Dr. Gabor Maté (Interview Archive)

The recording opened with a short announcement: this was A Psychology of the Future, an online summit hosted by Erik Lenderman, built around conversations with people working across self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine. Lenderman thanked the listeners for tuning in and then turned to his guest.

He introduced Dr. Gabor Maté, noting that Maté had spent twelve years in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside caring for patients dealing with severe drug addiction, mental illness, and HIV. Along the way Maté had picked up a range of honors, among them the Hubert Evans Prize for literary non-fiction and an honorary degree in law from the University of Northern British Columbia. The plan for the conversation, Lenderman explained, was to cover the wider arc of Maté's thinking on childhood trauma, on stress, and on the ways addiction touches everyone. Maté said he was glad to be there.

Asked to describe how his career had taken shape, Maté went back to the beginning. He corrected himself mid-sentence on the numbers: twenty years in private practice, he said, looking after people at every stage, from birth all the way to death. For seven of those years he served as clinical coordinator of the palliative care unit at the Vancouver hospital, sitting with people who were dying.

Then came the twelve years in the Downtown Eastside, which he called the most concentrated area of drug use in North America. Within a radius of a few city blocks, he said, more addicts were injecting out in the open than anywhere else on the continent. Taken together, his work had stretched from conception to the grave, with a great deal of mental illness and addiction in between.

He mentioned his books, four of them by that point. The newest was In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction. The other one he wanted to name was When the Body Says No, which examines the link between stress and disease.

The thread running through all of it, Maté said, was a single observation he had arrived at over the years. Whether the subject is cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, mental illness, or addiction, the roots trace back to what happened in a person's early life, and specifically to childhood trauma. Early childhood experience, he argued, is the largest single influence on a person's health later on. And that finding, he added, carries a weight that reaches well beyond the individual into the social world around us.