Review and Reflection on “The Myth of Normal” by Gabor Mate, MD

I was excited to read this book, based on the title alone. The subtitle is “Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture.” This is what we are living in. I have often said that we don’t do health care in America, we do sick management. We don’t do proactive medicine and prevention, we do reactive care only after a person is experiencing dis-health. And we’re so stuck on just physical ailments, that often the more abstract things like mental, emotional, relational, and spiritual health are ignored by our culture, much to our detriment.

In my own situation in life, I started reading this in the fall of 2022, soon after this book was published. I was suffering from long COVID systems constantly (pain from migraines and brain fog) and I wanted to read something that would help in my healing. My situation has changed thankfully and while I still suffer from long COVID systems, they are much more manageable than they were in the fall. I’ve been able to tap into a variety of ways to find some healing and peace.

As I said, I was drawn to the title because ever since the pandemic started, the question that we have all been faced with is “what is normal?” So many people have said they wanted to “get back to normal,” but was exactly is that? And is normal healthy? And if not, then why would we want to go back to it? These are questions that Mate deals within his book.

Mate makes the claim early on that our culture is not healthy. “…chronic illness — mental or…