Mental Illness: Insane Profits, Lifelong Customers, and Why the Church Should Be Talking About It

On July 24, 1972, biochemist David Wong identified a chemical he called “Lilly 110140,” which was effective in treating mental illness while avoiding the risks associated with the earlier drugs. The experimental drug made by the partnership of Wong, Ray Fuller, and Bryan Molloy was later dubbed Fluoxetine, and in December of 1987 it received FDA approval for the treatment of major depression. In the 1990’s it became synonymous with mental illness and its top-tier marketing gave it a snappy name, making it one of the best selling drugs of all time. You know it as Prozac.

A revolution was underway. No longer would medical practitioners focus on the underlying causes of mental illness; instead they would use pharmaceuticals – highly profitable pharmaceuticals – to mitigate symptoms. The goal shifted from curing troubled minds to managing a lifestyle.

Managing mental illness became a lifelong expenditure; patients were forced to choose between finding a quality psychotherapist and working hard to dig out root causes, or to just take a pill. Most chose the pills. The greater the mental struggle, the stronger the drug needed to cope with it, and for many patients there was/is no hope in sight other than the meds that get them through the day. From a medical perspective, a permanently refilled prescription and an insurance system to pay for it is the sole mechanism that allows them to function.

Jesus vs. Mental Illness

The church doesn’t like to talk about mental illness. Of the thousands of sermons I’ve heard, I’ve never once sat through a sermon on mental illness. Have you?

Why is that?

It’s not like mental illness isn’t a pressing matter for the church. Ask pastors, and they can probably relay a number of personal experiences with men, women, and children wrestling with mental illness and its effects on the lives of everyone in that person’s circle.

The secular medical establishment agrees, with global estimates of mental illness affecting 23-34% of the population. That makes mental illness one of the most pressing medical issues on earth…and the church is virtually silent on the matter. So why doesn’t the church discuss mental illness? Jesus certainly did; it was one of the focal points of His earthly ministry. Here are just some of the instances of Jesus dealing with mental illness:

“But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet and come out of him!” And when the demon had thrown him down in the midst of the people, he came out of him without doing him any harm.” – Luke 4:35 NKJV

“After the demon was cast out, the mute man spoke; and the crowds were amazed, and were saying, “Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel.” – Matthew 9:33 NAS

“And He healed many who were ill with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and He was not permitting the demons to speak, because they knew who He was.” – Mark 1:34 NIV

Spiritual warfare, and specifically the battlefield of the mind, is arguably the most important theater of war. All the more so when you consider how devastating mental illness is on the entire community, not just the church. Homelessness, depression, suicide, schizophrenia, eating disorders, OCD, bipolar disorder, anxiety, dissociative disorder, transsexual activity – they’re all degrees of mental illness, rooted in false identity, and often associated with trauma. They can also all be cured by the power of Jesus, perhaps only by the power of Jesus. But for some reason the church shies away from addressing these very prevalent elephants in the room. Why? Perhaps because of stigmatization we’re compelled to divorce treating mental illness with the biblical model of casting out demons. We don’t want to make people feel bad, so we leave it alone. But I hesitate to grant that point for one simple reason: scripture.

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.” – Ephesians 6:12, NKJV

The most important aspect of spiritual warfare is countering the lies of the enemy with the word of God. The enemy is constantly blanketing us with falsehoods, sometimes through the curses of others or in our own thought life. This concept of an inner struggle for our hearts and minds is basic Christianity, and we apply it to every facet of our Christian walks, from finance management, to marriage principles, to learning how to become better parents.

And yet for some reason when it comes to mental health, we as the body of Christ are far too comfortable subcontracting the treatment of mental illness to secular doctors. Or worse, to the psychotropic drugs those secular practitioners habitually prescribe.

Treating Schizophrenia

“Why would a hallucination have any beef with the Bible? Why would a hallucination want these people to stay away from preachers?”
– Psychotherapist, Jerry Marzinsky

Beginning in the late 1970’s, psychotherapist Jerry Marzinsky treated hundreds of schizophrenic patients in both mental hospitals and the prison systems. It wasn’t long before he recognized a disconnect between the Ivory Tower explanations of the disease and his personal experiences with his patients. After many years of listening to their struggles, Marzinsky began doing something taboo in the psychological world: He began asking his patients to describe what the voices were saying.

