Gabor Mate - Toxic Culture - How Materialistic Society Makes Us (FULL)

well this is a particularly fulfilling introduction for me our next speaker is someone whose lifework advocacy and activism informed by a deeply compassionate mind and wide-ranging inquisitive heart explore the deepest psychosocial factors in our society's unsustainability Gabor Ma Tei is one of those rare penetrating thinkers who exposed many of our society's most profound contradictions but he has far more to offer us than just intellectual brilliance for his vision is one of profound caring this is a man who seeks not just to understand but also to help us heal some of our most intractable social wounds common to all of Gabor's work is a holistic approach to understanding the broader social cultural and spiritual context in which human disease and disorders arise a hungarian-born Canadian physicist who survived the Nazi genocide as an infant dr. Mattei has one wide acclaim as a specialist in treating addiction and for his unique perspectives on attention deficit disorder his internationally best-selling books include in the realm of hungry ghosts coasts close encounters with addiction when the body says no the cost of hidden stress and scattered minds a new look at the origins and healing of attention deficit disorder based in Vancouver he has long worked with patients suffering from mental illness drug addiction and HIV or all three and has been a major advocate of harm reduction and a sharp critic on the war on drugs one of the major themes of his work has been the crucial impact of childhood experiences on our mental and physical health and the critical need for nurturing adults in children's lives to guarantee healthy brain development he makes a very strong case that the stresses modern social structures and inequities placed on families and the absence of non stressed parenting are proving highly destructive to children's well-being and to the future of our society he is also a passionate advocate for a form of medicine that honors the totality of our human being miss the entire mind/body/spirit continuum please join me in welcoming one of the most incisive diagnosticians of our society's deep diseases and a man who is a visionary healer whose insight clarity candor and compassion may offer some of our best medicines dr. Gabor marques [Applause] thank you thank you very much for that very generous introduction it's a great pleasure to be here I had to tell you though I'm not a physicist in this position I'm not that smart well it's a pleasure to address this audience here and those of you that are watching elsewhere and those of you that may be watching this some years from now who knows on the Internet I wish I could tell you that a few years from now what I have to say will no longer be timely but I'm not that optimistic I'm look around this society and from the perspective of health or do we see we see that 50 percent of adults in this society which considered this of the most successful society in the history of the world actually suffers with some chronic illness heart disease high blood pressure cancer whatever autoimmune disease whatever it happens to be 50 percent of adolescents today are enough set to meet the diagnostic criteria for one or another mental health condition there are three million three and a half million children in this country or receiving stimulant medications for ADHD and in my own country Canada the number of prescriptions for ADHD has gone up 43 percent in the last five years there are half a million children in this country who are receiving antipsychotic medications not because they have psychosis but because they are upset and their behaviors are at the problematic what we have here is the massive experiment in the chemical control of children's brains without knowing why actually long-term effects will be I know that in Vancouver British Columbia where I live and work there's a clinic at the Children's Hospital specifically to deal with the side effects of antipsychotic medications and children in the United States the antipsychotics risperdal and circle I think are in the top four or six four to six prescriptions given us in this country not to mention the antidepressants now how do we understand all this in this very successful Society well medicine mainstream medical perspective it which I was trained basically looks at it from a very strictly physical point of view mainstream medicine separates two areas that can't be separated one is separates mind from the body so we treat the body as a discrete entity without reference to people's emotional and spiritual lives number one and number two we separate the individuals from the environment as if the individual was not affected by the environment now I'll give you three examples of how that's simply not applicable it's been studied now and well documented that children whose parents are stressed or more likely to have asthma some polluted areas where the air pollution itself acts as an irritant and therefore increases the risk of asthma which represents an irritability the airwaves it's the children of parents who are most stressed or most like to live as much in other words the psychological emotional states of the child of the parent I should say affects the physiology with sized lungs and how do we treat asthma guess what we treat them and stress hormones are drawn and cortisol but we never ask ourselves the stress system would be with causing these kids asthma in Australia to give you another example of what I mean by the biopsychosocial nature of human beings which is to say that our biology is shaped and affected influenced for a lifetime by our psychological and social interpretation shifts in environment in Australia they looked at 500 women or so with breast biopsies for suspicious lumps now before the results came back these women underwent a psychological into you it turned out that if a woman had been emotionally stressed prior to the onset of that lump that bite cell did not increase the chance of that lump in cancerous zero effect similarly if one was emotionally isolated that had no effect either zero but if a woman was emotionally isolated and stressed the risk of that lump in cancers was 9000 grade of the average the physicians couldn't figure this one out who's logically speaking utter zero and zero right up to nine part of zero and zero multiply to nine but if we understand that human beings geology is affected by their relationships then we see that when stress happens cortisol elevates in the body which is a stress hormone which is suppressed immune system adrenaline increases in the body which disorganized the nervous system in a