[Reading Notes] The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture - Gabor Mate


2025 08 22    |    etc    no date    2024 +    2025    entries    home

These are all quotations from the introduction chapter of the book, and my responses/thoughts thereto.

Page 1

The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make those vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make those people sane.
- Erich Fromm The Sane Society


  • One wonders about the concept of "common sense" in this context. It's a too often used phrase on the more right-leaning of the populace, as it kindles ideas of the value of the everyday man but never for their real value, only for a superficial and/or false value used as a weapon against anything the right decides is an enemy, a problem. There's a lot of group think in the "common sense" of the "common man". It's a line fed to them to embolden a sense of ego that stops thinking for itself when the slogan appears on the scene.


... industries bank on people's ongoing investment [...] in endless quests ...


  • Quests that don't serve individual needs, shoving square pegs into round holes trying to force a fit.
  • Quests that can't solve problems because that would put the purveyors of said quests out of business.
  • Quests that never look at root causes because solving those issues would eradicate the need for the quests altogether.
  • The social ills caused by capitalism.
  • The depths of greed of billionaires and corporations.


In our modern world, at the pinnacle of medical ingenuity and sophistication, we are seeing more and more chronic physical diseases as well as afflictions such as mental illness and addiction.


  • We eat bad food, deny food to others, don't exercise enough, aren't active enough, we're stuck doing worthless work we hate, we are compelled to commodify our passions, we are chastised for doing things simply for the joy, the method of joy is vilified, even joy is stratified
  • Our social media culture of constantly watching is breeding people who don't know how to leave others alone
  • We feel no real purpose.


Page 2

How is it we're not more alarmed, if we notice at all?


  • we're too overwhelmed by constant information.
  • Many have been bred to distrust healthcare professionals.
  • We have been cultured not to trust things like our natural abilities for pattern recognition.
  • Many have been cultured to see the above as paranoia.
  • I once heard someone say that distrust of healthcare professionals in the US, and the predilection for home remedies and trend remedies, stems directly from their for-profit healthcare system that forces people into having to seek out alternative options because they have no other choice.


... chronic illness - mental or physical - is to a large extend a function or a feature of the way things are and not a glitch; a consequence of how we live, not a mysterious aberration.




Page 3

The phrase "a toxic culture" in this book's subtitle may suggest things like environmental pollutants [...] there is indeed no shortage of real, physical toxins in our midst. We could also understand "toxic" in its more contemporary pop-psychological sense, as in the spread of negativity, distrust, hostility, and polarization that, no question, typify the present sociopolitical moment.


  • While it is true that we are sometimes hapless victims/products of our environments - what our parents teach us makes us what we are, for example - there comes a point where we become responsible for how we move forward. "Shame on your parents for what you become. Shame on you if you stay that way." This means that things such as racism are a choice after a certain point.
  • How easy is it, in a culture where information overload is rampant, critical thought is a dying, mistrusted art, to take "Garbage in. Garbage out." and turn it into "Garbage in. Truth out." "Garbage in. Treasure out."


I am using "toxic culture" to characterize something even broader and more deeply rooted: the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives.


  • So many things that are sold to us as inclusion really aren't. That includes religion, which judges, excludes, others, and only includes by threat and brute force, along with enticement of a promise based on lies and inconsistencies. There is nothing organic about the forced familialness of the workplace, of sororities and fraternities, of forced borders.
  • Much of the culture we consume has its focus on the negative, on emotional hits that feed our baser instincts, things that bear us down instead of sustain or lift us up, and all for the god of money.


Our concept of well-being must move f4rom the individual to the global in every sense of the word. That is particularly so in the era of globalized capitalism, which, in the words of the cultural historian Morris Berman, has become the "total commercial environment that circumscribes an entire mental world: [...] by its very nature our social and economic culture generates chronic stressors that undermine well-being.


