Joe Rogan Experience #1869 - Dr. Gabor Mate

(drum music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Pleasure to meet you. I've, uh, I've really enjoyed your conversations online. I, I, I love your perspective, and, uh, it's really a, a real pleasure to have you in here.

Well, I really, I'm happy to be here with you, thank you.

My pleasure. Uh, this book, The Myth of Normal. This is your book.

Yeah, it's called The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, and it kinda sums up everything I've ever learned.

What exactly is toxic about our culture? Is that a too big a question?

No. It, it's, it's the, uh, it's the central question.

Yeah.

Um, if you imagine you're a microbiologist in a laboratory, growing microorganisms in a Petri dish, that's called a culture. You know, you put in the brew, and with the right nutrients and the microorganisms thrive and they multiply. But if a lot of them start getting sick, and a lot of them started dying, you would say this is a toxic culture. Now, if you look at what happening in North America now, there was an article in The New York Times 10 days before we speak of a teenager being on 10 different psychiatric medications. 10 different psychiatric medications. More and more kids are being diagnosed with ADHD, with anxiety, with depression. The rate of childhood suicide is going up and everybody's saying, "What's going on here? Why is this going on?" More and more people getting autoimmune disease, um, me- mental health issues. The overdose crisis in the States, over 100,000 people died of overdoses. Either we assume that these are all accidents and sort of, um, blows of misfortune, or we get that there's something about this culture that's fomenting so much illness. 70% of American adults are on at least one medication. Can you-

70?

70, yeah. 50 per- 40% are on about two at least. That's a toxic culture. There's all kinds of c- Now I could talk about what makes it that way, but when I talk about toxic culture, I'm talking about its impact on the people who inhabit it.

So, this toxic culture. Are y- are y- just talking about, uh, the, the overall way human beings communicate? Is it the way we're being raised? Is it the foods we eat? Is it everything?

It's all that.

It's all?

And, uh, salient amongst them, how we raise our kids.

What about how we raise our kids?

Well, (sighs) if you look at how human beings evolved, uh, over millions, really, of years, and, uh, hundreds of thousands of years, and even our own species has been on the earth for about 150, 200,000 years. For all that time until the blink of an eye ago, we lived out in nature in small band hunter-gatherer groups where kids were raised communally. So that it wasn't just an isolated nuclear family or a isolated mother or father, it was grandparents and uncles and aunts and the whole community. It takes a village, as the saying goes. It takes a whole community. Now, children also were picked up when they cried. In fact, they were never even put down. They slept with their parents. They were breastfed for three or four years. Um, in today's society, and I could start even before that. Already we know that stresses on the pregnant women have a negative im- impact on the infant. Physiological impact on the infant's brain development. We- this is not even controversial. In our society, we don't pay attention to women's emotional needs when they're pregnant, and we don't pay attention to the child's emotional needs. So the child needs to be held and accepted unconditionally. Now, in our society, we actually tell parents not to pick up their kids when they're crying.