short term they help you fight back or to escape with no long term they actually can suppress the body no wonder then that people are isolated and stressed or more likely to develop disease which is to say that the disease is not in the manifestation of some physical process unique to them but it reflects their particular lives in a particular environment and a particular culture and finally at the end of life a study in a young Journal of Medicine some years ago showed that a couple who've been together for a long time when one is hospitalized the other one has a significant ease increases a risk of dying which is to say that the physiology of our screaming beings is very much affected by the environment and that is what may be called and I referred to as a biopsychosocial perspective we think that may be new while it's revolutionary as far as mainstream medicine is concerned but it's certainly not new the Buddha said 2500 years ago he talked about the interconnection of everything being what he called the interconnected core arising interdependent co-arising of phenomena so he said look at a raindrop it doesn't just contain itself each can't just understand it as an isolated entity in fact it contains the river sky look at a leaf it contains the sky in terms of the irrigation it contains the earth in terms of the materials that go into it and the Sun in terms of the light that's needed to make it grow and he said that the births and deaths of any phenomena are connected to the birth and death of all other phenomena the one contains the many and the many contains the one without the one that cannot be the many without the many they cannot be the one and that was said 2500 years ago a lesson was still talking to integrate and to understand and to apply to our lives now I know that at a conference such as pioneers the emphasis is very much in the physical environment particularly what we're doing to nature and that's valid and necessary but I think we need to broaden review to them of the environment to actually include also the social relational interactive and cultural aspects as well now to and also and also the economic corners so for example a study little while ago showed that when women who are pregnant breathe in polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons their children are more active behavior problems by school age so we think this is simply a physical environmental problem no it isn't it's also a socio-economic one sense it's poor women who tend to live in more polluted areas and therefore the medical scientist who did the study at Montana University School School of Medicine Munson High School of Medicine in New York said this is really a paper about social justice poor people have more exposure to these things in all counts whether bad air or psychosocial stress and other things that's a societal problem and the changes are not going to be on an individual level they're going to be on a societal level you can't separate individuals for an environment or to take another example we know that LED exposure actually disturbs the nervous system leading for learning and behavior problems but amongst poorer kids who have an iron deficient diet that's the most the absorption of lead so it's not just a lead problem it's a socio-economic problem on account of the poor a diet that this shouldn't have so when I talk about the toxic culture that a materialistic society offers its members what am i referring to well materialism is really a system of belief or behavior which considers material things and particularly the control and possession of material things is more important than human values such as connection love or spiritual values such as recognizing the unity of everything and as the kind of culture we live in interesting enough the religious right in their opposition to the very idea of climate change or to the idea that the environment is to look at they will quote the Old Testament where man is given stewardship over the earth and all other creatures but whether they talk about stewardship they mean control and dominance there's another way to look at stewardship which is caring and nurturing for looking after and in the materialistic sense it's that control and ownership that we look at and that means that the culture itself quite apart from the physical toxins that we view into the environment and the way in which we are altering the very air that would be then the very Sun that beats down on us but shines on us we actually are affected also by the toxicity of human relationships or the lack of human relationships that this kind of society that emphasizes the material values teaches us to pursue and from that perspective we have to understand that medicine is not simply a science it's much more than that it's also an ideology it's also an ideology it's a way of looking at human beings so when we look at human beings as individuals without understanding the importance of the social relationships and their emotional psychological interactions with others that's actually a manifestation of the individualistic perspective of the entrepreneur who says that only I matter and what I gain or what I control matters and we're all in competition with one another so you see that economic ideological perspective also showing up it's a non particular way in the practice of medicine well reality is totally different reality tells us that we can't be separated and this begins already in pregnancy so a study out of Johns Hopkins University in 2004 for example showed that the reactivity the stress of the fetus is affected by the stress depression or anxiety of the mother so when you look at the heartbeat and the move and of entrance in the room whose mothers are stress depressed or anxious you see different patterns of activity and that will have like lifetime effects the studies reflect this this paper says growing evidence that stress and depression can have early and lasting effects on the child life including increased behavior problems including learning problems and we also know that if you stress pregnant animals in the laboratory their children will be more likely to use drugs that we have sued themselves once they've grown up so this mind-body unity and this interaction of environment and the individual begins already in the womb and therefore how we treat pregnant women how we provide an environment that is supportive or possibly stressful has a huge impact on the long term development of their yet unborn offspring and this of course happens in doing infancy as well because that's a crucial period of brain development so the influence of healthy mothers have very different cortisol stress hormone