242: Childhood Trauma + Our Physical + Mental Health With Dr. Gabor Mate

Welcome back to Therapy Chat! In today's podcast host Laura Reagan revisits an earlier episode speaking to Dr. Gabor Maté. Dr. Maté is the co-founder of Compassion for Addiction, a new non-profit that focuses on addiction. He is also an advisor of Drugs over Dinner.

As an author, Dr. Maté has written several bestselling books including the award-winning In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction; When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress; and Scattered Minds: A New Look at the Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder, and co-authored Hold on to Your Kids. His works have been published internationally in twenty languages.

For twelve years Dr. Maté worked in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside with patients challenged by hard-core drug addiction, mental illness and HIV, including at Vancouver’s Supervised Injection Site. With over 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience and extensive knowledge of the latest findings of leading-edge research, Dr. Maté is a sought-after speaker and teacher, regularly addressing health professionals, educators, and lay audiences throughout North America.

In the fall of 2017, Dr. Maté will be launching a brand new website offering online courses in his various areas of expertise. The first course will be a training program for health professionals working with people with addiction.

Dr. Maté explains the connection between childhood traumatic stress at any point in development - even in utero - and mental and physical health and well-being. Beyond a discussion of ACES, he describes the causes of illness and how trauma fits in. Did you know that ADD/ADHD, MS, Prostate cancer, ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease) and many other diseases, as well as addictions of all kinds are linked to trauma? Gabor's books, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Scattered, and When the Body Says No go into depth with the research to support his assertions.

Thank you to this episode's sponsor, TherapyNotes. Get a 2-month free trial of TherapyNotes by going to www.TherapyNotes.com and using the promo code TherapyChat. 

Resources

https://drgabormate.com

https://www.compassion4addiction.org

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66cYcSak6nE (Ted Talk)

Article Dr. Maté referenced: "An Integrated Scientific Framework for Child Survival and Early Childhood Development" from Pediatrics, February 2012, Vol 129, Issue 2.

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