Gabor Maté

Daniel Maté

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 and Healing in a Toxic Culture

The Myth of Normal

Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture

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.” 

nhu ⋆𐙚₊˚⊹

I had to arrive as well at the heartrending realization that the dream that had been a balm to my soul, that of a triumphant Jewish national rebirth in my people’s ancestral biblical home, had been achieved by imposing a nightmare on the Palestinian inhabitants of the land, a nightmare that continues to this day. [1] When the truth struck home, I was once again astonished that my imagined universe could have been such a distorted version of the real one. Visiting the West Bank and Gaza, I wept every day for two weeks.

Let’s say you suppress the “no” in order to maintain closeness with someone you care about. In practice, resentment drives you further away because it will contaminate your love for that person. They, too, will sense the emotional withdrawal fueled by resentment.

To forgive is to grieve— for what happened, for what didn’t happen—and to give up the need for a different past.

Abetted and amplified by the profit-driven media machine, political culture plays on our deepest longings for surety, security, and even supremacy, targeting our damaged “inner children” with force and precision.

“When we don’t even know we’re angry, we can’t converse with the person responsible or otherwise tackle the problem. We cry; we eat; we soothe ourselves a thousand different ways.” [9] Early childhood mechanisms of self-suppression are reinforced by persistent, gendered social conditioning. Many women end up selfsilencing, defined as “the tendency to silence one’s thoughts and feelings to maintain safe relationships, particularly intimate relationships.” 

More recently, one scientist has called poverty a “neurotoxin.” Brain scans of children and young people from deprived backgrounds have shown reduced surface area of the cerebral cortex, as well as smaller hippocampi and amygdalae—the subcortical regions involved in memory formation and emotional processing. [23] The brain’s serotonin system in adolescents has been seen to be impaired by the stresses of poverty, increasing the risk for emotional turbulence.

That assault itself is trauma, but the trauma is also how we have had to armor ourselves.

Brand-aware companies such as Nike, Lululemon, and the Body Shop are marketing much more than products: they sell meaning, identification, and an almost religious sense of belonging through association with their brand.

And while the personal stresses of a disconnect from the self and the loss of authenticity may cut across class lines, the allostatic strain imposed by imbalances of power falls most onerously on the politically disempowered and economically disenfranchised. What, in our society, are the most widespread emotional triggers for stress? My own observations of self and others have led me to endorse fully what a review of the stress literature concluded, namely that “psychological factors such as uncertainty, conflict, lack of control, and lack of information are considered the most stressful stimuli and strongly activate the HPA axis.” [3] A society that breeds these conditions, as capitalism inevitably does, is a superpowered generator of stressors that tax human health.

Contrary to what I, too, used to believe, a diagnosis like ADHD or depression or bipolar illness explains nothing. No diagnosis ever does. 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.

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. 

Just as I have never met anyone who chose to become addicted, neither have I met anyone whose addictions did not, at their onset at least, provide for some essential human need.

As Thomas Merton noted dolefully in 1948, “We live in a society whose whole policy is to excite every nerve in the human body and keep it at the highest pitch of artificial tension, to strain every human desire to the limit and create as many new desires and synthetic passions as possible, in order to cater to them with the products of our factories and printing presses and movie studios and all the rest.”

When Dr. Kang asserts that digital apps and gadgets are “engineered” to hit children’s brains with bursts of dopamine, she is being very precise. “The phone,” she told me, “has been designed by the world’s top neuroscientists and psychologists, who have taken all of our most sophisticated brain research and understanding of human motivation and reward cycles and have embedded it into devices.” She cited as an example a company with a name and mission so on the nose that one would think it came out of a satirical film or novel: Dopamine Labs. “It was started,” she said, “by a neuroscientist and software developers whose entire business platform is to consult companies to help them engage and release dopamine . . . It’s called persuasive design.” Addiction, of course, is the whole point. Viewed from a corporation’s bottom line, one could not imagine a more desirable consumer profile than those who can’t get enough of what they don’t need but feel they must have.

The same goes for some forms of “sleep training.” The assumption that infants need to be trained to sleep is based on a cultural view that the child should adjust to the parents’ schedule and agenda—which, for working parents or for stressed parents lacking support, may be a legitimate, even unavoidable longing. But we should be clear on what is being lost. As the psychologist Gordon Neufeld points out, being in physical touch is the infant’s only way of connecting with the parent. Her “resistance” to being put down and having the parent follow the Spockian counsel to “say good night affectionately but firmly, walk out of the room, and don’t go back” is simply an expression of her essential need. Shutting down our response to a baby’s distress may also weaken our own parenting instincts, with consequences that long outlast the child’s infancy.

Even babies—perhaps they especially—know when their physical and emotional integrity is being ignored or violated. Liedloff’s anecdote comports with Dr. Narvaez’s findings about small-band hunter-gatherers and what has been generally observed about Indigenous cultures: by and large, these did not normalize hitting their kids, and still don’t. Landing on the shores of the “New World,” the European Christians steeped, or so they believed, in the gentle spirit of Jesus, found it appalling to witness that the “savages” of North America avoided the corporal punishment of children.

Reducing women to passive recipients of medical care during perhaps the most momentous passage of their lives is dehumanizing, and not only figuratively: it disrupts physiological, hormonal, and psychological processes that have evolved in our species over millions of years to ensure the necessary bonding of mother and baby and the healthy development of our young.

Needless to say, physical factors such as nutrition and air quality interact with socioeconomic status, predisposing children to such problems as depression, anxiety, and ADHD. [15] “Poor people have more exposure to these things on all counts, whether the bad air, or psychosocial stress and other things,” Dr. Shanna Swan, reproductive endocrinologist and vice chair of preventive medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, pointed out. “That’s a societal problem and the changes are not going to be on an individual level. They’re going to be on a societal level.” [16] Thus [17] does inequality of opportunity, even in the basic biological sense, begin in the womb. Long before we had brain scans, blood tests, ultrasounds, and fetal heart monitors, ancient peoples intuitively understood the sanctity of the intrauterine environment. I spoke once about addiction to a First Nations group here in British Columbia, quoting studies on prenatal development such as cited above. A young man came up to me afterward. “You know,” he said, “in our clan, tradition was that if you were angry or upset, you weren’t even allowed to go near a pregnant woman. We didn’t want you to inflict your troubles on her baby.” In some African tribal societies, infants were greeted by rituals while still in the mother’s belly, including with songs that would later welcome them into the world. [18] Imagine hearing your own melody and lyrics, already familiar to you, as you are ceremonially ushered into your new home, the outside world. Such collective traditions have mostly been lost to colonialism and atomization, but we can still learn from them and apply their lessons.

 Our nervous system’s inherent expectation for reciprocity and connection makes sense when we consider how we developed as a species. For most of our evolutionary past, until about ten thousand to fifteen thousand years ago, human beings lived in small-band hunter-gatherer groups. [6] Indeed, if human existence were measured in the time span of one hour on a clock, we have inhabited newer environments only for the past six minutes or so. Liedloff described these forebears of ours as “people whose good relations are more important than their bargains.” Her direct observations of Aboriginal people in their jungle habitat conform with the vast body of research on hunter-gatherers as collated, for example, by the psychologist Darcia Narvaez, professor emerita at Notre Dame. We have learned that such groups held values emphasizing hospitality, sharing, generosity, and reciprocal exchange for the purpose not of personal enrichment but of connection. These values were intelligent, time-tested guidelines for mutual survival. And the traditions they generated, passed down from parent to child, generation to generation, characterized human life throughout most of our existence. Yes, there was violence and bad behavior and all the rest; we have never been “perfect.” But we knew something about setting the collective context for our humanness to flourish fruitfully; arguably, we knew nothing else. […]  No hominin species could have survived long enough to evolve had its members seen themselves as atomized individuals, pitted by Nature against their fellow beings. Contrary to our present ways of operating, a traditional view of self-interest would be enhancing one’s connection and membership in the community, to everyone’s benefit. Authentic self-interest need not be conflated with a suspicious and competitive stance toward others.

It is sobering to realize that many of the personality traits we have come to believe are us, and perhaps even take pride in, actually bear the scars of where we lost connection to ourselves, way back when. The sources of these scars are most often evident in their shape, so to speak: in many cases, specific traits can be traced to particular kinds of wounding. For example, if we don’t receive the agenda-free, unconditional attention we all require, one way to guard against that deprivation is to become concerned with physical attractiveness or other attention-getting attributes or accomplishments.

Some years later, psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley, investigated the physiological effects not of repression, a largely unconscious process, but of suppression, defined as “the conscious inhibition of one’s own emotional expressive behavior while emotionally aroused.” If I know I’m afraid but choose to conceal that from a rabid dog who can “smell fear,” I am suppressing my feelings—as opposed to repressing them, as in compulsively pretending to agree with opinions one finds repellent and not realizing it until later. In the Berkeley study, participants were shown films normally expected to elicit disgust, such as burn patients being treated or an arm being surgically amputated. Some participants were specifically instructed not to reveal emotions when watching, while the control group was free to express emotion by means of facial or body movements. On a number of physiological measurements, the suppression group showed heightened activation of their sympathetic, or fight-or-flight, nervous system: in other words, a stress response. [9] There may be certain situations where a person, for perfectly valid reasons, deliberately chooses not to express how he feels; if one does it habitually or under compulsion, the impact is more than likely to be toxic.

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

rebecca

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

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

Amelia Pokorny

Pratik M

Brenna Rutherford

gabriella

Emma Hak-Kovacs

Nina 

Karolina

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.

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

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