Gabor Mate

Question 1

Health and wellness have become a modern fixation.
Multibillion-dollar industries bank on people’s ongoing
investment—mental and emotional, not to mention financial—
in endless quests to eat better, look younger, live longer, or
feel livelier, or simply to suffer fewer symptoms. We
encounter would-be bombshells of “breaking health news” on
magazine covers, in TV news stories, omnipresent advertising,
and the daily deluge of viral online content, all pushing this or
that mode of self-betterment. We do our best to keep up: we
take supplements, join yoga studios, serially switch diets, shell
out for genetic testing, strategize to prevent cancer or
dementia, and seek medical advice or alternative therapies for
maladies of the body, psyche, and soul.

Question 2

For better or worse, we humans have a genius for getting
used to things, especially when the changes are incremental.
The newfangled verb “to normalize” refers to the mechanism
by which something previously aberrant becomes normal
enough that it passes beneath our radar. On a societal level,
then, “normal” often means “nothing to see here”: all systems
are functioning as they should, no further inquiry needed.

The truth as I see it is quite different.

Question 3

Indeed, the lives, and the deaths, of individual human beings—their quality and in many cases their duration—are intimately bound up with the aspects of modern society that are “hardest to see and talk about”; phenomena that are, like water to fish, both too vast and too near to be appreciated. In other words, those features of daily life that appear to us now as normal are the ones crying out the loudest for our scrutiny.

Question 4

For me, the process of putting the pieces together began several decades ago when, on a hunch, I went beyond the standard repertoire of dry doctorly questions about symptompresentation and medical history to ask my patients about the larger context for their illnesses: their lives. I am grateful for what these men and women taught me through how they lived and died, suffered and recovered, and through the stories they shared with me. The core of it, which accords entirely with what the science shows, is this: health and illness are not random states in a particular body or body part. They are, in fact, an expression of an entire life lived, one that cannot, in turn, be understood in isolation: it is influenced by—or better yet, it arises from—a web of circumstances, relationships, events, and experiences.