Breaking the myth of normal: A Q-and-A with renowned speaker and author Dr. Gabor Maté

What is normal?  And how do we define it?  The author of an eye-opening new book argues what we consider normal isn’t normal at all but is slowly killing us.

“Trauma and stress are so normal in society that we take them to be almost natural occurrences,” explains Dr. Gabor Maté, author of The Myth of Normal:  Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture.

Combining research with first-person accounts, it’s based on his more than three decades of experience in family practice, palliative care work, and addiction work on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

The renowned physician and speaker says most chronic illnesses of the mind and body have a strong basis in childhood trauma and adult stress.

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“We think this is normal. But actually, from the point of view of human needs and human evolution, the current way of living that we pursue is actually abnormal and is the cause of a lot of ailments of body and mind,” he explains.

John Ackermann: “The culture as a whole, as you put it, seems to be poisoning us from conception onward.  So, what is to be done and can anything be done?”

Dr. Gabor Maté: “Well, a lot can be done as long as we recognize the problem.  The issue is that my own profession, the medical profession, despite all the science that links the mind and body, emotions and physiology, doesn’t link them, it just shows their essential unity.  Despite all that science, physicians are not trained in understanding the whole human being and the unshakeable oneness of our existence. So, therefore, we don’t consider social and personal and multi-generational family factors when it comes to understanding illness.”

“The first thing we have to do is understand it and I’ll give you an example.  Stress on pregnant women already predisposes their infants, their children, to have mental health and behavior and learning issues later on in life.  But the average physician, when they do their prenatal visit, they don’t ask about the woman’s emotional state or the stress in their lives.  So, if we paid more attention to people’s psychological dynamics and challenges right from conception, let alone the mechanization of birth…in British Columbia, the Caesarean section rate is almost 40 per cent now, which is incredibly high.  Obstetrical intervention is essential in life saving about 10 to 15 per cent of the time, but that degree of intervention actually interferes with the natural bonding between mother and infant.  So right from the beginning, we just don’t get it.”

Ackermann: “Bringing it back to the title of the book, what will it take for us to unmake the myth of normal?”

Maté: “Well, I think we have to get trauma educated.  At the University of British Columbia, where I was trained 40 years ago, the average medical student still doesn’t get a single, coherent lecture on the impact of emotional trauma on physical health, even though we know for example, from Canadian studies, that men who have sexual abuse at children have triple the rate of heart attacks as adults, regardless of smoking or drinking.  We know that women with severe PTSD symptoms have double the risk of ovarian cancer.  We know that people with stress and trauma in their lives have an increased risk of rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, depression, psychosis, ADHD, and so on.  So, the first thing has to be at least the training of physicians in the unshakable unity of mind and body, of educators as well, because many of the troubled kids that educators are helpless to know what to do with are actually traumatized kids.  And politicians, if their policies are trauma informed, are going to have a totally different legal system, we’d have a totally different approach to addiction and so on.  So, I’m saying that the first thing needs to be trauma education.”

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Ackermann: “What do you hope people take away from the book?

Maté: “I hope they’re touched in their personal lives.  I hope to get to understand themselves, their own background, their own struggles, their own capacity to heal — both on an individual and on the social level. That’s my greatest, fondest hope for this book.”

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture is available from Knopf Canada.