A few TED Talks strung together: Amazon reviews of Gabor Mate's The Myth of Normal

My counselor suggested this book after hearing many reviews about it, and 1/3 of the way through or so, I had to put it down. It was very hard to read. You need to have a very extensive vocabulary to even begin to understand a lot of what he is saying, and I am an avid reader with a large vocabulary, and I was still having to constantly look up words or be left guessing if I had the right idea on something or not. It's also written in a way that you can't read in a nice flow. I had to keep rereading sentences because he worded things in such odd ways, in ways people never speak, as if he was purposefully trying to be impossible to understand to show how lofty and wise he is compared to his fellow humans. It was very braggy and cocky in feel. 

In the first 1/3 of the book, it was only doom and gloom. You've had trauma in your life, you are doomed to bad health, disease after disease, a shorter life span, etc, etc, etc. There was no hope of anything in the book up to this point. I tried to go further, but the writing was just so heavy, it was definitely doing the opposite of what my counselor hoped I would get out of the book. I would suggest you have a doctorate level vocabulary, and a huge understanding of psychology before reading this, because even with higher education and a vocabulary that surprises my friends, this book was way above me. This book should have been written for the every day man, with the author having compassion for those he was trying to reach, or promoted for more professional people.

My psychologist recommended this book to her patients. I am on a journey to heal childhood trauma and wanted to add this to my library. I couldn't get into it. I feel like he is trying to jam so much into this book that it didn't cover what I hoped it would. Granted, I didn't get far before I gave up. I just wasn't able to really follow his points and maybe that is because I kept trying to relate it to trauma and couldn't.

Just a bunch of statistics mainly. Yes we are all different so what’s normal for me is normal for me not anyone else. Waste of money.

I find Mate to be overrated. He's a black and white thinker who offers the idea that all addiction stems from a single cause without supplying any serious evidence for his dismissal of genetics and the like. Further, I'm not buying that his son was the co-author.

It took me nearly a year to finish. I had high hopes based on the reviews, but for me, it felt overhyped.

Geared towards women which I wish I'd have known ahead of time. Switched to skimming 20 pages in. There's little to be gleaned from thus book. Significant effort is required to navigate the authors not so subtle political opinions. Pass on this.

Extremly disappointed. Its so evident that he and his son picked a political side for a country they do not even reside in, and decided to make a certain party and politicians responsible for the mental decline of society, simply disgusting! I once highly respected this man and his research, but he lost me on this one.

Of course we have the usual victim narrative regarding women and minorities etc. As the author quotes from a famous movie, "It's not your fault! It's not your fault!" but he fails to recognise that very often it is our fault because we are nearly always the very authors of our own miseries.

Imagine this:  You take your car into the shop, and the mechanic, reputed to be a mechanical genius, tells you all about your car, how it works, and how it can stop working correctly. Turns out how the car was made is important. Influences and so forth. You nod to show interest. You're assured this guy knows his business. "My car had a rough childhood," you tell him, and he nods sagely.

But then this mechanic starts in about "globalization," "late-stage capitalism," and you start to look at your watch, thinking this was a mistake. "Yeah, both those parties are two legs in the same pair of pants. Corporations run America." Then he points to a leak coming from the undercarriage. "Got some nasty inflammation there, mate. You been driving some stressful roads lately?" He looks at you accusingly.

"Look," you tell him, "I just wanted you to fix my car..."
He's furious.
"Fix. Your. Car. Are you serious? In this world? Ha! Nothing can be fixed, the whole system is broken..."
As he breaks down sobbing, you quietly leave the repair shop. Luckily, all you lost was a few bucks for a book. Phew.

He brings in debunked social justice nonsense about minority stress as well as promoting drug trips from “enlightened” indigenous cultures who still have a lifespan decades shorter than western ones without grasping the irony of this, while performing a work out self flagellation.

His book made no sense at all it was very jumbled and I gained nothing from it , he was writing a lot about stuff we all know about when it comes to trauma, cancer stuff and childhood traumas , never mentioned happy families that still got cancer , the book is mostly gloom and doom , good luck reading it .

Way too many quote from celebrities. And I don’t think he gets close to explaining the title. I think the book will tell people a lot of what they want to hear (capitalism is “bad”, indigenous people have indigenous wisdom etc. etc.) But I struggle to see the book as more than a few Ted talks strung together.

I didn't finish the book as it just came across as a whingefest. The author just seemed to drone on about how everything has turned to manure.