Should I call an exorcist? Why I can't get creepy guru Gabor Mate out of my mind (originally posted in 2023)

 

'Trauma expert' Gabor Mate says he bitterly REGRETS controversial Prince Harry interview because of 'demeaning, dismissive' backlash he faced - saying 'foofoo' surrounding it took over his life and made him 'lose himself'

• Harry's conversation with the doctor, 79, was fiercely scrutinized back in March
• At the time, it was revealed Gabor had previously made anti-Zionist comments
• He has now addressed the backlash, admitting that it left him in a 'dark place'

'Trauma expert' Gabor Maté has admitted that he regrets his controversial interview with Prince Harry because the 'foofoo' surrounding it took over his entire life and made him 'lose himself.'

Back in March, the Duke of Sussex, 39, spoke with the the Hungarian-Canadian doctor, 79, about 'living with loss and the importance of personal healing,' while promoting his memoir Spare.

During their sit-down, which was live-streamed on the web and cost $33 to watch, Harry made a series of bombshell claims about growing up as a royal.

The conversation was fiercely scrutinized, especially after it was brought to light that Gabor had made a series of eyebrow-raising comments in the past - like comparing Hamas to the Jewish heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, defending Palestinian rocket fire at Israeli civilians, and branding Israel's government as terrorists.

He is also an outspoken supporter of decriminalizing drugs, and has used the Amazonian plant ayahuasca to treat patients suffering from mental illness. 

Now, the author and physician has addressed the public's 'demeaning, dismissive, and distorted' reaction to his chat with Harry, while revealing that it left him in a really 'dark place.'

'There was an incredible social media reaction to it, which was, for the most part, so negative and so demeaning and so dismissive and so distorted,' he said during a recent appearance on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast.

'I barely even know how to talk about it. I thought by this age I would know better, but you know what, it really got to me.'

Gabor said the backlash left him in a 'really negative state of mind' and feeling like he 'lost himself' - leading to him eventually reaching out to a psychiatrist for help.

'I was in a dark place, I'm a human being like the rest,' he continued. 'It's so difficult to ask for help but I did.'

He accused the media of twisting his words and recalled them calling him things like 'stern, overbearing, and a merchant of pain.'

After speaking to a psychiatrist, however, Gabor said he later realized that his problems didn't have to do with the criticism, but rather, stemmed from an 'old unresolved wound' from his past. 

According to Gabor, he had reservations about talking to Harry from the start, since he was uncomfortable with the idea of making people pay to watch it.

Gabor said the backlash put him a 'really negative state of mind' and resulted in him feeling like he 'lost himself' during an appearance on Steven Bartlett's The Diary of a CEO podcast

The conversation was live-streamed on the web and tickets were priced at $33. People who watched it received a copy of Harry's book, Spare

'I had a gut feeling all along that I shouldn't agree the way they set it up. Because the way it was set up, to watch it, people had to buy a copy of Harry's book,' he explained. 

'I thought, "This is not fair, four million people have already bought the book. Why can't they watch this interview?" They had to buy another copy. 

'I believed this should be a free public service from two people who are having a very interesting conversation. 

'But out of sheer opportunism I agreed to it. I didn't follow my gut feeling. I agreed to something that I didn't really like. 

'Not that I didn't like the idea of talking with him, I didn't like the idea of putting myself behind a pay wall. I lost myself just in agreeing to do it.'

Despite his regrets about the interview, Gabor insisted that he 'doesn't care' what the public thinks of him anymore.

But he said he wants people to 'see him' for who he is and 'not some distorted version.'

'I don't care if people agree with me or if they refute my ideas, but I want them to see me and what I'm actually saying, not some distorted version created by their own minds,' he concluded. 

'So what if someone says [something bad about me]. I don't live in the press. I don't live in someone else's mind. Here I am. Let them think and say what they want.'

