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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Gabor Maté
Read between
February 13 - April 9, 2023
The psychologist Julie T. Anné, who specializes in treating eating disorders, nails it: with her clients, she says, “three lacks” are typical—lack of control, identity, and self-worth—along with a need to numb pain.
From behavioral problems to full-blown mental illness, it’s not anyone’s fault—nor, as we’ve seen, the fault of their brains or their genes. It is an expression of untended wounds, and it is meaningful.
We know that chronic stress, whatever its source, puts the nervous system on edge, distorts the hormonal apparatus, impairs immunity, promotes inflammation, and undermines physical and mental well-being.
acute or chronic activation, potential overactivation, and even exhaustion of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis
“allostatic load”: the wear and tear on the body of having to maintain its internal equilibrium in the face of changing and challenging circumstances,
And while the personal stresses of a disconnect from the self and the loss of authenticity may cut across class lines, the allostatic strain imposed by imbalances of power falls most onerously on the politically disempowered and economically disenfranchised.
“psychological factors such as uncertainty, conflict, lack of control, and lack of information are considered the most stressful stimuli and strongly activate the HPA axis.”[3]
The hegemony of materialist culture is now total, its discontents universal. We explore how it affects our very health in this and the following chapters.
All stressors represent the absence or threatened loss of something an organism perceives as necessary for survival.
Wade Davis remarked recently in a broadly circulated Rolling Stone piece, “Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.”[14]
increase in inflammatory gene activity in people confronting a sense of threat or insecurity for more than a short period of time.
We can detect these same in mice, in monkeys. As far down as in fish, you can see that the more stress or threat or uncertainty you’re exposed to, the more the body turns on this defensive program that involves more inflammation.”
The notion that capitalism is meant to provide equality and opportunity for all must be taken on faith, since history and material reality provide no evidence for it.
Among psychologists there is wide-ranging consensus about what our core needs consist of,
“The statement that the physical and mental life of man, and nature, are interdependent means simply that nature is interdependent with itself, for man is a part of nature.” So wrote a twenty-six-year-old Karl Marx in 1844.[2]
A sane culture, Bruce and I agree, would have psychosocial integration as both an aim and a norm. Authenticity and attachment would cease to be in conflict: there would be no fundamental tension between belonging and being oneself.
But even people perched atop the economic pyramid can experience a devaluation of self, for the simple reason that materialistic values run counter to the need for meaning, for purpose beyond self-serving endeavors.
2020 found, the “presence [of] and search for meaning in life are important for health and well-being.”[6] Simply put, the more meaningful you find your life, the better your measures of mental and physical health are likely to be.
U.S. surgeon general Vivek Murthy wrote: “Our twenty-first-century world demands that we focus on pursuits that seem to be in constant competition for our time, attention, energy, and commitment. Many of these pursuits are themselves competitions. We compete for jobs and status. We compete over possessions, money, and reputations. We strive to stay afloat and to get ahead. Meanwhile, the relationships we prize often get neglected in the chase.”[12]
psychologist Tim Kasser, professor emeritus of psychology at Knox College, his response was unequivocal. “Research consistently shows,” he told me, “that the more people value materialistic aspirations as goals, the lower their happiness and life satisfaction and the fewer pleasant emotions they experience day to day.
Neuroscience, originally meant to unlock the mysteries of consciousness and the brain, has become another handmaiden of the profit motive.
While similar in some ways, pleasure and happiness run on different neurochemical fuels: pleasure employs dopamine and opiates, both of which operate in short-term bursts, while contentment is based on the more steady, slow-release serotonin apparatus.
It’s an appalling example of how rampant free-enterprise materialism has hijacked the science of neurophysiology to deregulate the brain, just as it “deregulates” the financial markets.
It has been broadly established that Big Pharma, such as Purdue, the company controlled by the Sacklers, promoted opiates like OxyContin to doctors as relatively safe analgesics. They did so in full awareness of their drugs’ addictive potential.
In today’s America, narcissism and sociopathy are strategies. And they’re very successful strategies, especially in business and politics and entertainment.”
