Two months later, the Nazis occupied Hungary: his mother took him to the doctor because he wouldn’t stop crying. He became a workaholic and lived with ADHD and depression until, in his 40s and 50s, he began to unravel the root cause – and that took him all the way back to Budapest, where he was born in January 1944. He speaks from experience: Maté is a physician who specialised in family practice, palliative care and, finally, addiction medicine. Life is certainly a lot more work than I anticipated And if our happiness is threatened at a deep level, by traumas in our past that we’ve not resolved, we resort to addictions to restore the happiness we truly crave. “The primary drive is to regulate your situation to something more bearable.” So rather than some people having brains that are wired for addiction, Maté argues, we all have brains that are wired for happiness.
“Our birthright as human beings is to be happy, and the addict just wants to be a human being.”Īnd addictive behaviour, though damaging in the medium or long term, can save you in the short term. Part of that price was addiction – whether to alcohol or drugs, gambling or sex, overwork or porn, extreme sports or gaming – but essential to understanding it, says Maté, is to realise that addiction is not in itself the problem but rather an attempt to solve a problem. People in Britain are beginning to realise they paid a huge price internally for all those suppressed emotions.” “With rising inequality and all the other problems there are right now,” he says, “people are having to question how they live their lives. But once the empire crumbled, lips quavered. Boarding school culture and traumatic childhoods played out into dominance of other countries and cultures, giving the “buttoned-up” approach inherent value. Born of our imperial past, he says, it was maintained for as long as there was something to show for it. The infamous British stiff upper lip is something Maté has watched with fascination over the years. He applauds the new approach: “I think they are right to be leading and validating that sense of enquiry, without which life is not worth living.” William and Harry opening up about their mother’s death is something the Queen’s generation would never have done There’s a generational conflict here, he says, around being open about past trauma: he cites Princes William and Harry opening up about their mother’s death, and says it’s something the Queen’s generation would never have done.
Well-known in Canada, where he lives, he gives some interesting reasons why Britain is “just waking up to me” and his bestselling book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. Maté, a wiry, energetic man in his mid-70s, has his own experience of both childhood trauma and addiction, more of which later.
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