Gabor said that after the interview, he had to reach out to a psychiatrist for help, adding, 'I was in a dark place, I'm a human being like the rest.' Harry is seen during their chat

Gabor has more than two decades of experience working with people suffering from addiction and mental illness - and he fiercely believes that all of the problems we face as adults stem from trauma we endured as children. 

Gabor has been scrutinized for comparing Hamas to the Jewish heroes of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising against the Nazis, defending Palestinian rocket fire at Israeli civilians, and branding Israel's government as terrorists

He himself had a traumatic upbringing. He was born in Nazi-occupied Budapest in 1944, and when he was five months old his maternal grandparents were among the Jews murdered in Auschwitz. He was then taken from his mother and hidden with an aunt until the war ended. 

He is an outspoken supporter of decriminalizing drugs, and has used the Amazonian plant ayahuasca to treat patients suffering from mental illness. 

The psychedelic plant, which is taken as a brewed drink, causes people to experience hallucinations and other side effects, including vomiting - something Prince Harry has admitted to using to manage his 'trauma and pain.'

It remains illegal in the US, UK, and Canada, and in 2011, Canadian officials threatened to arrest Dr Maté if he didn't stop using the drug to treat his patients. 

On top of his shocking anti-Zionist comments, Gabor has also contributed to a pro-Kremlin website that defends brutal regimes around the world and has spoken warmly of the spittle-flecked Pink Floyd star and alleged 'Putin apologist' Roger Waters.

OK THEN! Time for the blogger to intervene.

I have too much to say about Gabor Mate (and won't write a nasty poem about him, though I think I did once). I did meet the man back in 2003, interviewing him for January Magazine, an online publication which never paid me one red cent for all my hard work. He had just written his second book, When the Body Says No, which is one of those titles that sounds like a lot, but means very little. 

I think I was taken in by his guru-hood even then, though at the time he was still an actual doctor, a family practitioner working on the  cruel streets of Vancouver. He even gave me a tour of his downtown office, and showed me around the sights, i. e. the various addicts standing around in their different states of dereliction. He seemed hyper, severe, with an unreadable face that I was soon to learn only had one expression.

He's likely the only person I ever met who doesn't smile. I mean, he doesn't. In the rare "smiling" photos, it's more like a wince, with alarmingly dead eyes. He never laughs - I mean, he does not laugh. He was full of bombast during our coffee talks, but had no real warmth, no sense of the joy of living. In fact, I consider him one of the most joyless human beings I've ever met. And he cannot survive if he is not playing the role of the perpetual saviour.

Unfortunately, this has worked all too well for him, and his fans are cultish in their devotion. One even described him as "like having Jesus back here on earth". When you look at his detestable pro-Hamas views, his baffling and even frightening alliance with Russia, you've got to wonder how Jesus could have gotten so fucked up.

At any rate, though there's more, I am weary of the subject already and don't want to waste another brain cell on him. For all his Messianic posturing, the guy is about as resilient as an ice cube on a hot summer's day. There's no "there" there, no real substance, and no real joy.

The doctor has been unmasked, and he cannot stand it. In one breath he says people's comments nearly destroyed him, then immediately says he does not care two figs about what anyone says. Hypocrisy, much? Or is his memory so faulty he doesn't remember what he said just a minute ago? 

BLOGGER'S UPDATE. The recent photos of Mate bring to mind that statement, "You deserve your face at fifty." Add thirty years, and the photos tell the tale.  

A couple of things caused me to revisit this post from three years ago. I was ALL DONE with the whole Meghan and Harry debacle, until the formerly-known-as-Prince CREEP Andrew was hauled off to a prison cell for questioning about his scummy activities with Jeffrey Epstein. Somehow or other this dragged me back into the whole royal mess, including the H&M debacle, which has only escalated in recent times to the point of utter absurdity.

