Dr. Gabor Maté on the Stress-Disease Connection, Addiction and the Destruction of American Childhood

From Democracy Now! Here are three excellent interviews with  Dr. Gabor Maté on the Stress-Disease Connection, Addiction, and the Destruction of American Childhood (as one might guess from the title).

Dr. Maté is the bestselling author of four books: When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection (2011); Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do about It (2000); and, with Dr. Gordon Neufeld, Hold on to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers (2006); and his best known work, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction (2010).

There is a short one minute, or so, introduction and then the three interviews, all from 2010, come up when the intro is done.

Dr. Gabor Maté on the Stress-Disease Connection, Addiction and the Destruction of American Childhood

Today, a Democracy Now! special with the Canadian physician and bestselling author, Dr. Gabor Maté. From disease to addiction, parenting to attention deficit disorder, Maté’s work focuses on the centrality of early childhood experiences to the development of the brain, and how those experiences can impact everything from behavioral patterns to physical and mental illness. While the relationship between emotional stress and disease, and mental and physical health more broadly, is often considered controversial within medical orthodoxy, Maté argues too many doctors seem to have forgotten what was once a commonplace assumption, that emotions are deeply implicated in both the development of illness, addictions and disorders, and in their healing. [includes rush transcript]

First Interview:
In our first conversation, Dr. Maté talked about his work as the staff physician at the Portland Hotel in Vancouver, Canada, a residence and harm reduction facility in Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood with one the densest concentrations of drug addicts in North America. The Portland hosts the only legal injection site in North America, a center that’s come under fire from Canada’s Conservative government. I asked Dr. Maté to talk about his patients.

Second Interview:

In that first interview, we touched briefly on his work on attention deficit disorder, the subject of his book. Well, just about a month ago, we had Dr. Maté back on Democracy Now! to talk more about ADD, as well as parenting, bullying, the education system, and how a litany of stresses on the family environment is leading to what he calls the "destruction of the American childhood."

Third Interview:
Dr. Maté came on Democracy Now! this year to discuss his book When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection. Based on medical studies and his own experience with chronically ill patients at the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital, where he was the medical coordinator for seven years, Dr. Maté argues that stress and individual emotional makeup play critical roles in an array of diseases, including cancer, heart disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and arthritis. Speaking to us this time from Vancouver — it was actually during the Vancouver Olympics — Dr. Maté began by explaining his analysis of the mind-body connection.