levels than those of mothers with postpartum depression and if you look at the electroencephalograms of infants with postpartum mothers I'm sorry the electron-electron telegrams of the infants of mothers who have postpartum depression you can tell from the EEG of the child who is depressed and who isn't so the child's electrical circuitry is already affected at six months of age by the mood of the mother now in this society 20% of women suffer postpartum depression and another 20% of some symptoms of it and that's not because of an individual problem with the part of the mother depression is not an individual issue it reflects your relationship with the environment and therefore in this successful society we're managing to depress 20% of women who give birth to babies and that will have an effect on a child's brain hormone levels and neurotransmitter levels like dopamine and serotonin and on the child's ability to respond to stress in a positive or in a highly charged and dysfunctional way a report out of Harvard earlier this year talked about the impact of toxic stress on children and these children who experience toxic stress on the part because the environment was stressed because the parents were highly stressed or dysfunctional or abusive later on in life that is significant in Greece with heart disease obesity diabetes mellitus high blood pressure and a whole list of other medical conditions not only that how does an infant and a young child adjust to stress well by certain coping mechanisms if you're very stressed but you help us in the face of the stress and you can't escape it or to change it one of the ways you respond is by tuning it out by dissociating by throwing your mind somewhere else so you don't have to suffer the discomfort and distress of the pressures that the environment is placing upon you but if you're doing that when you one or two years old then your brain is developing then tuning up becomes wired into your brain and guess what eight years later they're going to diagnose you with ADHD and give you medications and if you're looking at the preponderance with all these childhood conditions that are just burgeoning in our society autism Asperger's ADHD oppositional defiant disorder a whole range of childhood disorders what are we seeing not genetic problems but individual problems but the effects of a high-stress environment on parents which are then passed on to their children despite the parents love and despite the parents best efforts other studies have shown similarly that early childhood adversity significantly increases the risk of addiction obesity autoimmune disease mental health disorders and so on a simple fact with this parental divorce has been shown to increase the risk of strokes by a factor of two doubles of them 50 67 years later so this is an axe and I'm thinking we're talking about divorces which have a lot of rancor and stress associated with them so what happens early is a huge impact later on down online the good news however is that similarly if you understand the biopsychosocial perspective here we look at a study about stroke victims in the 60s and 70s if they're surrounded by a loving supportive community their risk of or sorry their their their chances of recovery are far greater than those who suffer stroke and are emotionally isolated which again points to the importance of community and the importance of the environment from the psychological social and cultural perspective well where does that leave us with leaders first of all looking at the economic issues and what we know is that growing up in a low socioeconomic background can actually impair the working memory and the size of different parts of reign of the adult so poverty in this country is far from simply an economic question it's also question of human development and what kind of consequences that'll have on people's behavior capacity to respond to stress and therefore to get ahead in a society and we're just getting ahead is the highest value and if you don't get ahead you're left behind similarly children who are stressed early will have problems with impulse regulation later on impulse regulation means that the capacity to anticipate consequences and to respond calmly to the environment is impaired and that means they're also going to be at a greater risk of addiction unless you look at addiction so what are we looking at we're actually looking at two factors we're looking at number one the desperation to escape from the pain and distress that the child has experienced early on in life which then become programmed into his personality in his heart and brain and how you escape well one way to escape is to addictive behaviors whether that be drugs or the internet or sex or food or shopping or whatever else and number two since as I've already mentioned brain development early in life early in life is affected by the environment people who are traumatized earlier especially those are traumatized their brain development is impaired and that their brain circuits and neurotransmitters like the chemicals in the brain are actually at a disadvantage so when they do the drugs they feel complete and whole and feel good for the first time in their lives their addiction is not a matter of choice it's a matter of a coping mechanism that is a response to early stress now if we look at what stress is it's not just a psychological event I've already alluded to it it's a physical event it sets off a cascade of hormones typically cortisol and adrenaline in your body which in a short term again help you escape or to fight back but in a long-term damage your heart your your nervous system your intestines and suppress your immune system which then makes you more prone for all kinds of diseases naturally so when it comes to understanding something like cancer we can't just understand it in terms of the individual and as somebody very astutely said a couple of years ago in a series on cancer that the New York Times published that trying to understand cancer by studying the individual human cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by looking inside the internal combustion engine you really have to look at you really have to look at the whole picture and that whole picture involves a lifelong environment in which we live and from that same perspective again when you look at something like the obesity epidemic which has 30% of kids in the United States overweight not significantly overweight it's not a food problem well it is a food problem the junk foods and all that but it's mostly a stress problem because what people do is they sue their stresses like any addiction to food they're stresses with their addictive behaviors and those junk foods work in a short-term because they release feel-good hormones in the brain so if you want to look at children and prevent obesity it's not enough to tell them not to eat junk foods or to get more exercise you have to say what's lacking in their lives that they're so stressed that they have to suit themselves in that particular way which was lacking their lives of course our human relationships that are nurturing and supportive again not because the parents are not Vantage of their best but because the parents are funded their best under impossible circumstances if you look at what actually triggers stress the significant factors that trigger stress or uncertainty lack of information and loss of control if you look at rats and you hook two pairs of rats together or to rest together yoke them together and you attach an electrode to their tails and you shot them with electricity they will have physiological stress but if one rat is a power plant that can shut off the lever that delivers that stretch that that little shock even though both rats get the same electrical jolt for the same period of time the rat with the Aparri will have less stress hormones in their body because they have some control now what happens in a culture where the economy is going on a tube where decisions are made far away by people who don't even know you and you don't know who they are and your life is very much affected by these large forces over which you have increasingly a sense that you have no control or even influence over well that means a lot of people are going to be stressed a lot of uncertainty a lot of people are going to be stressed and that stress then will lead to addictive behaviors that stress then will lead to parents passing that stress on to their children in the nineteenth century Karl Marx talked about alienation which is a separation of being a stranger to something and you're an alien to something and Marx said there were four lien--a for alienation in this culture one is related from nature well at a conference dedicated to looking at the physical and the natural environment we don't have to say much for you to show how alien that we are from nature when we're destroying nature itself the second alienation is some other people and that means we have less contact we have less intimacy you have less trust we have less of a sense of relationship and that of course as I've shown you leads to increase propensity to illness physical and mental we related from our work a lot of people no longer do work that is any meaning to them and that means that and since human beings are productive creatures we really are created in the image of God we're meant to create when we do work that's not creative that doesn't reflect who we are that imposes depression anxiety a sense of meaninglessness and maybe the sense of meaninglessness we'll want to substitute that sense of meaninglessness or that sense of meaning that we've launched by all kinds of other activities and then we get all hung up on how we look or how people feel about us what we can obtain what we can possess what successes we can achieve in other words all the false substitutes which cannot possibly compensate us for the lack of genuine meaning and of course what this society does it sells a lot of product that substitutes for that loss of meaning in fact much of the economy is based on a loss of meaning in our culture and finally and most importantly we become alienated finally and most importantly we become alienated from ourselves let me ask you a question here I don't ask for show of hands how many of you had the following experience that you had a partial gut feeling about something you didn't pay attention to it and you were sorry afterwards please put your hand up if your head okay I think the ice habit if I asked you the adverse question as when we both had a powerful gut feeling you ignored it and you're glad about it afterwards how many would not put your hand up well I'm not sure I'm seeing very few hands here well that means to say now we know whether you're telling me you're talking that at some point in your childhood you got separated from yourself because no infant is born without gut feelings that to infants are totally connected to their gut feelings I've ever met a two-day-old who didn't know how to express their gut feeling and that means that in this culture if something very powerful happens to alienate you from you to self because the world couldn't stand who you really were and your parents were to stretch themselves to honor and recognize who you really were just but as a parent I did that to my kids without meaning to and then they become parents from ourselves you shut down our gut feelings and I've got things are not luxuries you know they tell us what is right and what is wrong they tell us what is dangerous and what is friendly they tell us what is safe and what is dangerous and they tell us what is true and what is false so Mirena is from our gut feelings we have no longer essential reality vogelin sense of truth well the good news is the good news is that UN beings can regain their sense of connection to themselves just as you can regain a sense of connection to our nature I will make just one final point here about the economics of it the Harvard study this year of sorry Harvard study three years ago showed that the lack of medical insurance in this country leads to 45,000 deaths annually this is not an ideological question about health care and the most recently President Bush so there's no problem maybe we can show up in emergency ward sure you can once you've had a stroke because you didn't get treated for high blood pressure which which you got because you were so stressed you can whatever into it and you get speed for your stroke but the lack of health care that's available people which is very much a social economic uestion it itself is a significant factor well the good news is that we can regain regain a connection to ourselves and empathy which is genuine human quality is in us we're actually wired for empathy even rats are wired for empathy when you stress that rats and laboratory by shocking their feet electricity their most stressed watching other rats being shocked than when I shot themselves the stress hormone levels are higher that's our nature of human being so contrary to the myth in our culture that we separated individual aggressive competitive creatures Rattray wired for empathy Zweifel connection right for love right for compassion so really to move forward all we have to do all you have to do not an easy task but it's certainly available to us is to get back to a to nature thank you

