Dr Gabor Mate The Myth of Normal

One of the talks that I give is entitled the myth of normal, which is to say that we think that there are people who are normal over here and then there's the pathological ones who have depression or anxiety or addiction or schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or any number of other ADHD or any number of other conditions. What I see is a continuum. That we're all on a continuum. These traits, to one degree or another, are present in almost everybody and it's a mythology to think that there's the normal and then there's the abnormal. Well, according to the research, the best place to be a schizophrenic in the world is not North America with all its pharmacopoeia. It's actually a village in Africa or India where there's acceptance, where people make room for your differentness, where connection is not broken, but is maintained, where you're not excluded and ostracized, but where you're welcomed. And when there's room for you to act out whatever you need to act out or to express what you need to express. And the whole community might even sing with you or chant with you or hold ceremony with you. Maybe find some meaning in your quote-unquote craziness. It's conceptual and it's cultural. So the disease is not an isolated phenomenon of an individual. It's a culture. It's a culturally manufactured or culturally constructed paradigm. So a society that cuts us off from our spirituality, that cuts us off from society by idealizing individualism and by destroying social contexts, which our society does, which ignores our emotional needs, is going to be a society that generates pathology. And I think that has to do with the very nature of the economic system that says that what matters is not who you are, but how you are valued by others. And our society values people for material, it's a materialistic society, which specifically means that what we value is not who people are, but what they produce or what they consume. And the people that neither consume nor produce, they're ostracized, they're shunted aside, and they're totally devalued. Hence the rejection of old people because they no longer produce and they're not rich enough to consume a lot either. So the very nature of this materialistic society dictates or generates and promotes that separation from ourselves. There is an intelligence and I'm not speaking about a operative creature up there or out there somewhere doing things and deciding things, but there's an intelligence in nature and creation that if we ignore, we create suffering for ourselves and other people. And aligning with that intelligence and aligning with that connection is really what whether we do so consciously or whether we do so because we're called to do that in ways that manifest compassion and connection and love. That's the way we're meant to be. And so the recognizing that and the striving for it is what I call spirituality. The paths are many. Some find it through religion. Sometimes religion is an obstacle to that. In fact, often it is. But it may be a conduit to it as well, depending on who and how and where. It's what people are seeking. Many other paths that are not religious, but fundamentally there's this spiritual nature that if we ignore, we're actually ignoring an essential part of ourselves.