Gabor Mate

Gabor Mate

Image Credit: UBC Library, Gabor Mate

For over ten years Gabor Maté has been the staff physician at the Portland Hotel, a residence and harm reduction facility in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. His patients are challenged by life-threatening drug addictions, schizophrenia, mental illness, Hepatitis C, HIV and, in many cases, all four. But if Dr. Maté’s patients are at the far end of the spectrum, how many of us are also struggling with addictions?

Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, work, food, sex, gambling and excessive inappropriate spending: what is amiss with our lives that we seek such self-destructive ways to comfort ourselves? And why is it so difficult to stop these habits, even as they threaten our health, jeopardize our relationships and corrode our lives?

In 2008, in addition to his many other speaking engagements across Canada, Dr. Mate has been guest lecturer at Washington State University and a visiting professor at McGill University in the Faculty of Medicine. His next book, to be published in 2010, will be The Making and Unmaking of Bullies and Victims: A New Look at a Contemporary Malaise, co-written with developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld.

Gabor Mate read at the Lillooet Room of the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre on December 04 2008.

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