Dr. Gabor Maté's Radical Insights on Human Nature and Health

What did I learn from 1 hour, 9 minutes, and 8 seconds of video?

Who is this man? Well, Gabor Maté, born in Hungary and living in Canada, is a 79-year-old retired man with a background in family practice. Looking him up on YouTube leads you to video titles virtually all talking about childhood trauma. He has also written five books and appeared in a gossip article written about him for diagnosing Prince Harry with four different conditions. With all that said, I blatantly admit that my only knowledge of the guy is his Wikipedia article and the one-hour speech I saw.

But, if I could, I wouldn’t take back that hour of my life.

Coexistence of qualities

I’ll tell you: There’s a deep arrogance in me. I’ve always thought that the world should be paying attention to what I have to say, on the one hand. On the other hand, I’m amazed that anybody does, which goes to show you that different qualities can coexist in us at the same time.

Cause and solution

My first book on ADHD, which I wrote after I was diagnosed with it myself: the Canadian title, my own title, was ‘Scattered Minds’. […] The American title when it was published in the States was ‘Scattered’. They took off the word ‘Minds’ […] I don’t know what the thinking was. But it’s the subtitle that interests me because the subtitle they gave it was ‘How ADD originates and what you can do about it’. So it’s the ‘what to do’ […]. The ‘what to do’ is always the wrong question. And this society is always asking ‘What to do about this?’, ‘What to do about racism?’, ‘What to do about bullying?’, ‘What to do about terrorism?’, ‘What to do about our economic crisis?’, ‘What to do about unemployment?’

That’s not the important question. The important question is always ‘why’. Why is something happening? What is actually going on?

Looking for the cause of a problem does help understand and solve it. But ultimately, why look for the “why” if it doesn’t serve the “what to do”? In my opinion, the question of “why” should only be a tool (a powerful one indeed) for the greater goal of “what to do,” but never replace it. That’s the reason for which I would personally consider “what to do” with more importance than “why.” Regardless, it’s just a matter of how important you see a tool in relation to the product.

Nature and nurture

If you have a bunch of plants growing in a garden, and these plants were not developing the way they should if they would start behaving or manifesting in ways that are pathological, that doesn’t further their growth, that doesn’t ensure that they have the longest possible lifespan, that stunts their development somehow… If you were a gardener, what would you do?

Well, you have to ask yourself: What is the nature of these plants? And what conditions does the nature of the plant demand for healthy development? And I’m suggesting that rather than looking to diagnose diseases or conditions or behaviours, why don’t we look at ‘What is the nature of human beings’? And what conditions are necessary for the healthy development of human beings? And what happens when these healthy conditions are not met?

In other words, we are the outcome of circumstances. But are we? Gabor Maté has already received criticism for downplaying genetic factors in human behaviour, especially with addiction and ADHD, so I’ll try to bring a new perspective. In the nature/nurture arguments that plague pretty much all of medicine and psychiatry, Maté certainly seems to be on the latter side. A side I admire for taking responsibility for illnesses, but one I also don’t entirely believe in. In my view, genetics are the limits, and our environment and behaviour reflect where we choose to be within those limits.

Two identical apple seeds can create two different-looking apple trees based on environment and care. But they never will grow to be banana trees, no matter how much you shape their surroundings to make it happen. For humans, those limits are physical but can also be mental. Maté does a good job exposing the environmental factors that lead to illness, which are often under-discussed. However, I wish for a more substantial acknowledgement of the other side.

This is how I adapted to what happened to me, and therefore I have the capacity now as a conscious human being to become aware of all of this and to transform myself. And that’s not easy. It’s not so easy to transform yourself because of course those adaptations I talked about originally related to our very survival as young children and so we think we have to be that way.

Society

It’s from a point of view of how the culture meets the needs of human beings and how does it promotes healthy or unhealthy development that we have to judge any society. We have the GDP, Gross Domestic Product. In this system, this is how we measure success: It’s how much wealth. In a materialistic society, we measure success by the possession or the control or the production of matter […]. Well, it’s one measure, but is it the true measure of a successful society? […] To what degree does it meet human needs?

