52 pages • 1 hour read
Gabor Maté, Daniel MatéThe Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaPart 4, Chapters 19-21Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary: “From Society to Cell”
Maté now looks at the effects of society overall on our health. He argues that the socioeconomic system that defines 21st-century society, capitalism, is responsible for damaging the health of all within it by creating stress and thereby increasing the “allostatic load” (276) on human beings. The main ways it does this is by fostering “psychological factors such as uncertainty, conflict, lack of control, and lack of information” (276). Maté states that while this stress and its negative effects are unequally distributed, they do not spare any social tier, and even the wealthy are subject to them.
More specifically, the dismantling of welfare states and protections for workers since the 1970s has led to an increase in job insecurity and anxiety about maintaining living standards. These concerns have been exacerbated by the 2007-2008 financial crisis, which caused yet more uncertainty regarding employment, inequality, and greater competition for what few good jobs remained. In addition, increased costs of living, especially in relation to food, fuel, education, and healthcare, have been added stressors for many.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Robbing the Human Spirit”
Maté explains how he was asked after the COVID-19 pandemic what the chief lesson of the pandemic was. His answer was “the indispensability of connection” (286). Human beings need others to flourish and give them a sense of meaning. However, capitalism, especially in its current form, with its individualistic and competitive ethics, separates us from others and a sense of community. The more precise term for this loss of communal connection is “social dislocation” (289). It reflects both a spiritual and economic detachment from one’s work and from one’s world. This process has been accelerated by late capitalism and globalization and has resulted in “mental dysfunction, despair, addictions and physical illness” (289). Such a process can be seen, for example, in the US rustbelt or in the plight of North America’s Indigenous peoples, with rates of suicide increasing amongst both groups.
Chapter 21 Summary: “They Just Don’t Care If It Kills You”
Maté discusses how corporations have intentionally “targeted the brain circuits of pleasure and reward to foster addictive compulsions” (298) in consumers. Indeed, there is a field of research called “neuromarketing,” which exploits developments in neuroscience to help companies make their products addictive. To explain this point, Maté draws a distinction between pleasure and happiness. He suggests that happiness is about being content and satisfied over a prolonged period of time. In contrast, pleasure corresponds to short-term satisfaction, often followed by a sense of lack and a desire for whatever initially gave us pleasure. As such, happiness corresponds to the slow-release serotonin apparatus in the brain, whereas pleasure corresponds to the dopamine and endorphin function of the brain, which works in short bursts. It is the latter part of the brain that all addictions hijack. It is also for this reason that it is this “pleasure” apparatus that corporations target in efforts to keep customers “hooked” on their products.
Chapters 19-21 Analysis
Former British prime minister Tony Blair stated that many public health problems are “not public health problems at all. They are questions of lifestyle […]” and “the result of millions of individual decisions” (277-78). Blair’s comments capture the individualistic attitude toward health in 21st-century capitalism and its justification for its poor health outcomes. This attitude suggests that problems like diabetes, obesity, or alcohol abuse are not issues for society but for the individual: Provided that individuals, as in the US, pay for their own healthcare, society does not have a moral duty to resolve these issues. Moreover, in this view, if individuals choose to eat unhealthy food or drink alcohol, it is their right to do so, regardless of the consequences. So long as they are informed of the effects, any further social intervention is unjustified.
However, such a view of health and the consumer lifestyle connected to it is upended once we start to see what people consume in terms of addiction, not choice. It is then that we can begin to view individuals in this system not as free economic agents with preferences, but as addicts caught in cycles of dependency beyond their control. Indeed, it is this switching of perspectives that constitutes the originality of Maté’s position here. As he highlights, corporations unshackled from state regulation have consciously sought to create addictive products. For example, in the food industry, companies use refined sugar, itself addictive, and combinations of neurochemicals “to hook people on addictive junk foods with no regard for the health consequences” (299). Likewise, pharmaceuticals, energy drinks, video games, and phone apps are made to be addictive. User dependency and craving are integral aspects of product design.
Yet, such products, despite their makeup, are not usually addictive by themselves. The stress, loneliness, and alienation of modern capitalism all make people vulnerable to the immediate relief and escape offered by addictive products. Such factors are crucial in initiating and deepening healthy habits. Companies consciously market their products as satisfying these unmet needs. As Maté says, quoting Naomi Klein, “they tap into a longing and a need for belonging” (292). Different brands intentionally and aggressively suggest, in a fetishized way, that they can provide the meaning and human connection that have otherwise been lost. Both specific products and consumerism in general follow the grim logic of all drugs: As the fetishized product “promises satisfaction but, instead, yields hollow dissatisfaction, it creates more craving” (296). In other words, consumerism, responsible for undermining true human connection, then purports to satisfy the lack that it has itself created.
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