Gabor Maté: How Capitalism Makes Us Sick

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Gabor Maté: How Capitalism Makes Us Sick

[ http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/ ... -420927885 ]

An interview on health and politics

by Ryan Meili • Nov 13, 2014 • Politics, Society

Doctor Gabor Maté is the award-winning author of the books When the Body Says No, Hold On To Your Kids, and In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts. He was recently invited to speak at a conference of the Saskatoon Tribal Council, which includes seven Saskatchewan First Nations. I took the opportunity to interview Dr. Maté about his writing and the intersection between health and politics.

Can you tell me about your new project?

I’m intending to write a book tentatively called Toxic Culture: How Capitalism Makes us Sick. That’s the working title. My contention is that the very nature of the system in which people live their lives is a significant source of illness. Now there are obvious factors like environmental pollution, toxins, and then of course there are the social determinants of health that you write about in A Healthy Society: the impact of poverty, the impact of inequality, the impact of history and continued racism. [ http://www.thinkupstream.net/a_healthy_society ] There’s an article in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix today about sentencing practices in the courts of Saskatchewan. [ http://www.thestarphoenix.com/news/Sent ... story.html ] People who are identified as Aboriginal are likely to get double the sentences of people who are not identified as Aboriginal. That’s going to have a health impact.

But I’m going to go beyond even that and say that even the people who are not on the wrong end of economic inequality or systemic racism are still made ill just by how we live our lives. The stress that we live under, the competition, the aggressiveness, the uncertainty, the loss of control that we experience in our lives. The gender inequalities, these are not just social phenomena, they have an actual impact on community health. The isolation people are experiencing.

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