Human nature

In this system, it is believed and often taught that human nature is essentially selfish, individualistic, aggressive, and competitive. […] that is to make a rather elementary mistake which is to take this society as a standard for what humans are supposed to be. It’s true that we are taught to behave that way. As a matter of fact, […] the most successful people in this society do behave that way. That’s how they become successful, very often. […] What if that is a distortion of human nature?

Rather than trying to determine the nature of human nature from how human people behave, let’s look at it from the point of view of their needs. […] You can have a Hitler who tried to kill me when I was less than a year old, or you can have a Jesus.

He then argues that one of our human needs, outside of our physiological ones, is a need for attachment.

We can look at individual problems […] as a problem to get rid of or we can look at them as warning signs that we’re out of sync with our true nature, that we’re misaligned, somehow with who we are, and that something in us is trying to wake us up.

His answer to depression

Depression is supposed to be this genetic disease. Really? What does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. I’ve been treated for depression […]. What gets pushed down in depression? Your feelings, your emotions. Well, why would a person push down their feelings? Because they’re too painful. They’re too much to bear. In other words, the pushing-down-the-feelings becomes a coping mechanism in an environment where you’re not allowed to feel because your feelings threaten your attachments.

So you learn to survive by pushing down your feelings and then 15 years later, or 30 years later, you get diagnosed with depression. Now you’ve got this medical, biological problem and they give you a pill. Now, I’m not here to form it against pharmacology. I’ve taken antidepressants, they’ve helped me. They work sometimes, but they’re not the answer. Because the answer is: How does that childhood experience manifest in your life today?

From Maté’s point of view, this mental health problem is a mechanism for the survival of relationships developed during childhood. But what about those who’ve had a normal childhood but still, somehow, have fallen prey to this disorder? Can’t those coping mechanisms also be developed into adulthood? Why not?

I’m still not sure about the explanation he gives. If it is a reaction to rejection, can’t we say that what a child perceives as rejection is subjective? Differing levels of rejection sensitivity exist in the adult world. Some can be unaffected by the negative judgment of their peers, while others go into a frenzy if their friend doesn’t text back fast enough. I think we can all agree that everyone has the potential to go into either side of this spectrum based on their treatment and perception of the world. Then, we can say that someone’s sensitivity to rejection isn’t genetic. The same applies to depression.

But what if it has nothing to do with rejection? What if it’s because you’re not taking care of your body? Or because you feel a lack of purpose and direction in your life? What if it’s not because of an overabundance of rejection but a lack of affection? There are so many routes you could go with this problem. Proving depression to be completely detached from genetics is verifying all possible causes based on circumstance and environment.

The mind and the body

We look at the rise in mental health pathology, the rise in physical health pathology, this is despite the advances of medical science which are immense and breathtakingly amazing when it comes to acute illnesses and infectious illnesses. But we do really badly with chronic illness, autoimmune diseases, and cancer for the most part. And we do extraordinarily poorly with mental illnesses. If we look at the rise of the intractability of these conditions, then maybe what’s missing is not medical medication or medical skill but a perspective that connects the dots.

What I like about this man’s philosophy is his belief that the mind and the body are connected. It makes sense if you look at the placebo effect or other similar phenomena, and it disallows you from ignoring one if you’re concerned about the other. But he seems to believe that, or at least talk like, all physical illnesses come from mental ones, which not only doesn’t make sense, but he also never talks about it the other way around.

The individual and the group

Human beings and bio-psycho-social-spiritual-ecological creatures and you can’t separate the individual malaise, from the history, from the multi-generational family trajectory, and from the culture as it is today. All this, then, concentrates on an individual, in physiological problems like immune system problems that affect the nervous system that leads to cocaine susceptibility, cancer that a stressed and isolated person is less likely to mount a defence against, like the mental illnesses that develop originally as compensations against stress and trauma.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this article, I wrote that I didn’t regret spending more than an hour on his talk. Indeed, it’s a fascinating dive into a stranger’s philosophy of the world, particularly his vision of society misaligning with our human needs and his conviction that illnesses stem from those misalignments. In conclusion, I highly suggest thinking back on what he says with both a critical and an open mind, and if you have the time, watch his full talk: