Name: Myth of Normal
ISBN: 9780593083888

Gabor Maté

Daniel Maté

By the acclaimed author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing.

In this revolutionary book, renowned physician Gabor Maté eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their healthcare systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two. In Canada, every fifth person has high blood pressure. In Europe, hypertension is diagnosed in more than 30 percent of the population. And everywhere, adolescent mental illness is on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health?

Over four decades of clinical experience, Maté has come to recognize the prevailing understanding of “normal” as false, neglecting the roles that trauma and stress, and the pressures of modern-day living, exert on our bodies and our minds at the expense of good health. For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. Now Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society—and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. Co-written with his son Daniel, The Myth of Normal is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Myth of Normal

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

In its predominantly biological approach, psychiatry commits the same error as other medical specialties: it takes complex processes intricately bound with life experience and emotional development, slaps the “disease” label on them, and calls it a day. Little in the training of doctors prepares them to wonder about their patients’ lived experience, much less to seek the sources of their malaises therein. Simplistic explanations, which require little time or emotional energy, are an attractive fallback position. Many doctors are intensely uncomfortable facing their own hidden sorrows and wounds—what Carl Jung called our shadow side. 

Emma Hak-Kovacs

Grace McCarter

Contrary to what I, too, used to believe, a diagnosis like ADHD or depression or bipolar illness explains nothing. 

. Diagnoses are abstractions, or summaries: sometimes helpful, always incomplete. They are professional shorthand for describing constellations of symptoms a person may report, or of other people’s observations of someone’s behavior patterns, thoughts, and emotions. For the individual in question, a diagnosis may seem to account for and validate a lifetime of experiences previously too diffuse or nebulous to put one’s finger on. That can be a first and positive step toward healing. I know this from firsthand experience.

The dead end comes when we assume or believe that the diagnosis equals an explanation—an especially futile view when it comes to illnesses of something as inherently abstract as the mind. As the British psychologist Lucy Johnstone said to me, “In physical illness you have, in principle, a way of checking it out. You can say, ‘Let’s look at the blood test or the enzyme levels.’ And you could, in most cases, confirm or disconfirm it. But in psychiatry, it’s simply a circular argument, isn’t it? Why does this person have mood swings? Because they have bipolar disorder. How do you know they have bipolar disorder? Because they have mood swings.” 

Karolina

Trauma, until we workit through, keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the present moment's riches, limiting who we can be. By impelling us to suppress hurt and unwanted parts of the psyche, it fragments the self. Until seen and acknowledged, it is also a barrier to growth.

We are caught up in pursuits of all kinds that draw us on not because they are necessary or inspiring or uplifting, or because they enrich or add meaning to our lives, but simply because they obliterate the present.

If we treat trauma as an external event, something that happens to or around us, then it becomes a piece of history we can never dislodge. If, on the other hand, trauma is what took place inside us as a result of what happened, in the sense of wounding or disconnection, then healing and reconnection becomne tangible possibilities. Trying to keep awareness of trauma at bay hobbles our capacity to know ourselves.

The genetic argument is used to justify social inequalitie injustices that are otherwise hard to defend. Much like junk sciences of the past—phrenology, eugenics, and so on-it serves a deeply conservative function: if phenomena like addiction or mental distress are determined mostly by biological heredity we are spared from having to look at how our social environment supports, or does not support, the parents of young children, and at how social attitudes, prejudices, and policies burden, stress, and exclude certain segments of the population, thereby increasing their propensity for suffering.

The hegemony of materialist culture is now total, its discontents universal.

A society that fails to value communality—our need to belong, to care for one another, and to feel caring energy flowing toward us—is a society facing away from the essence of what it means to be human.

Our society reinforces men's sense of being entitled to women's care in a way that almost escapes being put into words. I refer here to the automatic mothering women provide their male partners, the emotional sustenance that forms the invisible motar of many heterosexual relationships: a very conventional dynamic that speaks to how tenacious gendered social constructs are, how thoroughly steeped we are in them.

I will make the case that much of what passes for normal in our society is neither healthy nor natural, and that to meet modern society’s criteria for normality is, in many ways, to conform to requirements that are profoundly abnormal in regard to our Nature-given needs—which is to say, unhealthy and harmful on the physiological, mental, and even spiritual levels.

The meaning of the word “trauma,” in its Greek origin, is “wound.” Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world. It can even determine whether or not we are capable of rational thought at all in matters of the greatest importance to our lives.

Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you.