“The voices are getting louder. When I first started taking the medications they went away for a while but now they’re screaming at me all night. They are demons. Maybe twelve or more. They come all at once and mock everyone around me. When I read the bible they aren’t as strong but they’re still there. I have a hard time concentrating. But if I read a murder mystery or something negative I can remember everything that the murder mystery says.” – Anonymous patient, 2006

Official psychology doesn’t want to know what the voices are saying; according to the experts those voices don’t exist. The experts merely want the imaginary voices to shut up long enough for the patient to function, eat, read, and sleep, and not disturb other inmates. Harsh psychotropic drugs accomplish this goal by throwing a virtual hand grenade into the brains of patients. The tranquilizing effect of the drugs disrupts brain function and causes the patient to undergo what amounts to a short-term lobotomy. This drugs-only policy serves the medical facilities’ primary needs: managing the status quo. It also serves the drug industry’s needs: insane profits from lifelong customers.

The only loser is the patient.

As a secular agnostic researcher, Marzinsky was merely curious about the spiritual connection. He began collecting data on the drugs vs. Bible-related therapy, and his conclusions were astounding. Through the data, he became convinced that the voices were real, not a figment of the patients’ imaginations. One reason was that the voices followed fixed, repeatable patterns – which is not possible with hallucinations. The voices were pleased with anything negative, and went ballistic with anything associated with the Bible or church.

“I started asking all of my other patients if this was true with them. They all agreed. [The voices] hate the bible, they hate preachers…There were three categories: If the voices were weak they would kick and scream when the patient went to go to church, but once [the patient] got in there [the voices] shut up. If the voices were medium strength, they would moan, scream, try to discourage the guy from going [to church] but once he got in there they just got louder to block out what the preacher was saying. If they were very strong, when the guy got to church and the preacher started talking, they would actually drive him out of the church. He would get up and walk out the doors.” – Jerry Marzinsky

If this sounds familiar, it should. It mirrors the interactions Jesus had with demon-possessed (we’d say “afflicted”) people. Jesus may have had a simple prescription for these folks, but Big Psychology doesn’t want to cure schizophrenia. They think it’s impossible, and so they believe that giving voice to a mentally ill person’s delusions only reinforces their troubled mind. Unfortunately for the patient, the side effects of these drugs are severe, and unless the patient wants to continue hearing the voices louder and angrier, they need to stay on the drugs, in higher doses, forever.

That’s a problem for society and it darn sure isn’t the model Jesus or the early church provided. What Marzinsky found was that non-pharmaceutical treatments such as prayer, positive affirmation, various systems of meditation, and Bible reading silenced the voices, particularly recitation of Psalm 23.

“It is the voices that drive paranoid schizophrenia and not some mythical chemical imbalance, a proven scam that Big Pharma has come up with to sell their toxic drugs. If the voices can be gotten rid of by any means, all symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia vanish with them. The voices schizophrenics hear are very real. They are not hallucinations as the psychiatric mafia insists. The voices are energetic parasites which drain their victim of life energy after every attack. They are not physical. Nor are they caused by any physical malady. Trying to get rid of them with drugs is akin to attempting to get rid of a magnetic field by pouring anti-psychotic medications on a magnet.”
– Jerry Marzinsky

But silencing demonic voices comes at a cost. Altering a person’s brain might be a convenient band aid for those in the white coats, but the long term (even short term) side effects are devastating for many others.

Psychotropic Drugs & Mass Shooters

In 1987, Joseph Wesbecker shot twenty coworkers. He had been taking Prozac for one month before the attack that resulted in him murdering nine people.

Eleven-year-old Andrew Golden and fourteen-year old Mitchell Johnson were both on Ritalin when they shot fifteen people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding ten others.

Steven Kazmierczak shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax, and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.

Columbine shooter Eric Harris was on the drug Zoloft, and then Luvox. His partner Dylan Klebold’s medical records have never been made available to the public. They killed thirteen people and themselves, as well as wounding 23 others.

Sixteen-year-old Jeff Weise had been prescribed Prozac at three times the average starting dose for adults. He killed ten people, including himself, and wounded twelve others.

When he was eighteen, Kurt Danysh was on Prozac and killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.

Here are a few more:

And this barely scratches the surface. There used to be several databases cataloging mass shooters and the SSRI drugs (Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors) that they were on. At one point www.ssristories.com documented over 4500 instances. But if you try to access any of those websites now, this is what you’ll get:

This shouldn’t surprise anybody. The long established connection between psychotropic drugs and violence is reinforced monthly, and the drug companies are desperate to scrub that uncomfortable truth from the internet. This is in spite of the growing push for caution from a variety of medical, law enforcement, and public policy think tanks.

