The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture

Maté tells the story of Darrell Hammond, who later went on to be a star on “Saturday Night Live” for 14 years, who had his first experience of mental distress, being plunged into “unspeakable terror” (235), while in his first year at university. After this incident and its recurrence, Hammond saw countless doctors who diagnosed him with a range of psychological malaises from depression to bipolar disorder and PTSD. These doctors always repeated the same idea. This notion, he was told, which dominates modern medicine, was that “such torments are caused by a biological disease of the brain” (235). Doctors then used this diagnosis to prescribe Hammond a stream of medications for his alleged conditions.

Hammond’s life changed though, as Maté explains, when he met a psychiatrist after 35 years of treatment who told him that he should not think of himself as having a “mental illness” but of having been injured. This intervention led Hammond to understand that the root of his disorders lay in trauma experienced in childhood when he was abused by his mother, not in a mythical “illness.” Generalizing from Hammond’s case, Maté criticizes the concept of mental illness as developed in modern culture, for it reduces complex psychological problems to brain physiology and to a narrow biochemical domain of medicine.