  • It's been said that human beings can only maintain about 150 human relationships with any kind of quality. More than that, we can't solidly maintain. But that's not the only type of societal well-being, of community. However, it's one way we can build better community, by building more quality groups on the small scale that are easier for us to maintain.
  • Unfortunately, the demands and constrictions of capitalism prevent us from, very frequently, building even a few quality relationships, even preventing solid family relationship. Capitalism normalises more separation than it does collaboration or cohesion, more than it ever promotes real community. It has forced on us the replacement of love loyalty, familial loyalty, friendship loyalty, and others, with loyalty to the workplace, loyalty to work, loyalty to productivity. Or is it desperation attachment borne of necessity And now, with the rise of influencer culture and much more performative social media, we don't even have our self-improvement as that. We've commodified our joys, and we do more and more for the perusal and approval of others. We curate instead of enjoy. There is less and less of the concept of doing things for the sake of doing them, at least in some quarters. Sometimes, I feel as if certain activities exist not for people to simply enjoy them, but for people to record themselves doing them so they can be viewed by others later. Maybe we should call them clicktivities or viewtivities.
  • While this is sometimes nominally group-oriented, it's still largely singular and only superficially communal. You film yourself doing something only to share it later to a group of people you'll never meet, instead of finding people to actually do things with.
  • Are we too info-overloaded to even be able to spend time in community with others? Too overloaded to have it in us to hang out? I've seen an increased amount of social isolation, sometimes borne out of the sort of social exhaustion we experience by work-related interactions.
  • We have turned previously private or personal activities into things to be shared, commodified, viewed and consumed by others, by strangers: the creation of art, the pursuit of some hobbies, even journalling - to the point where people share images online of their hand-created journal entries. I Remember a character in a TV show (that I can't currently recall) saying something along the lines of a life experience not being considered of any value now unless it's received its requisite number of clicks and likes.
  • So many things are performative, ever-increasingly so.


Page 4

... deprivations we have more than enough resources to eliminate.


  • Sometimes I wonder what's more shocking: that we don't eliminate the deprivations, or how gleeful folks are not to. But that may be the greatest illness of all, our lack of humanity, our lack of compassion, our voracious desire to see others suffer, especially when we are living in plenty and comfort ourselves.
  • I was just watching something about gifted education and the speaker mentioned how they felt that it's mainly just a scam to hoard resources. The kids who get the enrichment are generally children of very specific economic or social classes, and everyone else is shut out. All children should get enrichment. That should be what the education system does. But what the education system (in the West) ends up doing, what it's meant to do in large part, is creating more cogs and grist for the capitalist wheel. The school system creates worker bees, not educated people. Which is very much evidenced by lack of real literacy and critical thinking skills in adults. (Literacy is not just a matter of being able to read the words, it also means understanding them, comprehending context, being able to infer or extrapolate.) We have the resources to do better, but we choose not to, to uphold aspects of supremacy and capitalist culture that separate the haves from the have nots and fight to ensure the divides are never crossed.


rise in chronic conditions and mental health diagnoses


  • Poor diet, lack of education, decreasing opportunities to escape poverty, decreasing job opportunities, so many hours spent working there's no time for self-care, enrichment, or even rest, no time for relationships, no time or space to grow fresh foods, increased dependence on convenience foods due to time and other obligations, decreased safety even in the home, increased racial tensions increased stressors of other sorts, more demands than the human body or mind can truly handle, multiple existential crises such as climate disaster.


... worse yet, we have become accustomed - or perhaps better to say acculturated - to so much of what plagues us. It has become, for lack of a better word, normal.


  • There does, in more privileged/Westernised cultures, seem to be an increase in trying to focus on activities and pastimes that focus on what we might term calming, soothing, improving, or self-care activities, or social activities one might do with friends: journalling, crafting, girls' nights centred around fibre arts or movie-watching, businesses that focus on making things, lecture talk series, en masses reading together. Though these are good things, they do seem to sometimes feel like something people are doing so they can be seen doing it (by sharing it on social media later), not something done to be enjoyed.


Uses of the word normal: to be expected.

It is not in these senses that the book's title refers to "normal"; but rather in a more insidious one that, far from helping us progress toward a healthier future, cuts such an endeavour off at the pass.


