Mental and Physical Health In Late Stage Capitalism: A Review Of Gabor Mate’s The Myth of Normal

After reading Marcus Aurelius’s Mediations, I turned my attention to Gabor Mate’s The Myth Of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing In A Toxic Culture. Mate is a well known physician who has previously written a number of books on specific topics like ADHD and addiction. The Myth of Normal is his magnum opus, a 500-page treatise in which he attempts to integrate the learning of a lifetime.

The book is divided into five parts. Part I is called “Our Interconnected Nature” and discusses topics like trauma, the mind-body connection, our interpersonal nature, autoimmune diseases, disease as a process rather than a thing and our needs for attachment and authenticity.

Western medicine continues to be hampered by the mind-body dichotomy which goes back to Descartes. Most practitioners are only interested in the physical manifestations and treatment of disease with little interest in studying the relationship between the mind and body or an individual’s biography and his illness (also see my “The Structure of Knowledge and The Limits of Physical Science”, April 7, 2024).

This is why autoimmune diseases – which are on the rise – have posed such a puzzle for Western medicine. To understand them, you can’t ignore the mind-body connection or a person’s life history. Dr Mate does an excellent job marshalling evidence to undermine the faulty assumptions of Western medicine and what actually goes wrong when people get sick.

Part II “The Distortion of Human Development” is focused on child development. The early years are crucial ones and our culture not only doesn’t prioritize them but does a lot to throw healthy development off course.

Part III “Rethinking Abnormal: Afflictions as Adaptations” focuses on addiction and mental illness. When property understood, these pathologies reflect responses to intolerable situations. In addiction, people turn to substances in order to numb the intolerable emotional pain they frequently experience. In mental illness, the mind adopts neurotic – or worse – ways of functioning in order to deal with an overwhelming childhood situation. Both are intelligible only in the context of a person’s life history, not biologically.

In Part IV “The Toxicities of our Culture” Dr. Mate turns his attention to the macro level of culture. We live in a materialistic culture that overvalues money and things and undervalues relationships and spirituality. Because the latter are deep needs of human nature, our culture simply does not satisfy human needs essential for a fulfilling life. Those who are sucked in by the messages of late stage capitalism whether via social media or the manipulation of powerful corporations are derailed from their true needs and playing a game that can only lead to emptiness and unhappiness. I have previously called it The Culture of Nihilism (for example, see “Economic Utopia and Spiritual Nihilism”, August 27, 2023).

Our health and illness are inextricably intertwined with the way we live our lives. In order to heal, we must change the way we live on both a personal and societal level. Frequently, a breakdown in the body is the crisis that triggers a reevaluation. As Bessel van der Kolk, a friend of Dr. Mate’s, aptly titled his book on trauma: The Body Keeps The Score.

In Part V “Pathways To Wholeness” Mate outlines the way forward. While changes in the culture would be supportive, we as individuals can’t sit around waiting for things to change. We have to take our own health into our own hands and do what we can to heal and create meaningful lives for ourselves and our loved ones in an unsupportive culture. Fortunately, the mind is resilient and compulsive maladaptive patterns entrenched when we were young and helpless can be transcended by many with a lot of hard work.

In the last pages of The Myth of Normal, Dr. Mate references a 1951 paper, “Resistance to Acculturation”, by the great student of human self actualization and the further reaches of human nature, Abraham Maslow. Maslow pointed out that self actualizing individuals often had an ambivalent relationship to their toxic cultures and “very frequently seemed to be able to stand off from it as if they did not quite belong to it” (496).

At some point Dr. Mate introduces the concept of “malignant normality”. To be normal in our culture is to be in actuality sick. As Erich Fromm wrote in The Sane Society: “That millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make them sane.”