The Myth of Normal

In The Myth of Normal, physician and trauma specialist Gabor Maté argues that many of the behaviors and symptoms modern culture calls “disordered” are often understandable responses to painful experiences and unhealthy environments. In his view, what gets labeled as pathology—compulsions, anxiety, emotional shutdown, addiction, attention issues, depression—frequently reflects a person’s attempt to survive, adapt, and stay connected in circumstances that overwhelm their nervous system or distort their development.

Maté’s core claim is not that suffering is imaginary or that biology doesn’t matter. Rather, he challenges the assumption that mental and physical illness can be explained mainly by internal defects, faulty chemistry, or isolated organ problems. He contends that a society can become so chronically stressful, disconnected, and coercive that widespread distress becomes common—and then gets redefined as “normal.” In that context, the real abnormality may not be a person’s coping patterns, but the conditions that shaped those patterns in the first place.

This creates the book’s central reversal. Instead of starting with “What’s wrong with you?”, Maté asks, “What happened to you?” and “What did you have to become to get through it?” Healing, from his perspective, begins when we stop treating symptoms as enemies to be eliminated and start treating them as messages—signals pointing toward unmet needs, unresolved emotional pain, and social realities that the body has been forced to carry.

How Society Decides What Counts as “Normal”

Maté emphasizes that ideas of normalcy aren’t neutral. What a culture praises, punishes, or medicalizes depends heavily on its economic priorities, its social hierarchies, and its expectations about productivity, behavior, and conformity. When a society prizes output over well-being, wealth over belonging, and performance over authenticity, people who cannot “keep up” are often treated as broken.

In that environment, distress becomes a personal failure rather than an expected response. If a person is overwhelmed by chronic pressure, precarious finances, or social isolation, the problem is often framed as a private dysfunction. Maté disputes that framing. He suggests that many so-called mental illnesses are not mysterious glitches appearing in otherwise healthy lives; they often rise from predictable conditions—lack of control, humiliation, social disconnection, fear of scarcity, and the emotional injuries created by unstable attachment in childhood.

To illustrate, Maté points to the way childhood behavior is interpreted. A child diagnosed with ADHD is frequently viewed through a medical lens: the child has a defective brain requiring correction through medication and behavioral management. Maté proposes a different interpretation: some “symptoms” may be a child’s natural resistance to an environment that suppresses movement, curiosity, and play while demanding prolonged stillness and compliance. Under that view, the issue is not simply a child’s wiring—it’s also the mismatch between developmental needs and institutional demands.

The book reinforces this theme with supporting perspectives, such as Johann Hari’s argument that depression can function as a stress response to low social status and powerlessness, reflecting patterns observed in social hierarchies in animals. The larger point is that mood, attention, and motivation are not just interior phenomena; they are also shaped by relationship and context. When ...