  • Outside of the aspects of "normal" related to keeping us safe, the idea of normal seems, in large part, forced. Humans don't always deal well with ambiguity, that which they can't control, and that counts societally as well. The more we are limited, the easier we are to predict and control. If we are limited in choice, the less they are required to provide for us, the fewer variables there are to contend with, and the more readily we come to accept less as the norm: like being forced into the idea that tiny homes are charming in order to have us accept less as the baseline, and not always in a good way.
  • Are they a good combat to overconsumption? Sure, they can be, but that's a different conversation.
  • Sometimes I think we so readily become used to things because it's so much less stress. A lot of change means a lot of activity, and that is exhausting.
  • I watched something recently about why the presenter felt some folks are more adept at living outside religion. She mentioned a few things she felt were necessary in order for people to succeed in a life without it: general security (social supports, healthcare, education), strong culture/social support outside the church (clubs, friendships, etc.), high tolerance for ambiguity (low in needing order/structure, must be okay with the unknown, paradox, chaos), must have an internal meaning-making system (if you aren't given meaning and purpose through another means, you must be able to make it - includes community, moral systems, personal philosophies, etc.)
  • The more a person's world is out of kilter, the more they cling to anything they can conceive as solid, steady, predictable. Does this play in to the sort of people that strive for/gain power/control? It does play in to theories as to how/why organised religion is used as a method of control, and why those groups work so hard to delegitimise those outside their sphere of influence/control.
  • Some folks also work very hard to normalise things simply for the purpose of forcing a new baseline on us. Is it a sleight of hand so that we do not realise the machinations and systems that control from behind the scenes?


Page 7

... much of what passes for normal in our society is neither healthy nor natural, and that to meet modern society's criteria for normality is, in many ways, to conform to requirements that are profoundly abnormal in regard to our Nature-given needs - which is to say, unhealthy and harmful on the physiological, mental, and even spiritual levels.


  • It is not healthy for us to be so isolated, so compacted into cities (for example), to spend so little time outdoors, to be so occupied by wage labour we have no time, room, or energy for rest or creativity, to live in the sort of society that demeans the creative as valueless even though it's such a natural human activity, to spend so much of our time creating monetary value for others and nothing for ourselves, to eat so synthetically, to breathe in toxins (and drink them), to be full of microplastics.


Page 8

... to see much illness not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances.


  • We don't see how society itself impacts and sickens us, the culture in which we live. Or, if we do, we understand it in the wrong way. And when the problems/symptoms are pointed out, the long-built mistrust of institutions like the healthcare profession, and our complete reliance on the capitalist state, won't allow us to see a way out of it. We have also been acculturated to see the individual as almost wholly and solely at fault for our own troubles, even though we rarely ever are. We are at the sae time victims and results of the systems in which we live.
  • And right after I wrote that I read: The ailing bodies and minds among us would no longer be regarded as expressions of individual pathology but as living alarms directing our attention toward where our society has gone askew.


... our culture's skewed idea of normality is the single biggest impediment to fostering a healthier world.


  • Which is blatantly obvious if you listen to people's very entrenched and unreasonable negativities about socialism, and their utter inability and unwillingness to imagine anything other than capitalism as a societal base.


The current medical paradigm [...] reduces complex events to their biology, and it separates mind from body, concerning itself almost exclusively with one or the other without appreciating their essential unity.


  • We've been bred to be such binary or linear thinkers, black and white. We have had our ability to see branches and overarching themes and patterns blunted. We are existing in a time and system where we think, or try to force ourselves to believe, that much of our health (especially in terms of disability) is a matter of will and/or moral failing.


Page 10

The false passivity of medical success that lulls us into believing we're making strides in healthier life standards.


  • There are a seemingly ever-increasing number of anti-vax types and people who won't follow even simple requests for healthcare protocols to help keep others healthy and safe.
  • Too much diet culture, quack layperson healthcare, and, in some cases, a lot more self-diagnosis due to for-profit healthcare systems.
  • Did the hyperfocus on individuality cause our increase or distrust of medical experts? The need to believe in the self so assiduously because being wrong would be too distressing? People have a penchant for entrenchment, sometimes stemming from sunk cost, sometimes ego.


... show how our physical and mental health is intricately interwoven with how we feel, what we perceive or believe about ourselves and the world, and the ways that life does or does not satisfy our non-negotiable human needs. Because trauma is a foundational layer of experience in modern life, but one largely ignored or misapprehended.


  • This goes back to the idea of anything health-related, particularly mental health and/or trauma, being seen as a moral failing if you can't just "get over it". Not being able to pull yourself up by your own mental bootstraps is seen as weak, lazy, not adult, not "manly".


Page 11

... the way things are meant or fated to be [...] returning to wholeness [...] healing is not guaranteed, but it is available.


  • We are not meant to be living the way we do - physically sick, mentally distressed, watching our fellow humans murder for sport, murder for glee. What happened to sicken people so badly that this is where we are?
  • Religion has relegated healthcare to prayer, eschewing medical science, or even condemning it outright. That is just vile to me.


Look up:
  • Erich Fromm
  • Morris Berman - cultural historian
  • Thom Hartmann - broadcaster, activist, author

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