The Zeitgeist Movement, which we'll continue to refer to as TZM,

is a sustainability advocacy organization

which conducts community-based activism

through a global network of chapters.

We have 1100 chapters throughout the world.

We propose that we as a species take a direct technical approach

to resource and social management, as opposed to

a monetary or political one.

The train of thought presented by TZM

is centered around the concept that we, as a species,

can and should update the workings of a society

to the most efficient, sustainable and proven methods

that science and technology have to offer.

In short, we can be summarized as a movement which advocates

the application of the scientific method for social and environmental concern.

Some background information, though I'm sure Dr. Maté needs no introduction:

Dr. Maté ran a popular family practice in East Vancouver for two decades.

For 7 years, he also served as medical coordinator of the palliative care unit

at Vancouver hospital, caring for the terminally ill.

More recently, he worked for 12 years in Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside

with patients suffering from drug addiction, mental illness and HIV.

He's authored four books; the last two have become national

and international best sellers, translated into 9 languages.

(Dr. Maté) 20. - 20 different languages.

[Laughs]

A recurring theme throughout his work is the development of the psyche,

mental and physical health and looking at

neurological and psychological mechanisms

which he connects with the need for social change.

Dr. Maté was gracious enough to lend us his expertise

and was featured in the latest of the Zeitgeist film series:

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward.

He put forth progressive ideas about what factors come into play

when looking at the development of the human psyche

in relation to its social and physical environment.

We are honored to collaborate with Dr. Gabor Maté

in this joint presentation based on a fairly simple question:

what promotes positive mental health and what would a society

that supports and fosters healthy and stable individuals look like?

Without further ado, please welcome Dr. Maté.

[Applause]

First of all, thank you for coming out to be part of this conversation;

thanks to The Zeitgeist Movement for inviting me.

I need to clarify that I'm not a member of the movement

(you might call me a friend)

nor was I gracious enough to put this bit in the movie.

I did not know I was participating when I was interviewed.

I didn't even know there was such a movie,

I was simply interviewed by somebody who thought my ideas were interesting enough

and next thing I know, I'm in the Zeitgeist movie,

so grace had nothing to do with it.

I was happy with the film, particularly the part

that has interviews with myself and a number of other people.

We all put forward a perspective which is what I'll be presenting today,

which is that human beings can't be separated from their environment,

and in order to understand the human being, you must understand the environment.

The implication is also that if we're going to be different human beings

or foster different human beings, we have to look at the environment.

The medical practice that I was trained in, the University of British Columbia,

has a very Western ideology-infused medicine.

Now, we think of medicine as a science,

as a scientific practice, but it's as much ideological as it is anything else.

What passes for science in our culture

is a combination of scientific data

but interpreted through an ideological lens,

so we must never think of it as pure science.

Unfortunately, it's not a conscious ideological lens,

so that the practitioners are not aware that they have an ideology.

They didn't choose that ideology, they simply grew up in it,

they were trained in it, and they think

that they're looking objectively at the world.

But as the Buddha pointed out 2500 years ago:

we create the world with our minds,

so the kind of perspective that we have will shape what we see

and that's absolutely true of science as well.

What I'm interested in looking at is: before we create the world with our minds,

how does the world create our minds?

What kind of minds are we looking at the world with?

That's the question that Western medicine doesn't ask very much.

It makes two separations:

it separates the mind from the body

so that physical illnesses, or illnesses that are considered to be purely physical

like rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, multiple sclerosis,

any chronic health condition you care to name,

is understood only in terms of the organs that it attacks,

but not in terms of the relationship of the body

to the person's psychological, spiritual and social life.

That means if you go to a doctor with a flare up of rheumatoid arthritis,

an inflammation of your joints,

a disease in which the immune system actually attacks the body itself

and therefore called 'auto-immune disease'

(sort of like if the Canadian army attacked Canada,

which under the current government is a total possibility in my opinion)

that's what an auto-immune disease is:

the immune system turns against yourself.

We don't ask the question: why is the immune system in mutiny against the body?

We simply give medications to suppress the symptoms.

We deal with surface manifestations, but we don't look at causes

because causes would imply a larger, more holistic look

and fundamentally, as physicians, we throw up our hands and we say

"We don't know what causes these things!"

If you look at something like multiple sclerosis

which is a degenerative disease of the nervous system,

in the 1940s, the gender ratio of multiple sclerosis

was a 1 to 1: for each man diagnosed, so was a woman.

The gender ratio now is 3 or 4 women for every man

and you cannot understand that on strictly physical grounds.

If you think it's genetics, it won't cut it

because genes don't change in a population over 70 years.

If you think it's the diet or the climate, no,

that hasn't changed more for one gender than the other either.

So, there's something about gender in our society

that certainly influences the onset and course of disease.

