Gabor Mate: Physician and best-selling author known for his expertise on addiction, stress, trauma, and childhood development; author of The Myth of Normal and Scattered Minds.
What this episode covers
Steven Bartlett interviews physician and author Gabor Mate about trauma, defined not as what happens to us but as the wound that forms inside us in response. Mate draws on his own infancy as a Jewish baby in Nazi-occupied Hungary to explain how an infant's sense of not being good enough drives lifelong workaholism, addiction, and inauthenticity. He argues that mental and physical illness are normal responses to abnormal circumstances, that the mind and immune system are inseparable, and that conditions like ADHD reflect inherited sensitivity plus environmental stress rather than a genetic disease. He lays out frameworks for healing including awareness, authenticity, agency, acceptance, and a five-step relabeling technique. The conversation closes with both men candidly admitting their shared phone and work addictions.
The guest's own work
The Myth of Normal
Gabor Mate
“So much so that in this book, The Myth of Normal, I actually talk about an experience with the psychedelic mushrooms”— Gabor Mate
Scattered Minds
Gabor Mate
“to read my book on ADHD. It's called Scattered Minds. And I was diagnosed with it in my 50s”— Gabor Mate
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Blessed with a Brain Tumor
Bill Pike
“I interview a young man called Bill Pike who wrote a book called Blessed with a Brain Tumor. And how what kind of blessing is that?”— Gabor Mate
The Art of the Deal
Donald Trump
“the person who co-wrote his quasi-autobiographical, The Art of the Deal, this writer says that he's never met anybody who's so capable of believing something that's not true”— Gabor Mate
Big reveals from this episode
- Mate's grandparents were killed in Auschwitz and his mother gave him to a stranger for six weeks to save his life when he was an infant.
- During a psilocybin therapy session at age 70, Mate relived being a one-year-old and apologized to his mother for 'making her life so difficult.'
- Mate himself was diagnosed with ADHD in his 50s, as were a couple of his children.
- A study of thousands of brain scans found nothing diagnostic in people with mental illness diagnoses; there are no physiological markers for mental illness.
- McGill rat-grooming study showed nurturing alters offspring's stress receptors via epigenetics, not genes, and is passed on behaviorally.
- Mate admits to a shopping addiction during which he lied to his wife every day, even after she stopped trying to change his behavior.
- Mate states no gene or group of genes for ADHD has ever been found; what is inherited is sensitivity, not a disease.
- Both Bartlett and Mate confess they cannot be alone with themselves without reaching for their phones.
Worth remembering
- Hungarian-Canadian researcher Janos Selye coined the modern usage of the word 'stress' and showed stress diminishes the immune system.
- Trauma derives from the Greek word for wounding; Mate says it behaves like a wound that scars over, going numb and rigid.
- A Canadian study found men who were sexually abused have triple the rate of heart attacks as adults.
- Sir William Osler called rheumatoid arthritis a stress-driven disease in 1890, and Charcot said the same of multiple sclerosis.
- The science studying the link between emotions, nervous system, hormones, and immunity is called psychoneuroimmunology.
- Spanking has not been shown to be as traumatic as harsher forms of physical abuse, per Mate.
- In the 1980s one in 20 US children were diagnosed with ADHD; today the figure is roughly one in nine.
- In the US, poor children and children of color are much more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD due to greater stress exposure.
- British psychologist Richard Bentall noted the evidence linking mental illness and childhood adversity is as strong as that linking smoking and lung cancer.
- A 2012 Harvard Center on the Developing Child article in Pediatrics stated the human brain develops from before birth into adulthood.