Dr. Gabor Maté: A Radical Approach to Addiction Treatment

Gabor Maté came of age during Hungary's turmoil, and something of that upbringing seems to have followed him into medicine. After the Holocaust and the end of the Second World War, his family left Hungary for Canada, where he eventually trained as a physician. Most people know him for the years he spent among inner-city adolescents at a palliative care setting in Vancouver, British Columbia. Later in his career he drifted toward the kind of work many holistic practitioners take up, studying ayahuasca, a plant brew that indigenous communities in the Amazon had long used as a spiritual medicine.

Ayahuasca reached hands outside those communities around the 1950s, roughly the same era that LSD and psilocybin mushrooms began circulating beyond their traditional contexts. The brew could be combined with leaves containing DMT. When a generation of young people started acquiring these substances illegally and taking far more than they could handle, the U.S. government responded with the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which pushed psychedelics out of legal reach for the general public.

Maté's doubts about Western medicine run deep, particularly its handling of what gets filed under mental illness. As an addiction specialist, he kept running into the limits of the standard playbook. His book When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection pulls from both his work with addicts and his private Vancouver practice. In it he traces connections between chronic stress and conditions as varied as diabetes, cancer, arthritis, and multiple sclerosis, then lays out what he calls the Seven A's of Healing, along with a case for heading off illness that grows quietly out of buried stress.

None of this is new in spirit. The idea that our feelings are bound up with our ailments is old, and that unresolved emotional pain can push a person toward self-medication is older still. What makes Maté a lightning rod is that his conclusions sit awkwardly against a profit-driven system. The clinic where he worked with inner-city addicts faced an attempt by the Canadian government to close it. Canada's Supreme Court stepped in, ruling that shutting the facility would violate the civil liberties of the young people it served and would leave them worse off, since his more compassionate methods were reaching the underlying causes of their addictions rather than just the symptoms.

His bestseller In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts digs further into addiction, his main area of expertise. Maté takes the position that addiction sits close to the center of what it means to be human. Almost anything can become an addiction, in his view, including habits we normally praise: eating, exercise, work, even the use of medicines meant to help us heal. Suffering has emotional roots, and reaching for something to numb it is, to him, ordinary human behavior. The trouble is that it clouds our judgment and ties us more tightly to whatever we lean on. He argues the only real repair comes from going back to the thing we avoided and dealing with it directly. The same body that breaks down under emotional strain, he contends, is the one capable of recovering once we return to the original wound.

A third book, Scattered: How ADHD Originates and What You Can Do About It, reads more like a personal record. Maté lives with the disorder himself and is father to three children who share the diagnosis. Many readers across North America, especially young people handed an ADHD label, have found the book a kind of lifeline. He turns some of his criticism back on society too, pointing to the way people are encouraged to trade on one another's sense of emptiness and inadequacy, often in the name of profit. Woven through the book is material from the Buddhist Wheel of Life, and he draws as well on Hindu thought, which holds that people are prone to illusion but also carry the capacity to see past it, once they recognize what they are caught in.

- E Bishop Wooten, The Liberal Conservative