“In a study published in Public Library of Science ONE in 2010, researchers analyzed data from the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System and identified 31 out of 484 prescription drugs disproportionately associated with violence. Of these, 25 were psychiatric drugs, including antidepressants, sedative/hypnotics, and drugs used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The cases of violence linked to these drugs ranged from homicide and physical assaults to homicidal ideation and violence-related symptoms.”
– CCHR International Mental Health Industry Watchdog, June 13, 2023

Big Pharma continues to push dangerous, potentially deadly prescription medications on vulnerable people at the expense of them and everyone around them, and those are just the drugs we have quantifiable data on. The average pharmacy is filled with drugs containing devastating side effects that the industry works overtime to protect, including the demonstrably deadly Covid vaccines – perhaps every vaccine for that matter – and also seemingly benign pharmaceuticals for erectile dysfunction, heart health, or weight loss.

Tucker Carlson on Big Pharma

Calley Means is a former pharmaceutical industry insider turned whistle blower. He recently appeared with investigative journalist Tucker Carlson to expose the deadly nature of the FDA-approved drug Ozempic, which is being touted as the magical cure for America’s diabetes and obesity “epidemic.” The only problem is that the drug is deadly, and as with all profitable drugs, the pharmaceutical industry is trying to bottle that little fact up tight (no pun intended, I don’t pun).

“If a fishtank is dirty, you clean the tank. You don’t drug the fish. In America right now we have a very dirty tank.” – Calley Means

What Means is saying is that our overall health is a byproduct of our lifestyles and environment. We’re sick, mentally and physically, because we do foolish things, like eating food products with a dozen ingredients on the box we can’t pronounce. That’s a topic for a different post, but in his interview with Tucker Carlson, Means goes on to explain the following:

“No drug being used to treat a chronic condition has ever cured that condition.”

And perhaps that is the only indictment on the drug industry that we need. If they don’t work to cure anything, why continue to use them?

But the drugs have an effect, there’s no doubt about that. The problem is that those effects (I refuse to call them side-effects anymore) cause far more harm over the long term. They linger, saddling a patient with financial, physical, and mental burdens for years – perhaps for a lifetime to come.

Healing Mental Illness

It may be the ingestion of toxins, dyes, or pesticides that make us ill, but there is also a spiritual component, and we in the church need to recognize that. Perhaps our afflictions stem from immersing ourselves in demonic entertainment, or perhaps we accept an identity (curse) that others have placed upon us. A strange commonality among methamphetamine addicts is a shared experience of seeing “shadow people” during their highs. For whatever reason, Meth opens a door in the spiritual realm that allows these addicts to see the demons with their own eyes. What mental doors does the demon of pornography (or lying about pornography) open? How about the demons of gossip or envy?

The church by and large has no problem praying in faith for a broken bone or miraculous healing of a cancerous tumor. So why doesn’t it apply the same degree of supernatural healing power to the casting out of the demons such as anxiety, depression, dementia, and suicide? Why do we accept that our elderly will inevitably lose their minds as they age instead of being mentally spry right up their final hour? Where is that written in scripture?

“Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do he will do also; and greater works than these he will do, because I go to My Father. And whatever you ask in My name, that I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything in My name, I will do it.” – John 14:12-14 NKJV

That might place us in a precarious position with our loved ones who suffer from these conditions. On the one hand, we don’t want to accuse and emotionally scar them. Our ultimate goal is to always love them through the turmoil. And yet at the same time we don’t shrink back from confronting supernatural problems with supernatural power in every other area of life. For this reason, the afflictions we’ve written off as medical problemsneeding secular solutions need to be assessed with with the mind of Christ. We need to learn how to walk in our authority to confront mental illness just as we would with any other affliction. What would Jesus do about a schizophrenic teenager in His midst? What would Jesus do about a bipolar man sitting through one of His sermons?

Personally I don’t think Jesus would tolerate the demons afflicting those people. And I don’t think He wants us to, either.

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If you or someone you love is wrestling with mental illness, please email contact@vinceguerra.com and I would love to join my faith with yours in praying for healing. If you know of effective ministries like Jerry Marzinsky’s in treating and healing those with mental illness, please contact me so I can include them in updates of this post.

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For the sake of brevity I’ve paired down much of the research used in writing this article. If you’d like more examples of mass shooters and the drugs they were on, you can find a partial list here.

If you enjoyed this article, you may want to check out these as well:

The Unscientific Method: When Scientists Refuse to Science

The Shameful State Of America’s Hospitals

Medical Misinformation: What President Garfield Can Teach Us About Covid-19

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