Dr Gabor Maté | We Live In A Toxic Culture (Part 1)

[Music] thank you good morning everyone thank you so much for turning out um welcome to the how to Academy and penguin live um it's my enormous pleasure to be able to talk this morning to someone who you may not know double mate um as you all know um is a doctor he's the author of several best-selling books including his new one the myth of the normal which is been published in 25 countries 25 languages it's already published in five and is a bestseller in four of them already um what else can I say if if

they gave out professorships for wisdom then he would certainly be the professor of wisdom um sadly our culture is much more concerned with expertise than wisdom but um it is an extremely Wise book for those of you who have not read it yet um thank you for coming thank you thank you I see I'm having a bit of difficulty hearing you I don't know I know if there's any mics that um can anything be done about the sound so I get a better feedback here on the sound well I'll I'll look directly at you when

we're speaking um but thank you so the the title is the myth of the normal trauma illness and the healing in a toxic culture should we start with what you mean by a toxic culture since we all live in it sure sure so the analogy that we use in introduction is in the laboratory if you're a scientist growing microorganisms in a broth you call that a culture you say you're culturing microorganisms and if those creatures were thriving and proliferating you'd say that's a healthy culture but if a lot of them if I um developing pathologies

dying struggling you say it's a toxic culture there's something in the brew that doesn't serve the health of these microorganisms well I'm saying that there's something about this culture that we live in that doesn't serve the health but undermines the health of many of the people living in it and you can look upon illness either as some random Misfortune that hits people very rarely dictated by genetics but mostly just we don't know what causes it and it's just bad luck too bad we can actually say well maybe there's something about the way we live that

contributes to people's illness and I'm saying that in this culture illness is not an abnormality it's actually a normal response to an abnormal circumstances hmm you also talk about um the main title the myth of the normal and it sort of features in the book in two ways doesn't it that that we think that the culture that we walk around is normal yeah it's normal out there it's a normal day it's a normal week um but we think we're we are all normal ourselves yeah what was it that made you start to question this idea

of normal because you must at some point in your life have thought this is normal too yeah what made you wake up and think well hang on this isn't normal yeah so that's where the meaning of normal comes into it's in from the medical point of view um there's Evangel normal that corresponds to what is healthy and what is natural So within without outside of certain spectrum of body temperature you can't live if your body temperature was too low or goes too high you can't live outside a certain level of blood acidity you can't sustain

life Beyond a certain range of blood pressure if it's too low or too high you don't live so in that sense normal the normal range corresponds to what is healthy and what is natural but we make the Assumption in this society that what we're used to in other words what is Norm to us is also healthy and natural and I'm saying it's a dangerous assumption in fact quite false so that what is considered to be normal in this culture is neither healthy nor is it natural unlike in that strict medical sense when we talk about

the the toxic culture yeah um are we talking about the range of illnesses that that are prevalent because it is a point you make very early on in the book that we're a very health obsessed culture yeah and so it's it's ironic to say the least that there's such a a tidal wave of of illness that and is it well accounted for in the normal medical hypothesis well first of all why are we Health obsessed it's because because people are endowed people are anxious about about their health um what's the brunt of your question you

said again well what is it do you think that makes us ill in this culture toxicity of the culture well so there's two ways you can hurt people one is you do bad things to them such as in the street and now that happens on the individual level in the case of child abuse and so on of which there's plenty and on the social level in in the form of the inequalities that British research has so clearly shown to be a major source of ill health the world famous researchers here in England have been Pioneers

in Michael Marmot and and others showing the impact of inequalities like just yesterday in the guardian the bishop of London was talking about health inequalities in this culture so you saw that during covet who was most likely to get to fall ill and to die of covet by significant percentages would be people of minorities caller low socioeconomic status and so on so that inequality and then and then the embedded racism and all kinds of other prejudices that beset people on on a what corresponds to an individual level to be individual abuse you might say is

