Healing as a Subversive Act | Gabor Maté, MD

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From Psychotherapy Networker: “When you look at the major health indicators in our society, what do you see? Every three weeks, the number of deaths from drug overdoses equals the total death toll from 9/11. The number of people diagnosed with autoimmune illness is going up, and mental health issues are snowballing. The number of children being diagnosed with one or another so-called medical disorder—whether it’s ADHD, anxiety, depression, so-called conduct disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, pervasive development disorder, not to mention the autism spectrum issues—keeps growing. More and more kids are being medicated all the time. Anxiety is the fastest growing diagnosis among our youth.

How do we explain why these problems are burgeoning? As a medical doctor, I was trained in the mainstream medical tradition, a perspective that sees the mind and the body as separate from one another, and the individual as separate from the environment. In this framework, society and culture play almost no role in the onset or the dynamics of illness. Everything is reduced to individual biology or individual behavior . . .

The problem with that perspective is that it cannot possibly explain why the problem of drug abuse [illness, etc.] is getting so much worse on such a large scale. The real sources are individual trauma in an increasingly isolating and dislocated culture. But our society loves to reduce everything to the level of the individual, because then we don’t have to look at the social factors. . . .

In essence, healing is a highly subversive act in our culture. Whether in a medical or more direct psychotherapeutic sense, our work with people is about subverting their self-image as isolated, simply biological or simply psychological creatures, and helping them see the connections among their existence, the nature of the culture we live in, and the functioning of all of humanity. It’s about challenging the idea that someone’s value is dependent on how well they fit into an abnormal, unhealthy culture. Ideally, as healers in the broadest sense, that’s what we should be doing.”

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4 COMMENTS

  1. “the mainstream medical tradition, a perspective that sees the mind and the body as separate from one another, and the individual as separate from the environment.”

    Who are the crazy people? The ones hypocritically claiming to be “healers,” who believe “Healing” is “a Subversive Act,” because it’s not profitable for the “healers”? Lunatics who nose themselves into other peoples’ lives, fraudulently claiming people have “life long, incurable, genetic mental illnesses,” with zero proof? Pharmakia worshippers, who value the reputation of their “wonder drugs,” infinitely greater than the reputations of their clients? People who believe that a scientifically “invalid” and “unreliable” DSM billing code “bible” of stigmatizations, is a “bible.” Those that believe that the DSM is a “bible” are the crazy people.

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  2. Excellent article.
    As Dr. Gabor Mate states “The real sources are individual trauma in an increasingly isolating and dislocated culture. But our society loves to reduce everything to the level of the individual, because then we don’t have to look at the social factors”.

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  3. ^^^^^ It is also because if people suffer from individual problems then they cannot organize and fight back.

    Instead they have to worry about making themselves right, like before the Big Sky Daddy.

    Talk about Healing, Therapy, and Recovery is all just another way of abusing survivors.

    Justina Pelletier, 3 posts
    https://www.madinamerica.com/2019/06/the-three-types-of-psychiatric-drugs-a-doctors-guide-for-consumers/#comment-157141

    Come Join:
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