#1869 - Dr. Gabor Maté

Gabor Maté (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

Pleasure to meet you.

I've really enjoyed your conversations online. I love your perspective, and it's really a real pleasure to have you in here.

Gabor Maté (0:21)

Well, I really am happy to be here with you. Thank you.

Joe Rogan (0:23)

My pleasure. This book, The Myth of Normal, this is your book.

Gabor Maté (0:27)

Yeah, it's called The Myth of Normal, Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture. And it kind of sums up everything I've ever learned.

Joe Rogan (0:36)

What exactly is toxic about our culture? Is that a too big a question?

Gabor Maté (0:41)

No, it's the central question. Yeah. If you imagine you're a microbiologist in a laboratory growing microorganisms in a petri dish, that's called a culture. You know, you put in a brew, and with the right nutrients and the microorganisms thrive and multiply. But if a lot of them start getting sick and a lot of them start dying, you'd say this is a toxic culture.

Now, if you look at what's happening in North America now, there's an article in The New York Times ten days before we speak, of a teenager being on ten different psychiatric medications. Ten different psychiatric medications.

More and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD, with anxiety, with depression, the rate of childhood suicide is going up, and everybody's saying, what's going on here? Why is this going on? More and more people are getting autoimmune disease, mental health issues, the overdose crisis in the States, over 100,000 people died of overdoses. Either we assume that these are all accidents and sort of blows of misfortune, or we get that there's something about this culture that's fomenting so much illness. Seventy percent of American adults are on at least one medication.

Joe Rogan (1:56)

Seventy?

Gabor Maté (1:57)

Seventy, yeah. Forty percent are on about two at least.

That's a toxic culture. There's all kinds of... I could talk about what makes it that way, but when I talk about toxic culture, I'm talking about its impact on the people who inhabit it.

Joe Rogan (2:12)

So this toxic culture, are you just talking about the overall way human beings communicate? Is it the way we're being raised? Is it the foods we eat? Is it everything?

Gabor Maté (2:24)

It's all done.

Joe Rogan (2:25)

It's all.

Gabor Maté (2:26)

And salient amongst them are how we raise our kids.

Joe Rogan (2:30)

What about how we raise our kids?

Gabor Maté (2:32)

Well, if you look at how human beings evolved over millions, really, of years, and hundreds of thousands of years, and even our own species has been on the Earth for about 150,000, 200,000 years. For all that time until the blink of an eye ago, we lived out in nature in small band hunter-gatherer groups where kids were raised communally. So that it wasn't just an isolated nuclear family or an isolated mother or father, it was grandparents and uncles and aunts and the whole community. It takes a village as the saying goes. It takes the whole community. Now, children also were picked up when they cried. In fact, they were never even put down. They slept with their parents. They were breastfed for three or four years. In today's society, and I can start even before then, already we know that stresses on the pregnant women have a negative impact on the infant, physiological impact on the infant's brain development. It's not even controversial.

In our society, we don't pay attention to women's emotional needs when they're pregnant, and we don't pay attention to the child's emotional needs. So the child needs to be held and accepted unconditionally. Now, in our society, we actually tell parents not to pick up their kids when they're crying. And that is an insult and a trauma to the child. And that has an impact on the child's trust in the world, sense of safety, sense of belonging, how they feel about themselves. In the book I talk about my mom, and I talk about my own infancy in Budapest, Hungary, as a Jewish infant under the Nazis. So you can imagine how stressed my mom was.

But forget the Nazis for a minute.

I read her diary, and she writes, this is when I'm two weeks of age, and we're in the maternity hospital. And she says, my poor little Gabor, my heart is breaking for you, because you want to be fed, and you're hungry, but I promised the doctor I would only feed you every four hours. And you've been crying for the last hour and a half.

What's it like for an infant to lie there next to their mom and not be picked up and fed for an hour and a half? Try telling a mother baboon, or a mother cat, or a mother bear to ignore their child's distress for an hour and a half. So the very advice that you would give to a lot of parents these days already damages the child.