Unresolved trauma is a constriction of the self, both physical and psychological. It constrains our inborn capacities and generates an enduring distortion of our view of the world and of other people. Trauma, until we work it through, keeps us stuck in the past, robbing us of the present moment’s riches, limiting who we can be.

Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted, even by loving parents.

Trauma is in most cases multigenerational. The chain of transmission goes from parent to child, stretching from the past into the future. We pass on to our offspring what we haven’t resolved in ourselves.

Parent-blaming isn’t only cruel and unfair; it’s nonsensical. Suffice it for now to say that the quality of early caregiving is heavily, even decisively, determined by the societal context in which it takes place. As we will see, children are increasingly set upon by an accumulation of potent influences—social, economic, and cultural—that overwhelm and, in many ways, subjugate their internal emotional apparatus to imperatives that have nothing to do with well-being; that are, in fact, inimical to the healthy growth of the mind.

Neufeld sums up eloquently what all young ones, whatever their temperament, need first and foremost: “Children must feel an invitation to exist in our presence, exactly the way they are.” With that need in mind, the parents’ primary task, beyond providing for the child’s survival requirements, is to emanate a simple message to the child in word, deed, and (most of all) energetic presence, that he or she is precisely the person they love, welcome, and want.

What is considered normal and natural are established not by what is good for people, but by what is expected of them, which traits and attitudes serve the maintenance of the culture. These are then enshrined as “human nature,” while deviations from them are seen as abnormal.

Just as we wouldn’t think of blaming the owner of a diseased kidney, it makes no sense to reproach someone for having a “sick” brain, especially if that “sickness” was inherited.

Here we arrive at the second cornerstone query regarding addiction, one that has become something of a mantra with me: Ask not why the addiction, but why the pain. This is the question neither the prevailing disease-based medical paradigm nor popular prejudice can possibly answer or would even think to raise. Yet without it, we can have no clue as to why this affliction of mind, body, and spirit is so rampant.

We tend to believe that normality equals health. Yet what is the norm in the Western world? Mental illness is on an unstoppable rise. Some 45% of Europeans suffer high blood pressure, and nearly 70% of Americans take at least one prescription drug. Illness and trauma are defining how we live. In his new masterpiece, renowned physician, addiction expert and author Gabor Maté dissects the underlying causes of this malaise - physical and emotional, and connects the dots between our personal suffering and the pressures of modern-day living. Over four decades of clinical experience, Dr Maté has found that the common definition of 'normal' is false: virtually all disease is actually a natural reflection of life in an abnormal culture, as we grow further and further apart from our true selves. But he also shows us the pathway to reconnection and healing. Filled with stories of people in the grip of illness or in the triumphant wake of recovery, this life-affirming book shows how true health is possible - if we are willing to embrace authenticity above social expectations. The Myth of Normal is Gabor Maté's most ambitious, compassionate and urgent book yet.

Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture

The Myth of Normal

This one took a while - very good for the mind though

rebecca

Imogen west

Really enjoyed this, if you get through the somewhat scientific first 100 pages then the rest is a smooth read! Not sure if there’s many self help books that discuss the connections between our health and toxic culture we live in, such as effects of global corporate capitalism on our wellbeing. highly recommend 

Marion

Ricardo

Amelia Pokorny

Pratik M

Brenna Rutherford

gabriella

Nina 

Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “This riveting and beautifully written tale has profound implications for all of our lives, including the practice of medicine and mental health.” —Bessel van der Kolk, MD, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Body Keeps the Score “Wise, sophisticated, rigorous and creative: an intellectual and compassionate investigation of who we are and who we may become. Essential reading for anyone with a past and a future.” —Tara Westover, New York Times bestselling author of Educated “The Myth of Normal is a book literally everyone will be enriched by—a wise, profound and healing work that is the culmination of Dr. Maté's many years of deep and painfully accumulated wisdom.” —Johann Hari, New York Times bestselling author of Stolen Focus “Gabor and Daniel Maté have delivered a book in which readers can seek refuge and solace during moments of profound personal and social crisis. The Myth of Normal is an essential compass during disorienting times.” —Esther Perel, psychotherapist, author, and host of Where Should We Begin? From our most trusted and compassionate authority on stress, trauma, and mental well-being—a groundbreaking investigation into the causes of illness, a bracing critique of how our society breeds disease, and a pathway to health and healing. Gabor Maté’s internationally bestselling books have changed the way we look at addiction and have been integral in shifting the conversations around ADHD, stress, disease, embodied trauma, and parenting. Now, in this revolutionary book, he eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their health care systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health? For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. In The Myth of Normal, co-written with his son Daniel, Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society, and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. The result is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

Myth of Normal Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture