Gabor Maté
Gabor Maté | |
|---|---|
.jpeg) Maté in 2013 | |
| Born | January 6, 1944 Budapest, Hungary |
| Citizenship | Canada |
| Education | University of British Columbia (BA, MD) |
| Spouse | Rae Maté (m. 1969) |
| Children | 3, including Aaron |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields |
|
| Website | drgabormate |
Gabor Maté CM (born January 6, 1944) is a Canadian physician. He has a background in family practice and a special interest in childhood development, trauma[1] and potential lifelong impacts on physical and mental health including autoimmune disease, cancer, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD),[2] addictions and a wide range of other conditions.
Maté's approach to addiction focuses on the trauma his patients have suffered and looks to address this in their recovery.[3] In his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction, Maté discusses the types of trauma suffered by persons with substance use disorders and how this affects their decision making in later life.
He has authored five books exploring topics including ADHD, stress, developmental psychology, and addiction. He is a regular columnist for the Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail.
Life and career[edit]
Maté was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1944 to a Jewish family.[4][5] His maternal grandparents, Josef Lövi and Hannah Lövi, who came from the town of Košice in eastern Slovakia, were killed in Auschwitz when he was five months old.[5] His aunt disappeared during the war, and his father endured forced labour at the hands of the Nazi Party.[6] When he was one, Maté's mother put him in the care of a stranger for over five weeks to save his life. Upon their reunion, the infant Maté was so hurt that he avoided looking at his mother for several days. He claims this trauma of "abandonment, rage, and despair" continues to manifest in his adult life, leading to similar altercations when he perceives a threat of abandonment, especially from his wife.[7]
In 1956, Maté immigrated to Canada.[5] He was a student during the Vietnam War era in the late 1960s[8] and graduated with a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
In 1969, Maté married artist and fellow UBC graduate Rae Maté; together they have three children including writer and journalist for The Grayzone, Aaron Maté.[9]
After working as a high school English and literature teacher for several years, he returned to the University of British Columbia to obtain his M.D. in general family practice in 1977.
Maté ran a private family practice in East Vancouver for over 20 years. He was the medical coordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital for seven years. For 12 years, he was the staff physician at Portland Hotel, a residence and resource centre located in downtown Vancouver. Many of his patients had co-occurring mental health and substance use concerns, in addition to chronic health concerns, such as HIV. He worked in harm reduction clinics in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.[10] He has written about his experiences working with persons with substance use disorders in In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. [11]
In 2008, Maté made national headlines in defence of the physicians working at Insite (a legally supervised safe injection site) after the federal Minister of Health, Tony Clement, attacked them as unethical.[12]
In 2010, Maté became interested in the traditional Amazonian plant medicine ayahuasca and its potential for treating addictions. He partnered with a Peruvian Shipibo ayahuasquero (traditional shamanic healer) and began leading multi-day retreats for addiction treatment, including ones in a Coast Salish First Nations community that were the subject of an observational study by health researchers from the University of Victoria and the University of British Columbia. Although preliminary and limited by the observational study design, the research results showed that participants had significant improvements in some psychological measures and reductions in problematic substance use, suggesting that Maté's claims of therapeutic efficacy may be well-founded.[13] However, when the Canadian federal government learned about Maté's work with ayahuasca in 2011, Health Canada threatened to refer the matter to the RCMP if he did not immediately stop his activities with an illegal drug.[14]
Writings and views[edit]
Medicine[edit]
In his books and lectures, Maté emphasizes the role of biopsychosocial aspects of pathology and the role of psychological trauma and stress. He underlines the importance of relations and social attachment for learning and health. His ideas are consistent with a trauma-informed care framework.[15][16]
Maté defines addiction as any behaviour or substance that a person uses to relieve pain in the short term, but which leads to negative consequences in the long term. Without addressing the root cause of the pain, a person may try to stop but will ultimately crave further relief and be prone to relapse. By this definition, many things in modern culture have the potential to become addictive such as gambling, sex, food, work, social media, and drugs.[4] He argues the "war on drugs" actually punishes people for having been abused and entrenches addiction more deeply, as studies show that stress is the biggest driver of addictive relapse and behaviour.[11] He says a system that marginalizes, ostracizes, and institutionalizes people in facilities with no care and easy access to drugs, only worsens the problem.[11][17]
Palestine[edit]
In July 2014, Maté wrote an opinion piece titled, "Beautiful Dream of Israel has become a Nightmare", he described how the policies imposed by Israel were not compatible with a just peace, and described how "There is no understanding Gaza out of context".[18] Maté drew direct comparisons between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto and commented on the severe power imbalance stating, "Unlike Israel, Palestinians lack Apache helicopters, guided drones, jet fighters with bombs, laser-guided artillery."[18]
In November 2023, Maté was interviewed by Piers Morgan in which he described how he cried every day for two weeks after visiting Gaza. He also called for an end to the occupation and persecution of Palestinians, as well as a return of Palestinian land occupied since 1967.[19]
Awards[edit]
- 2009: Hubert Evans Prize for Literary Non-Fiction for In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction
- 2011: the Civic Merit Award of the City of Vancouver "for his extensive work on addiction treatment and his contributions to understanding mental health and youth related to addiction, stress and childhood development" [20]
- 2018: member of the Order of Canada[21]
- 2023: Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature for the book The Myth of Normal which he co-authored with his son Daniel. The citation for the award said "The book covers topics from brain chemistry to rethinking what is deemed 'normal.' It's beautifully written and changes the modern-day discussion on health and healing".[22]
Criticism[edit]
Stanton Peele, psychologist and psychotherapist, disagrees with Maté's notion of "trac[ing] every case of addiction back to childhood trauma, stating that "most addicts weren't traumatized as kids; most traumatized people don't become addicts." Peele writes that Maté, whom he still admires for his work with Insite where he also had worked, offers "a reductionist vision of addiction" that does not "account for people's natural tendency to overcome abuse and addictive experiences," and ignores the "strong tendency that has been revealed, time and again, for people with addictions to naturally remediate."[23] Peele, in general, disagrees with the theory adopted decades ago by modern physicians, mental health professionals, research scientists, and others, that addiction is a disease[24][25][26] and opposes all twelve-step drug and alcohol treatment programs.[27]
Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, James Coyne, claimed that Maté's "piling bonkers claims on bonkers claims" he "urges us to abandon what has evolved to be evidence-based solutions to health and social problem," though he concedes that "overspecialization in research and clinical practice is an important issue, especially for the management of difficult-to-diagnosis [sic], multiple comorbidities with multiple medications."[28]
In a high-profile, live-streamed interview with Prince Harry in March 2023, Maté diagnosed the prince publicly with PTSD, ADHD, anxiety, and depression, based on his conversation with him and reading his autobiography Spare. During the chat, Maté told Prince Harry that he had diagnosed him with ADD after reading through his book and hearing about his life experiences.[29][30][31] His decision to do so was described as unorthodox and reckless by some critics.[32]
Books[edit]
- Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder. Toronto: A.A. Knopf, 1999. ISBN 978-0676971453.
- Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It. United States.
- When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress. Toronto: A.A. Knopf, 2003. ISBN 9781785042225.
- When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection. United States.
- Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers. Co-authored with Gordon Neufeld. Toronto: A.A. Knopf, 2004. ISBN 9780307361967.[9]
- In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. Toronto: A.A. Knopf, 2008. ISBN 9781785042201.
- The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture, Co-authored with Daniel Maté, Toronto, Canada, A.A. Knopf Canada, 2022 ISBN 9780593083895
Films and videos[edit]
- The Power of Connection. Video. Wholehearted, 2020.
- A Masterclass for Healers. Video. Wholehearted, 2020.
- Healing Trauma & Addiction. Video. Wholehearted, 2020.
- Wisdom of Trauma. Film. Science & Nonduality, 2021. By Maurizio and Zaya Benazzo.
- Zeitgeist: Moving Forward, 2011. By Peter Joseph.
- Joe Rogan Experience #1869, 2022 (2 hr. 24 min. video interview)
- Drunk on Too Much Life.[33] Documentary, 2021.
- Why do some people become addicts and not others? Interview. BBC Ideas, 2022.
- This Is Why You Feel LOST & UNHAPPY In Life! (Change Everything) | Gabor Matè Interview/Podcast. Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu, 2022.
- The Power of Connection & The Myth of Normal Video Special. Wholehearted, 2022.
References[edit]
- ^ "'How we cope with this has a lot to do with our past'". Irish Independent. January 31, 2021. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ "Care to incarceration: what happens to those without a fair start in life". The Independent. September 25, 2015. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ "Addiction is a Response to Childhood Suffering: In Depth with Gabor Maté - ICPPD". ICPPD. March 2, 2016. Retrieved November 29, 2016.
- ^ a b "How dealing with past trauma may be the key to breaking addiction". The Guardian. November 24, 2018. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ a b c O'Malley, JP (December 21, 2019). "Addictions guru channels survival of the Holocaust into self-help empire". The Times of Israel. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ Gutman, Abraham (November 2, 2018). "How a traumatized America finds relief in hate". inquirer.com. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ Dr. Gabor Maté — The Myth of Normal, Metabolizing Anger, Processing Trauma, and More, retrieved January 31, 2023
- ^ Nov 18, Ryan Meili; Share, 2014 10 min read. "Gabor Maté: On Storytelling, Health, and the Ruling Class". briarpatchmagazine.com. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ a b Cocozza, Paula (March 23, 2019). "'If you focus on control, you have lost the battle': how to win back your kids". The Guardian. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ Tierney, Allison (February 7, 2017). "How the Stigma of Drug Addiction Hurts All of Us". Vice. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ a b c ""In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts": Dr. Gabor Maté, Physician at Vancouver Safe-Injection Site, on the Biological and Socio-Economic Roots of Addiction and ADD". Democracy Now!. February 3, 2010. Retrieved January 14, 2011.
- ^ "Doctor calls Clement's Insite comments 'repugnant'". The Canadian Press. CTV News. August 20, 2008. Retrieved October 18, 2008.
- ^ Thomas, Gerald; Lucas, Philippe; Capler, Rielle N.; Tupper, Kenneth W. & Martin, Gina (2013). "Ayahuasca-Assisted Therapy for Addiction: Results from a Preliminary Observational Study in Canada". Current Drug Abuse Reviews. 6 (1): 30–42. doi:10.2174/15733998113099990003. PMID 23627784. Retrieved December 26, 2013.
- ^ Posner, Michael (November 9, 2011). "B.C. doctor agrees to stop using Amazonian plant to treat addictions". The Globe and Mail. Toronto. Retrieved December 26, 2013.
- ^ Maté, Gabor (2012). "Addiction: Childhood Trauma, Stress and the Biology of Addiction". Journal of Restorative Medicine. 1 (1): 56–63. doi:10.14200/jrm.2012.1.1005.
- ^ Treisman, Karen (2021). A treasure box for creating trauma-informed organizations : a ready-to-use resource for trauma, adversity, and culturally informed, infused and responsive systems. Volumes 1 and 2. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. ISBN 978-1-83997-136-5. OCLC 1255846476.
- ^ MacBride, Katie. "This 38-year-old study is still spreading bad ideas about addiction". The Outline. Retrieved July 12, 2021.
- ^ a b Maté, Gabor (July 22, 2014). "Beautiful dream of Israel has become a nightmare". Toronto Star. Retrieved January 29, 2024.
- ^ "Holocaust survivor Dr Gabor Mate calls for land return to Palestine". Middle East Monitor. November 29, 2023. Retrieved February 20, 2024.
- ^ "Civic Merit Award". vancouver.ca. Retrieved October 16, 2021.
- ^ "Dr. Gabor Maté". The Governor General of Canada. Retrieved October 16, 2021.
- ^ "Sheila Heti and Gabor Maté among winners of $10K Vine Awards which recognize best Canadian Jewish books". CBC Books. October 23, 2023. Retrieved March 30, 2024.
- ^ "The Seductive, But Dangerous, Allure of Gabor Maté". Psychology Today. December 5, 2011. Retrieved September 8, 2023.
- ^ Matano1, Robert A.; Wanat1, Stanley F. (January 2000). "Addiction is a treatable disease, not a moral failing". Western Journal of Medicine. 172 (1). National Center for Biotechnology Information: 63. doi:10.1136/ewjm.172.1.63. PMC 1070736. PMID 10695451.
- ^ "Substance Use Disorders". ama-assn.org. American Medical Association. October 2023. Retrieved October 24, 2023.
- ^ "What Is a Substance Use Disorder?". psychiatry.org. American Psychiatric Association. December 2020. Retrieved October 24, 2023.
- ^ Peele, Stanton; Bufe, Charles (2000). Resisting 12-Step Coercion: How to Fight Forced Participation in AA, NA, or 12-Step Treatment. See Sharp Press. ISBN 978-1-884365-17-1. Archived from the original on April 7, 2017.
- ^ Coyne, James (July 23, 2021). "Gabor Maté's Bizarre Ideas on Connections Between Stress and Disease". Medika Life. Retrieved October 24, 2023.
- ^ "Trauma expert Gabor Maté diagnoses Prince Harry with ADD but says it 'can be cured'". ok.co.uk. March 4, 2023. Retrieved September 8, 2023.
- ^ "'This is dangerous': How people have reacted to Harry's conversation with Gabor Maté". yahoo news. March 6, 2023. Retrieved September 8, 2023.
- ^ "Response to the Dr. Maté - Prince Harry Interview: Debunking the Trauma Industry". Dr. Mario Martinez Channel. March 5, 2023. Archived from the original on March 8, 2023. Retrieved March 8, 2023.
- ^ "No, Gabor Maté Did Not Actually Diagnose Prince Harry with ADHD on Live TV". Additude Magazine Online. March 13, 2023. Retrieved September 8, 2023.
- ^ "Drunk on Too Much Life (2021) - IMDb". IMDb. Retrieved September 8, 2023.
External links[edit]
- Anti-Zionist Jews
- 1944 births
- Canadian addiction physicians
- Canadian health activists
- Living people
- Members of the Order of Canada
- Canadian people of Hungarian-Jewish descent
- Holocaust survivors
- Hungarian general practitioners
- Hungarian emigrants to Canada
- Writers on addiction
- People from Vancouver
- University of British Columbia alumni
- Jewish activists for Palestinian solidarity
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Health & wellbeing
Interview
The trauma doctor: Gabor Maté on happiness, hope and how to heal our deepest wounds
This article is more than 1 year old
Ellie Violet Bramley
The physician, author and self-help guru came to worldwide prominence when he appeared with Prince Harry last month. He discusses the mind-body connection, the reality of addiction and why trauma can be treated
Wed 12 Apr 2023 19.00 AEST
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Gabor Maté was arriving at Vancouver airport one day when his phone lit up with a text from his wife, Rae. She asked if he still wanted a lift home, and mentioned she hadn’t yet left their house. The physician, mental health expert and bestselling author, who was 71 at the time, replied brusquely: “Never mind.” So enraged was he, as Maté writes in his new book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, that, when he got home, he “growled a hello” and then “barely made eye contact” for the next day. “Is this the response of a mature adult in his eighth decade?” he asks.
This kind of candour about his failings has won him fans for his work on trauma, addiction, attention deficit disorder (ADD), stress and childhood development, but it is the wisdom he squeezes from it that has made him a self-help guru for some. With more than 1.4 million followers on Instagram, he has an impact on people akin to that of a rock star, but a cerebral one – more Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell than Justin Bieber (his husky drawl would sound almost as good narrating the lyrics to I’m Your Man).
Back to the airport. “At times like this, there is very little grown-up Gabor in the mix,” he writes. “Most of me is in the grips of the distant past. This kind of physio-emotional time warp, preventing me from inhabiting the present moment, is one of the imprints of trauma, an underlying theme for many people in this culture.”
The template for his hostility, he says over a video call from his home in Vancouver, against a backdrop of Indigenous art from British Columbia, is to be found in the messages he received as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Hungary. Maté was born in January 1944; in May of that year, the deportation of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz began. By the end of the Holocaust, 565,000 Hungarian Jews had been murdered, Maté’s maternal grandparents among them.
Trauma is not what happens to you; it is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you
When he was 11 months old, his mother sent him with a stranger to be cared for by his aunt. In the book, he quotes her diary from the time: “My dear little man,” she starts, explaining that she was forced to part with him because “your little organism could not possibly endure the living conditions [in the] fenced-in Budapest ghetto”.
Maté says trauma, from the Greek for “wound”, “is not what happens to you; it is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you … It is not the blow on the head, but the concussion I get.” That, he says, is the good news. “If my trauma was that my mother gave me to a stranger … that will never not have happened. But if the wound was that I decided as a result that I wasn’t worthwhile as a human being, I wasn’t lovable, that’s a wound that can heal at any time.”
There can be two types of wound, he says. “There’s the capital-T traumatic events,” which include things like being abused as a child and the loss of a parent. Then there are “small-T traumas”. “You can wound a kid not only by doing bad things to them, but by also not meeting their needs,” he says. Even doting parents can easily, unknowingly, inflict small-T traumas on their children. He would know, because, as he admits, he inflicted them on his own kids.
All trauma must be treated with compassion, but he is adamant that it isn’t an excuse for not taking personal responsibility. As he writes about the airport incident, there comes a point when “‘Hitler made me do it’ won’t fly”.
Trauma exists on a personal level, but also in the collective sphere – he cites the persecution of Canada’s Indigenous people and the ensuing addiction, illness and suicide, as well as the legacy of racism and slavery in the US. In most cases, he writes, trauma is multigenerational: “We pass on to our offspring what we haven’t resolved in ourselves.” Left unhealed, trauma “has an impact on your life … about how you feel about yourself, how you see the world, how you get triggered, what you believe about yourself, the kind of relationships you get into. And it shows up in the form of chronic illness.”
Even now, at 79, Maté is still discovering ways that the imprints of trauma can bubble up. Take the past few weeks. At the beginning of March, he engaged in a livestreamed conversation with Prince Harry about loss, trauma and healing. It was rapidly subjected to the same scrutiny as all things the prince touches. Maté was derided in the press as a “so-called ‘trauma expert’”; headlines pitched him as a “Holocaust survivor who hails Hamas as ‘heroes’”; and there was criticism of his diagnosis of Harry as having ADD. Also, his – stylish, it should be said – collarless shirt was belittled.
His own reaction surprised him: “I thought by this age I was past that stuff.” But the encounter with the press, and on social media, left him “roiling inside with upset and even some degree of shame”. He reached out to a psychiatrist friend who asked him: ”What is it about this whole thing that upset you so much?”
I wasn’t diagnosing Prince Harry with a disease … I said: ‘You’ve got a normal response to abnormal circumstances’
For Maté, it was not being seen. “That’s my trigger. If somebody disagrees with me, that’s great, I don’t care. But let them see me and let them disagree with what I actually say and who I actually am and not their distortion.” His friend made a link about how not feeling seen as a child seemed like a life-threatening situation to him, after he was separated from his mother. “As soon as he said that, I just released inside. I got it,” he says, exhaling visibly.
In terms of diagnosing Harry with ADD – something Maté was diagnosed with in his mid-50s – the point that was missed, he says, is that “I wasn’t diagnosing him with a disease. I said: ‘You’ve got no disease.’ I said: ‘You’ve got a normal response to abnormal circumstances. Because if a child is stressed like he was, or I was, what do you do with that stress? You can’t escape it, so what do you do? The brain tunes out … But this is happening when the brain is developing and that affects its circuitry.” While many scientists would disagree, Maté believes this is a “reversible response”.
I wonder if it must be particularly galling to see his views on Israel and Palestine represented with such clumsiness, given they have cost him so dear. When, in the immediate aftermath of the six-day war in 1967, he first made clear his opinions, his father kicked him out of the house. “I basically dared say that Israel had launched this war to occupy territory and they’ll never give it back. Now, I’m going to ask you: how wrong was it?”
His early Zionism was, he says, “wonderful for me, because it made me proud to be a Jew for the first time”. But finding out “the actual history” punctured it: “The slogan about a land without a people for a people without a land. There was never a land without a people; there was a people there.”
For his parents, “who had suffered so much for being Jewish, for a Jewish young man to criticise Israel, to call its policies into question, was so painful”. While his father did, eventually, come to agree with him, it was a subject that he could never discuss with his mother. His maternal grandfather had been a Zionist leader and “to have actually looked at the reality that I was looking at would have meant a betrayal of her father who died in Auschwitz. So I understood that.”
Maté has a heightened level of compassion. Perhaps part of it is because, for him, the real villain is our culture. In The Myth of Normal, he gives the analogy of a toxic culture in a laboratory, meaning one that is “unsuitable for the creatures it is meant to support. Or worse: dangerous to their existence. It is the same with human societies.” He catalogues toxicities as: “illness born of stress, ignorance, inequality, environmental degradation, climate change, poverty and social isolation.”
Don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain … addiction is a normal response to trauma
We have, he says, become so “acculturated” that it has become normal, but that doesn’t mean it is healthy. The central argument of the book is: “Those features of our daily life that appear to us now as normal are the ones crying out for the greatest scrutiny.” Like crustacea placed in cold water, we haven’t noticed the heat being turned up to boiling point.
Many of the plights of modern society are, he says, natural responses to an unhealthy culture. Take addiction, something that he doesn’t just relate to drink and drugs, but also to “sex, gambling, pornography, extreme sports, cell phones”. His view is that there is no such thing as an “addictive personality”. Nor is addiction a disease. His mantra is: “Don’t ask why the addiction, ask why the pain. To understand people’s pain, you have to understand their lives. In other words, addiction is a normal response to trauma.”
Maté spent 12 years working in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – North America’s most concentrated area of drug use. “Every one of my female patients – many of whom were Indigenous, many caught up in the sex trade – had been sexually abused in childhood or adolescence, one marker of the multigenerational legacy born of Canada’s brutal colonial past,” he writes.
I ask why he thinks there can be such an empathy gap for people with addiction. He says that, when he was working with people addicted to hard drugs, he had his own severely addictive behaviours – “work and shopping”. He would lie to his wife about the money he had spent. “At one point, I even left a woman in labour in hospital to go and get a compact disc. I had to have it right then and there.”
He told his patients about his own behaviours. “They said: ‘Doc, you’re just like the rest of us.’ The point is, we are all just like the rest of us.” So, when it comes to addiction, he says, “people find it much easier to project that part of themselves that they don’t like on to a certain despised population than to look at themselves. What they’re actually disdaining is a part of themselves that they dare not look at.”
If your average person is, to a lesser or greater extent, acclimatised to the toxicity of our culture, like a lobster in a pot, how has Maté come to be so cognisant of it? One factor, he says, is that through his work as a family doctor he “knew people before they got sick” and could locate their illnesses in the broader context of their family, their communities and their lives.
To say that the mind is connected to the body is incorrect … They are not connected; they are the same system
He takes umbrage with the way medical teaching is done: “Physicians are trained in this narrow biological view, but, if your eyes are open, you can’t help but notice it.” He started reading the “vast body of literature that has demonstrated the links between emotional dynamics and physical pathology”.
He points to stress as one of many examples; he wrote about it in his 2003 book, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress: “[It] causes inflammation, erodes the healthy functioning of chromosomes, turns genes on that can trigger cancer.” He mentions a study that showed “women with severe post-traumatic stress disorder had double the risk for ovarian cancer. Despite the fact that this study came out four years ago, from Harvard, the average oncologist doesn’t have a clue.”
Maté is passionate about the connection between mind and body. “To say that the mind is connected to the body is incorrect,” he says. “To say that the nervous system is connected to the immune system, and the immune system is connected to the emotional apparatus, all of which is connected to the hormone system, is incorrect. They are not connected; they are the same system.”
I wonder what Maté hopes to achieve with everything he is putting out there. He thinks back to a workshop he attended five years ago, when he was asked to identify his calling and what footprint he wished to leave. “My calling is that people are free in every realm – so in the political realm, hence my stance on the Israel/Palestine conflict, but also in the personal realm, so that we’re not pulled like puppets on a string by our own personal dynamics, by trauma. You may agree with me or not agree with me, but that is my intention in everything I do.”
If he talks a bit like a thought leader, that is because, these days, he is one. He has been well known in Canada for some time, but now, in any airport anywhere in the world, someone will run up to him, crying, shaking and thanking him for his work. That must be a strange experience, I suggest. “You know, it isn’t, because I believe in my work and the truth that I am saying,” he replies.
He is well aware, he says with gentle humour, of “what a flawed little creature I am”. It is a good job that he has his head screwed on, I say, because otherwise his ego would be huge. “To correct you, my ego is huge. I just don’t believe it.”
The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate & Daniel Mate (Ebury, £25). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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