The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

by Gabor Mate MD
4.32 (22K)  •  2022

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Spoiler: The author recounts his own fundamental trauma in which his mother, to save him from the Nazis, abandoned him at eleven months old with a non-Jewish stranger. He talks about how traumas can manifest as addictions and disease. He says that the United States is also traumatized as a society, and that we are so resistant to societal change that we failed to learn the lessons that the pandemic should have taught us.
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Spoiler: Explaining the title of the book, the author says that the conditions of our society which we think are normal are actually leading to rises in mental illness among children and to disease in general. In medicine, normality means health, like normal body temperature. But on a societal level what we consider normal is actually unhealthy; Dr. Maté uses the high rate of Cesarean section births, which he says are “invasive” for both mother and baby, as an example.

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