It’s 10 o’clock in the morning, and Gabor Maté is anxious. “I gave a talk last night at Troxy to 2000 people,” he says nervously. “I beat myself up afterward. I didn’t give them enough.”
Maté is in town to talk about his new book, The Myth Of Normal, a 562-page behemoth on how to heal in a toxic culture. The idea is to transition from a society that penalises illness to one that tackles our trauma. Maté has agreed to meet me to record an episode for my podcast; but really, it’s just a pretext for me to meet one of the most interesting voices on the human mind since Sigmund Freud.
Dr Gabor Maté was born in Budapest in 1944: a child of the Holocaust, his grandparents were killed in Auschwitz. At age one, his mother put him in the care of a stranger for five weeks to save his life. “It made me feel like I wasn’t worthy,” he says. Understanding that emotion – and its long term effects – has been his life’s work.
Maté has, by his own admission, always been desperate to prove himself. “On an unconscious level,” he says, “I work to justify my very being.” He became a workaholic doctor hooked on buying CDs: a rather benign addiction but one that spoke volumes on his pain. Maté, an addiction expert, sees all dependencies as symbols of absence, frequently citing heroin addicts who liken their high to being held by a mother.
Having been saved by the Soviet army, Maté left Hungary only seven years after it came under Communist rule. His family emigrated to Canada in 1956, and he’s lived in Vancouver since the 1960s. He has, by most accounts, seen it all, studying in the US during the Vietnam War and working as a physician at the height of the AIDS pandemic.
Opposed to medicine’s tendency to address symptoms without getting to the cause, he’s obsessed with finding out what truly makes us sick. The answer, he believes, is stress, which ravages the body far more than Western medicine lets on. Its leading cause is uncertainty, driven by “lack of information, loss of control and conflict”.
“The more inequality there is in society, the more disease,” Maté notes, pointing to the economic insecurity affecting many in Britain today, with an estimated 14.5 million currently living in poverty. Cancer diagnoses and autoimmune diseases are rising despite the betterment of medicine and ever greater number of licensed pharmaceuticals. Therein lies the paradox which he seeks to untangle.
During our two and a half hours together, we cover all manner of topics, from the impact of tech on our brains to asking whether the English are the most repressed people on the planet. “It took a lot of repression,” Maté says, for “stiff upper lip” Englishmen to “impose their colonial cruelty on aboriginals.” To recognise our trauma, he believes, is to begin tackling the ills and evils of the world.