The Myth of Normal

i know its a good book when all i want to do is spreading the gospel of this book to anyone who asks

The concept of mind-body relationship is one I agree with and suspected. It was also fascinating to read stories that seemed miraculous as I still also subscribed to the trust of Western medicine. However, the book was very long winded and used big words so it was a struggle to finish especially where it lagged in the middle.

I love Gabor Maté's talks but while this book shares a good deal of information, it got tiresome and dry with a lot of anecdotal bits. It just felt a little all over the place and like the same information could have been presented in a more concise way.

DNF. I stopped reading after chapter 13. I got very frustrated with this book for multiple reasons, but the most important are that the author doesn't approach the topic from a neurodiversity framework or a fat liberation framework, and the valorization in anecdotes of people who were once extremely ill but today take no medication gave me a bad vibe.

The attachment parenting advocacy felt like a repackaging of refrigerator mother theory, with the twist of “society creates situations that coerce or strongly encourage refrigerator parenting.” It's not a framework that I find helpful as a parent or as a neurodivergent person.

In summary, I don't know if the author is one of those people who thinks that I as a chronically ill person should have “be on no medications” as a goal, but I don't want to continue reading to find out. Of course I'd love to not be in pain. But I can't read about mental illness and chronic illness from a perspective that seemingly depicts being 100% nondisabled & neurotypical and on no medications as something that I have a responsibility to want.

I did appreciate that the author has zero tolerance for Jordan Peterson.

This was definitely an important book about trauma and its impacts on our individual and social health. These topics of trauma are often not discussed enough. However, this book was so overwhelming with information about the deep and dark effects of trauma (addictions, homelessness, disease, etc). It felt as if we are doing everything wrong and nothing right that it left me with a lot of hopelessness. It was a very long book and it felt like it dumped all of this trauma on the reader with not a lot of solutions to actively solve the problem. Although it was very well researched and clearly the author knows what they are talking about, it left me feeling helpless knowing that there is all this trauma and not a lot of answers to how to change it.

I'm not knowledgeable about trauma from any prior books, so I learned a lot about what it is. In the end, it reminded me a lot of Dianetics. I didn't agree with about half of the author's numerous political and economic implications. Though I did like the author's perspective on dealing with other people: we should respect each person's views because their experiences, not ill will, led them there.

This is Mate's best book yet! I think having his son as a co-author really helped, because I thought the writing was more evocative and clear than his other books. Myth of Normal goes way further into many subjects that Mate has talked about before, as well as some new topics. There are chapters on pregnancy and prenatal development, politics, race, class, and gender; social media, depression - and a bunch of other salient topics that are all intertwined in how people interact with the world and deal with trauma/are traumatized. This will definitely be a book I re-read and I will recommend it widely!