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

by Gabor Maté

What kind of people would knowingly cause the illness and deaths of countless millions? Law professor Joel Bakan,[*] whose book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power became the basis of the award-winning documentary of the same name, set out to assess corporations in the light of standard mental health measures we would apply to people. The appraisal is entirely fair, given that U.S. law has, since the late 1800s, regarded corporations as “persons.” “Viewed from such a vantage,” he told me, “many corporations meet the criteria of ‘sociopaths,’ acting without a conscience: not caring about what happens to other people as a consequence of their actions, having no compulsion to comply with social or legal norms, not feeling guilt or remorse.” It’s an airtight case—from a mental health perspective, how else to regard nonaccountable “persons” with limitless power, quite willing to obscure truths and broadcast lies, sowing illness and death? If anyone requires a second opinion, the New York psychoanalyst Steven Reisner is ready with one.[*] “Narcissism and sociopathy describe corporate America,” he told me. “But it’s flat-out wrong to think in twenty-first-century America that narcissism and sociopathy are illnesses. In today’s America, narcissism and sociopathy are strategies. And they’re very successful strategies, especially in business and politics and entertainment.” Call it the myth of abnormal, this notion that somehow these antisocial traits go ag...