11/10/2019
Dr Gabor Mate - Oct 2019 -
The dynamic nature of what we call mental illness also means that healing is possible— it is the same dynamic moving in the other direction, from fragmented to whole. Healing is not the same as pharmacologically suppressing symptoms. Medications may have a role, as I can both professionally and personally testify, but they are not the answer because they do not address the fundamental trauma of disconnection from the self and from safe and nurturing social affiliations—the disconnection at the core of all psycho-emotional distress and symptomatology. The best case would be that medications allow those who need them the space to do this deeper work.
Before I conclude with some more thoughts about healing, I want to briefly touch on addictions, a major issue in our society. Addiction, too, is a complex process, manifested in any behavior in which a person finds temporary pleasure or relief, and therefore craves, but cannot give up or denies despite negative consequences. In a nutshell: pleasure, relief and craving in the short term, negative impact in the long term, and an inability to desist. Note that I said any behaviour—that could, obviously, mean drugs or substances from he**in to to***co, but it could also mean a compulsive relationship to s*x, po*******hy, shopping, eating, gambling, gaming, cell phones, social media—the list is endless.
I’d like now to invite a participatory exercise, if you’ll allow it. Please raise your hand if, according to the definition I’ve just given, you have ever had any kind of an addictive pattern in your life.
Now, look around, take in the number of people whose hands are raised along with yours. The stigma of mental illness vanishes when we realize we are all in the same boat. It cannot be otherwise: there is only one boat. In my work with severely addicted people, with depressives, with schizophrenics, with men and women challenged by bipolar tendencies, I have never met one whose dynamics, to one degree or another, I could not recognize in myself.
As for healing, although the search for wholeness is a highly personal process, it is equally an expression of a universal capacity that inheres within all of us. It means finding the lost connection to ourselves, for which we require—beyond the limitations of medical diagnoses—compassionate contact with other human beings who can support the very same needs that were not satisfied at some essential points in our lives: the needs for love, belonging, acceptance, and meaning. May we all, my fellow beings in normalcy and dysfunction, attain the ultimate sanity of connection with our true selves, with one another, and with the Creation that lies beyond yet embraces us all.
