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.

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