The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

The Myth of Normal is bookended by Maté’s own personal narrative of healing and redemption. The book begins with Maté retelling an episode of irrational resentment against his wife that he claims was rooted in his abandonment by his mother when he was a child in Hungary. It ends with Maté describing his transformative experience of taking the psychedelic ayahuasca in the Amazon. As Maté says, this allowed him to temporarily “divest from the trauma-confined personality” (459) and to some extent deal with his childhood abandonment issues.

This is just one of the stories of illness and healing that run throughout the text. For example, there is the case of a woman, Mee Ok, who suffered from the debilitating illness of scleroderma, which both confined her to a wheelchair and left her in continual pain. Despite being given no hope by doctors, she was able, by confronting her “hidden inner distress” (75) and the abuse she suffered as a child, to achieve a full recovery. Other stories include those of writer Anita Moorjani, playwright and activist Eve Ensler, and many others, including a woman, Julia, suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, and a man, Will, coming to terms with a brain tumor.