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Dr. Gabor Maté on Democracy Now
I caught today's Democracy Now show, which collected three previous interviews with Dr. Gabor Maté. If you're interested in rethinking contemporary medicine, the hour-long program is worth a listen.
He talks about how mental and emotional health can't be separated from physical health, but since western medicine (which he also knows and practices) has a better understanding of the latter, chemical-based solutions are often applied to solve primarily social problems. For instance, in post-industrial America, many children don't get much parental attention – many companies give just six weeks of maternity leave – meaning kids miss out on important developmental processes. This often manifests later in life in damaging ways, ranging from ADHD to drug addiction to antisocial behavior.
I've been thinking recently about "ecological thinking," which I hope to write more about later, and these interviews were a good example of what I've got in mind. Short maternity leave makes sense from the short-term self-interest of the company, but a culture where the practice is widespread may, over the course of a couple generations, be significantly worse-off because its children missed out on important development.
He talks about how mental and emotional health can't be separated from physical health, but since western medicine (which he also knows and practices) has a better understanding of the latter, chemical-based solutions are often applied to solve primarily social problems. For instance, in post-industrial America, many children don't get much parental attention – many companies give just six weeks of maternity leave – meaning kids miss out on important developmental processes. This often manifests later in life in damaging ways, ranging from ADHD to drug addiction to antisocial behavior.
I've been thinking recently about "ecological thinking," which I hope to write more about later, and these interviews were a good example of what I've got in mind. Short maternity leave makes sense from the short-term self-interest of the company, but a culture where the practice is widespread may, over the course of a couple generations, be significantly worse-off because its children missed out on important development.
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On the one hand, I fully believe that we too often approach mental health care and addictions from a medical model, even when it's not appropriate, and ADHD is a great example because
--it's overdiagnosed (easy to meet criteria for)
--many disorders, for example PTSD and anxiety, masquerade as ADHD
--it IS a symptom of a wider macro-level syndrome caused in part, I believe, by our emphasis on multitasking.
That said, there are many, many times when there's a legitimate biological component. I am absolutely not a proponent of overmedicating people, particularly kids. I myself am much more frequently referring clients to psychiatry as a result of client-driven (usually parent-driven) referrals. But there's this trend in mental health, particularly in people like me who may qualify as kind of "crunchy" and idealistic, to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Also, I've seen how resilient kids are. I've seen them thrive and bounce back from really horrific levels of abuse and neglect. I see it every day, seriously. And although overworked parents are indubitably having an effect on their children, I am not prepared to point the finger at them for drug addiction, ADHD, and acute Axis II diagnoses (which is, I assume, what they mean by "antisocial behavior").
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Dr. Maté believes this as well. He's advocating better integration between physical and mental health, not the replacement of the former with the latter.
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But! I really like this point about integrating physical and mental health care.
Ah, sleep deprivation -> nonlinear train of thought. To bed!