In order to understand that, you'd have to look at something broader

than just the body. So that mind/body separation

doesn't work to explain either physical or mental illness.

And by the way, my talk is not just about mental illness either,

it's about illness in general.

Then the second separation that we make is, we separate

the human being, the individual, from the environment.

We think that if cancer shows up in somebody,

or if mental illness shows up in somebody,

it's strictly [due to] individual factors

such as, for example, the genetics, so it has to do with the genes, the DNA

that you or I inherited from our parents,

or perhaps is a result of lifestyle choices we make:

if you smoke, which of course increases your risk of lung cancer,

then you get lung cancer, that's because of a choice you individually made.

These are individual perspectives on disease,

which again, causes us to miss a lot of things.

Let me give you three examples of a different approach,

which has been called 'a bio-psychosocial approach'

which means to say that the biology of an individual

is inseparable from its psychological and social environment.

It's the only scientific understanding that makes any sense at all

and it's the only way through which we can comprehend

who gets sick and why.

Of course, if you look at it in a broad scale,

social factors such as gender, race

and economic position are far more influential

in population health than individual factors,

and that's because we're bio-psychosocial creatures.

Therefore, biology can't be separated from the psychological and social environment.

For example, it's not even controversial,

a number of studies have shown it,

that children whose parents are stressed

are much more likely to have asthma than children whose parents are not stressed.

In polluted areas, where the air quality itself

and the irritants in the air

cause the triggering of more asthmatic flare ups in people,

it's still the children of stressed parents who are most likely to have asthma.

If you go to the ordinary, western-trained physician

with either yourself or your child having asthma,

you'll be given the appropriate treatment

which will reverse the narrowing of the airways that happens in asthma;

it will suppress the inflammation that happens in asthma.

Now, the inhalers, the medications you get in whatever form

to achieve those affects, it's interesting to consider what they are.

Because the inhaler that opens up the narrowed airways of the asthmatic

is actually a copy of adrenaline.

In fact, if you rushed to a hospital with a severe asthmatic episode

you'd be given an injection of adrenaline.

The inhaler that suppresses the inflammation

(which is the other aspect of asthma,

the swelling, etc. that needs to be suppressed

which further clutters the airways) that inhaler, or that infusion

that you'd get the hospital's emergency ward, is actually cortisol.

If you look at what cortisol and adrenaline are, anybody know what they are?

They're stress hormones. They're treating asthmatics with stress hormones.

As a matter of fact, cortisol is the commonest medication used in all of medicine.

It's used in conditions of the skin, of the lungs, of the joints,

of the intestines and of the nervous system.

It's a stress hormone. If you were threatened right now,

your adrenal gland would put out adrenaline and cortisol

which would allow you to fight back or to escape,

but in the long term, those same hormones damage your health.

So, acute stress is just how you survive a threat;

chronic stress debilitates your immune system:

heart disease, thinning of the bones,

ulcers in the intestines and depression are the side-effects.

Now, we give these stress hormones to the asthmatic child,

but we never ask the question:

we're treating something with stress hormones,

is it possible that the condition is connected to stress somehow?

That question is never asked. Now, the lung functioning

of the children of stressed parents,

why is the lung functioning affected by the parents' emotional states?

Because the child's biology is actually

shaped or influenced by the parents' emotional/psychological states,

because it bio-psychosocial.

You can't separate the emotions from the body

and you can't separate the individual from the environment.

In another study in Australia, they looked at

500 women who'd had breast biopsies,

lumps in their breasts, which needed to be biopsied for cancer

to see if they're malignant.

These biopsies

were then done and before the results came back,

the women underwent a psychological questionnaire, an interview.

It turned out that if a woman has been emotionally isolated

prior to the onset of that lump, that by itself

had zero effect on that lump being cancerous.

Similarly, if a woman had experienced a major stressful episode in her life,

that by itself also had zero effect.

So far so good. But if the woman had been emotionally isolated

and stressed, the risk of that lump being cancerous

was 9 times as great as the average.

The researchers being left-brained,

medically-trained, scientific-minded people,

they had no way of understanding this. They were totally puzzled by this.

They said "How does zero and zero add up to 9?"

which is logical

as a question, but it ignores the true nature of human beings.

Because if you're stressed,

then again these hormones are raging through your system.

But if somebody comes along and says "Hey friend,

I see that you're upset, how are you feeling?" puts a hand on your shoulder,

what happens to you physiologically in a split second?

You calm down, you take a deep breath.

Your brain has more oxygen, you start thinking more clearly.

The adrenaline levels and your blood pressure go down, your heart stops racing,

the cortisol levels go down, so the immune system is no longer under siege.

But if you're emotionally isolated and there's no one to relate to,

then you'll be stewing on your own stress juices for months,