on a social level a social abuse so that's one way to hurt people is just to do bad things to them I mean there was a study just three weeks ago just just as the book was being published another study in the States showing that in the aftermath of racism a racist episode a person's immune systems activity diminishes and their hormone level changes just one episode like that so there's plenty of that kind of hurting people but the other way you can hurt people is by depriving them of their needs so we all have a

need for oxygen you know I don't have to hit you but I could badly Hurt You by sucking the oxygen out of this one I'm saying that people have certain needs children of certain essential needs without which they don't develop Hell in a healthy way and adults have certain needs and this Society deprives them of those needs so both in the active sense of imposing hurt on people and in a more passive sense of depriving of their needs it's a toxic culture a lot of the books you you are very concerned through the whole book

with children I mean if there's one group and we've all been a member of that group at some point um that when you talk about hurting people or depriving people that it's not really grown-ups you're talking about most of the time that a lot of the hurt that people carry around with them you say it's in the very very earliest part of their childhood before one years old yeah tell us what you mean by that and why you think it happened so early well with any organism I mean if you're a gardener a horticulturist and

you're planting flowers or trees you know that the conditions that you're establishing I mean at the earliest stages are the most important ones so that you know an acorn may have the potential to develop into a Mighty Oak Tree but only if the conditions are right otherwise it might not develop at all so in terms of human beings the most important period are the formative years beginning In Utero so I already stresses on pregnant women we know have impact on the developing child in such a way that that interferes for example with the stress apparatus

like for example in after 9 11 there was a study of women who had developed post-traumatic stress disorder while pregnant as a result of 9 11 and one year later their children still had abnormal stress hormone levels well you don't need 911 to stress women that was just a particular example I could get named a whole lot of other studies in Europe then there was I spent some time in the book talking about birth practices and and human birth is not just the question of the baby being expelled from the wound birth was actually designed

by nature for much more it was to create a a context for bonding between a mother and infant biochemically actually doing birth process certainly a love cocktail it's been called an oxytocin and endorphins and other areas released now modern medicine has certainly performed miracles in Saving Women's and Children's lives when birth wasn't going well so that's not to be either denied or decried but we're also interfering with birth mercilessly the way I was trained to deliver babies was really interventionist and totally unnecessary in a way that would undermine the bonding between mother and infant so

in in British Columbia where I live there's a cesarean section 8 that's almost 40 now that's incredible it should be about according to the landsat the British publication this is the worldwide now especially amongst the middlemen and other class people in in in in in in the so-called third world China and Brazil and so on this is a section where it is approaching 50 percent which is unbelievable it should be about 10 or 15 percent so in Europe and by the way if you're have you ever given if you ever given birth here if you're

ever pregnant just raise your hand that if you went to the doctor for your prenatal visit they asked you about your emotional states anybody I don't see any hands up yet that's so important you know now they ask you about your diet maybe and your blood pressure and you know but nothing about your emotional states which is amazing given how important that is and then there's a whole childhood how do we raise children and what I'm saying is is that we become denatured the human beings have parenting instincts all animals are planting instincts but instincts

have to be evoked by their environment so that an instinct doesn't necessarily come online it has to be supported by the environment in this Society people are actually trained to ignore their instincts I mean I give the example of my mother who writes in her diary when I was two weeks of age poor little gab over my heart is breaking for you because you've been crying to be fed for the last hour and a half but I promised the doctor I only figured every four hours so I'll have to like to let you cry for

another half an hour her Instinct was to pick me up and to hold me that's the maternal Instinct but she was stifling her Instinct in order to comply with medical advice by the way medical advice that I myself used to give on until I found out better like let the baby cry it out let them go back to sleep all this kind of nonsense that totally inimical to human development but which advice that we give to parents all the time and I could go down the line in all the ways that parenting is undermined in

this culture so we get the early years wrong and then we wonder why so many kids are being diagnosed with everything under the sun