Channel: Empower the Mind

Views: 608,640

Keywords: gabor mate, gabor, addiction, ego, psychedelics, health, anxiety

Id: W_ALpvLadQI

Length: 30min 42sec (1842 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 02 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/conscsness]

SS::

Gabor Mate give a speech about the state of society and what may be the most important factor in whatever we see today.

One big part of it all is Alienation from nature::
"It is increasingly common in contemporary discussions of science, technology, and society, especially those influenced by environmentalism, to find the claim that humans today are "alienated from nature".
Typically proponents of this claim argue that the scientific-technological project itself expresses such as alienation, by treating nature as an inert and passive matter to be "dominated" by human will, and by failing to see that the complexity of the ecosystem places sever constraints on what ca be done "to" nature without producing ecologically dangerous consequences.
Humans , this vie asserts, feel themselves to be independent of nature, and masters of it, and believe science makes it possible to bend nature to their will; in fact, however, they are *part* of nature, themselves subject to its laws, and any act to change it potentially rebounds back to humanity's (and nature's) own peril.

The clearest expression of our alienation, it is also claimed, lies in the wat we treat the natural environment. Rather than learning from nature, from its complexity, its organismic and holistic character, we treat it as "mere matter" to be manipulated for purely human purposes, destroying forests and wetlands in the name of "development", killing lakes and streams with the acid pollution from modern industry, genetically engineering new species while callously allowing the extinction of thousands of old one. This form of environmentalism thus tends to be characterized by deep misgivings about human interventions into nature and natural processes, particularly large-scale technological ones; instead of attempting to master nature, it suggests, we ought to learn to live in harmony with nature, recognizing our bond to it and treating it with respect and dignity its role as source of all life deserves." — Marx and Alienation From Nature

We are lost as species. Completely lost.
It is late to change current stream of social consciousness, all we can do is educate next generation to be in harmony with nature and not behave like we are independent of it.
We may be late to save, but never late to lead next generation with compassion and deep fundamental understanding of the importance nature carries in this reality.

[u/[deleted]]

Much respect for this guy, he has a keen understanding of the biopsychosocial approach and psychoneuroimmunology, really good at analyzing the human condition with all it’s context

[u/lowrads]

I think it's more urban spaces than anything. They really are just holding pens for four billion helots.

One of the goals of the Vietnam war was to drive people into the cities. It was the fastest rate of urbanization sociologists have ever measured.

Of course, the only time any government had opposite designs was under Pol Pot. You might also consider that China established limitations on people moving to cities for many decades, mainly as a way to curb the development of slums.

[u/newstart3385]

SS?