| CALGARY
HERALD
March
20, 2003
by
Kim Heinrich Gray
Author and physician Gabor Mate is no stranger to controversy.
Three years ago, his book Scattered Minds -- which
focuses on the origins of attention deficit disorder --
rocked Canada's mainstream medical community.
His controversial claim was that a child's emotional environment
has as much to do with the disorder as his or her physiology.
He asserted that western society is stressed and as a result
children are not developing normally.
This week, Gabor's latest book, When the Body Says No,
was released. And, like its predecessor, it is bound to
provoke a response or two. Basically, Mate says doctors
need to take more time to talk to their patients. Five-
and 10-minute appointments just don't cut it.
He was originally inspired to write the book because he
says he noticed patterns in his patients who developed chronic
conditions -- conditions such as cancer, multiple sclerosis,
Lou Gehrig's disease, asthma and even migraine headaches.
"These people were stressed without being fully aware
of how stressed they were. The stresses were hidden to them.
They consisted of their own difficulty to look after themselves
emotionally," says Mate. "Instead of being mindful
of their own needs, they repressed their anger. When people
don't know how to say no, the body will say so in the form
of illness." (Hence, the book's title.)
Many stresses, he says, are internal, the product of early
childhood programming. People learn to suppress anger, he
continues, and to put other people's emotional needs before
their own. He says they do it automatically and chronically
and, as a result, physiological stresses are created in
the body.
To quote his latest book: "How may stress be transmuted
into illness? Stress is a complicated cascade of physical
and biochemical responses to powerful emotional stimuli.
Physiologically, emotions are themselves electrical, chemical
and hormonal discharges of the human nervous system . .
. Repression -- dissociating emotions from awareness and
relegating them to the unconscious realm -- disorganizes
and confuses our physiological defences so that in some
people these defences go awry, becoming the destroyers of
health rather than its protectors."
Curiously, when asked if his research has had any affect
on his own life, Mate chuckles. "I used to be a workaholic
doctor. Now I'm just a workaholic author and doctor."
On a serious note, the physician says he has implemented
some changes in his day-to-day living.
"I decided that I don't need to save everyone's life
in the whole world. I can say no. I don't have to work those
hours. There are other priorities such as taking time for
myself, my family and my wife."BACK |
Now comes Gabor Maté , an
insightful, no-nonsense, and thoroughly compassionate
physician who provides an overview of all these perspectives
and comes to the marvelously humane conclusion that ADD/ADHD
is neither nature (genetics) nor nurture (parenting/environment)
but, rather, the result of the collision of a predisposing
nature with an ADD-hostile life situation, family, school,
or job. How refreshing!
-Thom
Hartman, author of ADD: A Different Perception and many
other books about ADD |
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