Brief Thoughts & Quite a few quotes from Gabor Maté’s new book: The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Gabor Maté has a new book : The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Maté believes that a major flaw in research involves that known fact that there is no money in finding a “cure” for mental health issues. The money for pharmaceutical companies is in medication management. Additionally, he believes there is a flawed logic in the medical field and psychology field separating the mind from the body when, as well we know, the mind-body connection is not just a concept but a reality. The mind cannot exist without the body and the body is, as some have said, a “flesh bag” of sorts, without the mind. This lack of focus on the connection of mind and body results in tactics to approaching mental health treatment that lacks integrated wellness initiatives. This failure is beyond an oversight. It remains a tragedy in modern healthcare. We cannot treat the body if we do not treat the mind. We cannot treat the mind if we are not taking care of the body. These go hand in hand. As Maté suggests in a throwback to his previous work on ADHD, that the common rationale for treating ADHD is that the mind wanders and lacks focus so we provide a medication that temporarily aids in the person regaining this ability because they have lost this ability as a result of natural causes in childhood and so we treat the symptoms and never resolve this elliptical and utterly hyperbolic sequence of mitigating symptoms—often with rather blunt instruments (in the form of medication interventions).

~ A selection of quotes from The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture ~

“Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you”

“If we could begin to see much illness itself not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health related.”

“One of the things many diseases have in common is inflammation, acting as kind of a fertilizer for the development of illness. We’ve discovered that when people feel threatened, insecure—especially over an extended period of time—our bodies are programmed to turn on inflammatory genes.”

“chronic illness—mental or physical—is to a large extent a function or feature of the way things are and not a glitch; a consequence of how we live, not a mysterious aberration.”

“Children, especially highly sensitive children, can be wounded in multiple ways: by bad things happening, yes, but also by good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met…”

“In the absence of relief, a young person’s natural response—their only response, really—is to repress and disconnect from the feeling-states associated with suffering. One no longer knows one’s body. Oddly, this self-estrangement can show up later in life in the form of an apparent strength, such as my ability to perform at a high level when hungry or stressed or fatigued, pushing on without awareness of my need for pause, nutrition, or rest.”

“Whereas individual people can become dislocated by misfortunes in any society, only a free-market society produces mass dislocation as part of its normal functioning, even during periods of prosperity.”

“Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.”

“Another study observed higher rates of inflammation in African Americans than in Caucasians, an epigenetic effect that remained even when comparing those of the same socioeconomic level. “We found that experiences with racism and discrimination accounted for more than 50% of the black/white difference in the activity of genes that increase inflammation,” wrote the lead author, Dr. April Thames, in an article titled “Racism Shortens Lives and Hurts Health of Blacks by Promoting Genes That Lead to Inflammation and Illness.”

“Tellingly, the degree of protection offered by married status was five times as great for men as for women, a finding that speaks to the relative roles of the genders in this culture.”

“Single people showed an elevated risk for heart disease and cancer.”

“Creatures with poorly self-regulated stress reactions will be more anxious, less capable of confronting ordinary environmental challenges, and overstressed even under normal circumstances. The study showed the quality of early maternal care to have a causal impact on the offspring’s brains’ biochemical capacity to respond to stress in a healthy way into adulthood. Key”

“…no emotional vulnerability, no growth.”

“Disconnection in all its guises — alienation, loneliness, loss of meaning, and dislocation — is becoming our culture's most plentiful product. No wonder we are more addicted, chronically ill, and mentally disordered than ever before, enfeebled as we are by such malnourishment of mind, body and soul.

“In the United States, the richest country in history and the epicenter of the globalized economic system, 60 percent of adults have a chronic disorder such as high blood pressure or diabetes, and over 40 percent have two or more such conditions. Nearly 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug; more than half take two.”

“Certainly, all traumatic events are stressful, but not all stressful events are traumatic.”

“…strong evidence that childhood traumatic events significantly impact the inflammatory immune system.”

“It doesn’t matter whether we can point to other people who seem more traumatized than we are, for there is no comparing suffering. Nor is it appropriate to use our own trauma as a way of placing ourselves above others—“You haven’t suffered like I have”—or as a cudgel to beat back others’ legitimate grievances when we behave destructively. We each carry our wounds in our own way; there is neither sense nor value in gauging them against those of others.”