A review by inniss
The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture by Gabor Maté

4.0

I listened to this and I'm glad I approached it this way. If I'd read it, I would have been overwhelmed by the volume of info here. I really liked it--a pretty exhaustive look at the myriad ways in which our ideas of what's 'normal' have been dictated by globalization and late capitalism with all it entails---including life online, food sources contaminated by GMO etc, erosion of communities by design---he does a deep dive here. Minor quibbles for me with the intense emphasis on trauma as a rationale for almost everything that's gone wrong in the world, and he's weirdly reliant on testimony from people like Jewel, Dave Navarro and Jamie Lee Curtis, considering he's also rightly critical of cult of celebrity--I'm not sure why he didn't just focus on regular people since he seems to have access to a diversity of patients himself. I'm also suspect of psychedelics and ayahuasca as key elements in recovery from a toxic society, which seem as much of a quick fix as anything else.