Cold comfort to some, but I think there's at least one real advantage that the addict or anyone with an acknowledged mental disorder or personal problem has: addressing this is a path to enormous self-realisation and growth. By comparison, most people are sleepwalking through life.
Agreed. I realized I was addicted to checking Facebook and Reddit even though I rarely got anything out of them. I've since deactivated (I need Messenger to chat with some friends, so I can't fully delete, sadly) my Facebook account and pared back my Reddit subscriptions to only academic ones so I can at least learn while on it. It's made me want to check Facebook/Reddit a lot less.
I live in Gabor Maté's hometown of Vancouver, where he has been a pioneer in transforming how the medical profession and government deals with the addiction epidemic affecting the city. Looking out my office window right now, I can see the clinic which is pioneering opioid replacement therapy, in which addicts who have failed all other avenues of addictions treatment are injected regularly with hydromorphone and diacetylmorphine. Without Maté's courageous work in this community, the research underpinning this therapy would potentially not have occurred.
I saw Gabor Mate on Russel Brand's,well, podcast, and was saying to myself, what a compasiomate human being, why isn't this the norm? I think Mate's deep compassion stems from his own suffering in his past.
I am wondering what is suffering for scientists? Suffering is not depression or only sadness in my view, it's a condition that if we manage to overcome we become agents of good.
> People end up compassionate and empathic after suffering indeed
I agree, but suffering is not (I hope) a prerequisite to becoming compassionate and empathic. These qualities are inborn for most people. Perhaps suffering makes people more inclined to put these into practice more consciously or more naturally.
His interview with Tim Ferris was better. The conversation was flowing and they went to some topics in depth. Russell doesn't have patience or just a bit more disorganized.
I'm really enjoying Gabor Maté being more in the spotlight recently. I've been following his work for about 6 years and wished he would get more attention. Such a good human being.
For those interested here's a fascinating discussion between Gabor and Aaron. It's a candid talk between father and son in which they address real feelings of concern, anger, resentment, and disappointment with each other. I remember thinking about how most relationships of that nature go unexamined and unaddressed for an entire lifetime. I still haven't picked up the phone myself.
This interview contains some of the more interesting observations I've heard on this much-discussed topic. e.g. his analogy between online tribes and teenage gangs.
There is a great Mate talk at the society of psychedelics where he gets a question from a father about how to fix y or z for his daughter. Mate's answer is always: do your own healing work, fix yourself -- such a great man.
I've done that with my own personal issues, but I'm not sure it's the best approach for everyone and all the issues.
I'm close to 40 and only now I've been able to give a technical name to a personal problem that has been fuzzy for decades. I'm sure a trained professional would have seen that and maybe my healing would have taken a couple of years instead of close to 20 years.
I think his point is to focus on fixing yourself, rather than trying to fix others. He’s not suggesting that you avoid getting help from professionals to do so.
Gabor Maté is a great public speaker but some of his thinking has some leaks when further prodded [1]. If it could be synthesized and refined a bit more , (maybe his successor?) I think it would help the psychology field in moving to a more holistic approach of the human being and less of an isolated problem / mechanistic one.
That's an interesting article but it's a critique of Maté from a humanistic, non-biomedical position that thinks he isn't radical enough in rejecting the biomedical/disease model of addiction. Mainstream critics would reject Maté's views for opposite reasons. In this sense the author and Maté are largely on the same side.
Search for "gabor mate ayahuasca" on Google/YouTube and watch some videos, Mate is quite familiar with the biology of addiction. There is a reason he isn't being combative against the status quo also, as it gains no one's favour if you're simply engaging someone in 'combat' - causing their ego mind guard to go up to protect one's present moment indoctrinated knowledge, perhaps we can say that knowledge being tied to their sense of meaning and their tribe, so they are reacting with the strength of defending their tribe.
