the doctor, to go see a therapist. But those reasons will never preclude going to the God who promises through his Holy Spirit the power of the scripture and the work of Jesus Christ to make you new both. And that's the way forward. Hey, thanks for watching this episode of Wake Up, Look Up. If you enjoyed it, please help us get the word out by sharing it with someone you think might benefit from it. And while you're here, make sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel to get further content or even download the CCC app, where you'll find even more resources to help you grow in your faith and relationship. With Jesus Christ.

Have an article you’d like Zach to discuss? Email us at [e-mail]!