Just the other day I got a comment from someone who just discovered my original 2023 post on Mate's interview with Harry, likely due to all the royal kerfuffle going on right now. She agreed with me that the guy is disturbingly creepy, and so lofty he actually says things like "I'm human too", kind of like Meghan Markle saying, "I, too, get to make mistakes!" Do tell. I never realized. Whatever I objected to back then has only gotten worse, as he sets out the bait of his traumatized childhood (PLEASE not again!) and thousands still take the bait. 

I rediscovered a piece I wrote during the Prince Harry kerfuffle, when I felt the need to share some of my own past with this dried-up old bastard. I think it's well-written and has something to say, so I'll repeat it here. 

I knew Gabor Mate personally when he began to write bestsellers on ADHD, addiction, trauma, etc. I contributed to his book on addiction, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, but was never given credit for it. In fact, in the book he described me as "a manic-depressive with a long history of alcoholism" - just the way I want to be remembered! I don' t know why I let that go by, but I can no longer make excuses for him. It was a shameful way to describe any human being, let alone one you pretended to care about, then  ripped off and used.

The Gabor I knew when I first met him in 2003 no longer exists, and he drank his own Koolaid a long time ago and has become a particularly toxic kind of guru. It's not just the ayahuasca retreats he holds every year in South America (do a YouTube search under Gabor Mate ayahuasca, and see what come up). He believes EVERY single problem you have in life stems from childhood trauma.

But there are far worse things. The Daily Mail ran a slew of articles about him, which no one seems to have read - seven or eight at last count. I knew his political beliefs were extreme, but I had no idea he supports the Palestinian terrorists of Hamas (he says they are his heroes) and accuses Israel of horrible crimes such as ethnic cleansing. He has publicly defended two celebrities who made blatantly anti-Semitic remarks.

Odd that a Jew would do this, but being Jewish gives him some sort of immunity to criticism. If a non-Jew said all this, he'd be publicly shamed and lose all credibility. He also hauls out that trauma story of the Holocaust/being separated from his mother at EVERY event, every book, every interview, article, etc. It never fails to bring people on-side, but it's like MM's dish soap story – it works, because how can you NOT sympathize with a newborn baby being abandoned in Nazi Germany? But it's a cheap trick in my estimation, and cheapens the stories of other survivors.

To me, this is exactly like Harry constantly talking about "Mummy", monetizing her at every turn, and thinking it's basically her fault for "leaving" him. But Gabor Mate's well-documented anti-Israel beliefs caused a prominent rabbi in the US to speak out against Mate and actually tried to get the event cancelled. (Why isn't anyone talking about this? I have not seen ONE mention of it apart from the intensive coverage in the Daily Mail.) It's not a good look for H the Taliban-killer to publicly align himself with someone who is a known terrorist sympathizer, particularly with that little event that's coming up in May.

There's a lot more, as in the fact he told me he had an affair with one of his addict patients, and when that one ended in disaster, he started another one, nearly destroying his marriage. He publicly recommends (in his books) the Landmark seminars which have been compared to Scientology. And on and on it goes - this is just scratching the surface. The most ludicrous thing is that he claims to be an addict himself, so that he understands all the pain addicts go through, because he buys too many classical music CDs. I know this is unbelievable, but it’s right there in his book.

He is has become one of these guru types who tramples on boundaries, because he can. As far as I am concerned, he is a dangerous predator. There's a lot more, but I will say I think he lost his way a long time ago and just played into Harry's hands, basically echoing everything he believes and not challenging him at all. It seems to me no one has really done a deep dive on Mate, who has a devoted fan base of mostly women who want to mother him. If you google him, it’s all positive, but if you even skim the headlines on the Daily Mail website over the past few days, there are a dozen or so articles about this whole mess. Everything they are saying about him checks out. As with so many things, no one is looking deeply enough into his phony credentials, and many people still fairly worship him for the work he did with addicts 20+ years ago.

Might it be possible that when he says he "lost himself", there really wasn't much left to lose?