Why is a family practice doctor considered one of the world experts on psychological trauma?

CATEGORY: POPULAR CULTURE

Gabor Maté, M.D.

Source: Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta
Read time: 2.3 minutes

This Happened
On July 2, 2024, an interview with Gabor Maté, MD was released on Dr. Sanjay Gupta’s CNN podcast to discuss his views on trauma, happiness, and healing.
 
Who Did This?
Gabor Maté was born in Hungary, immigrated to Canada when he was 12, and became a family physician who practiced for many years in Vancouver. He is not trained as a licensed mental health clinician and has not published a research article on any psychological topic. Maté has written four books, three of them best-sellers, and has over 70 hours of videos of his presentations/courses for sale. Now 80 years-old, he is one of the most sought-after trauma experts, with dozens of interviews on the internet, and maintains a busy international speaking schedule.
 
The Claims
Maté has made an enormous number of assertions that he claims are settled science over the years. In this 32-minute podcast, he covered a small portion of them, but these include some of his core assertions that reflect his general views:

• There are two types of trauma— big T and little T. Big T is life-threatening events, what conventional researchers consider to be real trauma. Little T traumas are everyday stressors, like parents who are stressed out or have normal marriage difficulties. 
• Childhood trauma (both big and little T) is the root cause of a wide range of physical diseases, including chronic pain, asthma, and addiction.
• Childhood trauma is the root cause of fundamental personality traits.
• Childhood trauma is the cause of mass killers.
• The mechanism of how childhood trauma alters all these things is through the immune system and the stress hormone cortisol.
• Infants can remember trauma events as implicit memory, and these embedded memories shape their fundamental personalities their entire lives. Maté’s evidence for this is a story he’s told many times: At 11 months of age, he was “abandoned” when his mother put him in the care of a stranger to save his life during the Holocaust. When he saw her again, after five or six weeks, he didn't look at her for several days. As evidence that this scarred him for life, at the age of 71, he would not look at his wife when she neglected to pick him up at the airport.
• These traumas and little stressors get instantaneously wired into neural circuitry of the brain.
• Society is the cause of our small T stress.
• Whenever he has examined his pain and setbacks, he has always found a meaning from his past, which allowed him to move forward more powerfully in life.

 
Analysis
All Maté’s claims about trauma and stress are provably wrong. Life-threatening events are not equivalent to little stresses in their psychological impacts. Trauma and stress do not permanently damage brains or bodies (debunked here and here). A mechanism of damage—be it cortisol, immune, or epigenetic changes—has never been remotely proven. Infants do not store implicit memories that shape their behaviors for lifetimes. Society is not the cause of all our stress, as inherited individual differences determine far more about how stress is perceived.
 
In contrast to many psychiatrist and psychologist trauma experts who make the same types of claims, Maté doesn’t even try to verify his claims with original research evidence (a common criticism of his books). His authority comes solely from lived experience and anecdotes.
 
Why Is This Happening?
Why he is so popular? Maté’s striking demeanor may have something to do with it. He looks like the personification of ascetic contemplation with deep set eyes, droopy eyelids, unkempt hair, with wrinkled skin on a spindly frame. He has no full smile. His soft utterances seem dense with compassion.
 
The misinformation in his message has much in common with other progressive liberal philosophies that claim to know what’s wrong with societies. These sensibilities believe that the self and society must progress, and can be controlled, and want to point at one thing and say with certainty, “This is the oppressor that caused all my problems.” An expert on perhaps the greatest literary work on oppression and human nature described why he believed Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto maintains such enduring and worldwide appeal: “A manifesto is primarily a performance, which uses language to enact a will to realize a particular future. It aims to orientate the reader towards a specific future. This willfulness manifests itself in a special kind of literary absolutism—the use of the tense of the absolute present—in which what is desired is presented as if it were already the case, in order that it might become so” [1]. In the case of Maté, it is a performance to convince the world that the path to a better future for humankind  is already known. We must only work harder to find the meaning in our traumas, whether we remember them or not.
 

​REFERENCES
[1] Peter Osborne (2005). How to Read Marx, p88. W.W. Norton & Company: New York


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