It is no outcome of genetic destiny, for example, that in Canada Indigenous people suffer more illness and die earlier than others. Racism and poverty do get under the skin, in so many ways.
Ta-Nehisi Coates tersely asserts, “Race is the child of racism, not the father.” In other words, the very concept of race emerges from the distorted imagination of the racist.
The existence of the Jew merely permits the anti-Semite to stifle his anxieties.”[2]
Reviewing the literature, I found it most stunning that the race differentials in blood pressure rates are measurable already in children and adolescents.[8]
Black American children are six times more likely than non-Black kids to die of asthma.[9]
The racial differences, independent of genetics, defy economic categories: for example, the abovementioned breast cancer risk for Black women cuts across class lines.
In short, it is “racism, not race itself, that threatens the lives of African American women and infants,” a recent review of multiple studies concluded.[13]
The lifespan of Indigenous people is fifteen years shorter than that of other Canadians, infant mortality two to three times higher, and type 2 diabetes four times more widespread:
Both inequality and poverty stir the by now familiar brew of disturbed genetic function, inflammation, chromosomal and cellular aging, physiological wear and tear, hormonal disturbances, cardiovascular effects, and immune debility, all of which combine to bring illness, disability, and death.
The gender gap in health is real, if underappreciated. Women are more subject to chronic disease even long before old age, and they have more years of poor health and disability.
rheumatoid arthritis strikes women three times more often than it does men, lupus afflicts women by a disproportionate factor of nine, and the female-to-male ratio of multiple sclerosis has been rising for decades. Women also have a higher incidence of non-smoking-related malignancies. Even when it comes to lung cancer, a woman who smokes has double the chance of developing the disease.[2] Women also have double men’s incidence of anxiety, depression, and PTSD.[3]
Women often serve as the emotional glue—the connective tissue, if you like—that keeps nuclear and extended families and communities together. It is no coincidence they suffer far more than men do from diseases of actual connective tissue,
Our society reinforces men’s sense of being entitled to women’s care in a way that almost escapes being put into words. I refer here to the automatic mothering women provide their male partners, the emotional sustenance that forms the invisible mortar of many heterosexual relationships:
Dr. Julie Holland, she averred that the disproportionately high rate of anxiety and depression in women stems, in large part, from their absorption of male angst and their culturally directed responsibility for soothing it. In that sense, women are ingesting the antidepressants and anxiolytics (antianxiety meds) for both sexes.
When I reduce my wife to an object whose purpose is to keep me satisfied, what role am I casting myself in? An impotent, dependent child whose emotional welfare hinges on Mommy’s willingness to comply with my perceived needs. This child, in an adult body, struts, remonstrates, sulks, and makes demands on his caregiver. He is never sated, never satisfied.
if we want to understand why individuals and groups believe and behave as they do—and we should want to, if we truly care about the consequences—then we need to be willing to see the traumatic scars underneath the extreme emotional reactions.
Although their respective supporters would likely shudder at the thought of them being remotely similar, Trump and Clinton were a match made in childhood suffering.
In fact, much of politics is a lot more coherent if we see how people, many millions of them at once, unconsciously look to their leaders to fulfill their own unmet childhood needs.
On the liberal side, idealizing leaders as kind, supportive, caring, and inclusive can be another form of displaced longing for attuned parenting.
Less appreciated is the way pop culture grooms us for a particular sort of passive, spectator-like engagement with politics. The hero worship and emotional projection driving modern showbiz run on superfuel distilled in large part from trauma.
All in all, the system works with cyclic elegance: a culture founded on mistaken beliefs regarding who and what we are creates conditions that frustrate our basic needs, breeding a populace in pain, disconnected from self, others, and meaning.
When I speak of healing, I am referring to nothing more or less than a natural movement toward wholeness.
Nor is healing synonymous with self-improvement. Closer to the mark would be to say it is self-retrieval.
Any movement toward wholeness begins with the acknowledgment of our own suffering, and of the suffering in the world.
No matter what degree of discomfort our illusions cover over, the truth hurts, and we don’t like hurting if we can help it—even if we sense that something better could lie on the far side of the pain.
