Power of addiction and addiction to power | Gabor Maté | TEDxRio+20

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences.

If the success of a doctor is measured by the longevity of his patients, the post-Nazi genocide Hungarian-born, Canadian psychiatrist Gabor Maté is a failure. As a specialist in terminal illnesses, chemical dependents, and HIV positive patients, Dr. Maté is a renowned author of books and columnist known for his knowledge about attention deficit disorder, stress, chronic illness and parental relations. His theme at TEDxRio+20 was addiction -- from drugs to power. From the lack of love to the desire to escape oneself, from susceptibility of the being to interior power, nothing escapes. And he risks a generic and generous prescription: "Find your nature and be nice to yourself."

I've come to talk to you about addiction,
the power of addiction,

but also addiction to power.

As a medical doctor,
I work in Vancouver, Canada,

and I have worked with some very,
very addicted people.

People who use heroin,
they inject cocaine,

they drink alcohol, crystal meth
and every drug known to man.

And these people suffer.

If the success of a doctor is to be
measured by how long his patients live,

then I am a failure

because my patients die very young,
relatively speaking.

They die of HIV, they die of hepatitis C,

they die of infections
of their heart valves,

they die of infections of their brains,
of their spines,

of their hearts,
of their bloodstream.

They die of suicide, of overdose,
of violence, of accidental deaths.

And if you look at them, you call to mind

the words of the great Egyptian novelist,
Naguib Mahvouz, who wrote:

"Nothing records the effects of a sad life
as graphically as the human body."

Because these people lose everything.

They lose their health,
they lose their beauty,

they lose their teeth,
they lose their wealth,

they lose human relationships

and, in the end,
they often lose their lives.

And yet, nothing shakes them
from their addiction.

Nothing can force them
to give up their addiction.

The addictions are powerful
and the question is: why?

And as one of my patients said to me:

"I'm not afraid of dying," he said,
"I'm more afraid of living."

And the question we have to ask is:
Why are people afraid of life?

And, if you want to understand addiction,

you can't look at
what's wrong with the addiction;

you have to look at
what's right about it.

In other words, what's the person getting
from the addiction?

What are they getting
that otherwise they don't have?

What addicts get is relief from pain,

what they get is a sense of peace,
a sense of control,

a sense of calmness,
very, very temporarily.

And the question is why are
these qualities missing from their lives,

what happened to them?

If you look at drugs like heroin,
like morphine, like codeine,

if you look at cocaine,
if you look at alcohol,

these are all painkillers.

In one way or another,
they all soothe pain.

And that's why
the real question in addiction

is not, "Why the addiction?,"
but, "Why the pain?"

Now, I just finished reading
the biography of Keith Richards,

the guitarist for the Rolling Stones

and, as you probably know,
everybody is still surprised

that Richards is still alive today,

because he was a heavy-duty
heroine addict for a long time.

And in his biography,
he writes that the addiction

was all about looking for oblivion,
looking for forgetting.

He said, "The contortions
that we go through

just not to be ourselves for a few hours."

And I understand that very well myself,

because I know that discomfort with myself,

I know that discomfort
being in my own skin,

I know that desire
to escape from my own mind.

The great British psychiatrist
R.D. Laing said

that there are three things
that people are afraid of.

They are afraid of death,
of other people and of their own minds.

For a long time in my life, I wanted
to distract myself from my own mind,

because I was afraid to be alone with it.

And how would I distract myself?

Well, I've never used drugs,
but I've distracted myself through work,

and throwing myself into activities.

And I've distracted myself
through shopping;

in my case, for classical compact music,
classical compact discs.

But I've been a real addict that way.

One week, I spent 8,000 dollars
on classical compact discs,

not because I wanted to,

but because I couldn't help
going back to the store.

And as a medical doctor,
I used to deliver a lot of babies.

And once I left a woman
in labor in hospital

to get a classical piece of music.

I still could have made it back
to the hospital on time,

but once in the store you can't leave,

because there are these evil
classical music dealers in the aisles:

"Hey buddy, have you listened to
the latest Mozart symphony cycle?"

"You haven't? Well..."

So I missed the delivery of that baby,

and I came home and I lied
to my wife about it.

Like any addict, I would lie about it
and I would ignore my own children

because of my obsession
with work and with music.

So I know what that
escape from the self is like.

My definition of addiction

is any behavior that gives you
temporary relief, temporary pleasure,

but in the long term causes harm,
has some negative consequences

and you can't give it up,
despite those negative consequences.

And from that perspective,
you can understand

that there are many, many addictions.

Yes, there is the addiction to drugs,

but there is also
the addiction to consumerism,

there is the addiction to sex,
to the internet,

to shopping, to food.

The Buddhists have this idea
of the hungry ghosts.

The hungry ghosts are creatures
with large empty bellies

and small, scrawny necks
and tiny little mouths,

so they can never get enough,

they can never fill
this emptiness on the inside.

And we are all hungry ghosts
in this society,

we all have this emptiness,

and so many of us are trying to fill
that emptiness from the outside

and the addiction is all about trying
to fill that emptiness from the outside.

Now, if you want to ask the question
of why people are in pain,

you can't look at their genetics.

You have to look at their lives.

And in the case of my patients,
my highly addicted patients,

it's very clear why they are in pain.

Because they have been abused
all of their lives,

they began life as abused children.

All of the women I have worked with
over a 12-year period, hundreds of them,

they had all been
sexually abused as children.

And the men had been traumatized as well.

The men had been
sexually abused, neglected,

physically abused, abandoned

and emotionally hurt over and over again.

And that's why the pain.

And there is something else here too:
the human brain.

The human brains itself,
as you've heard already,

develops an interaction
with the environment.

It's not just genetically programed.

So the kind of environment
that a child has

will actually shape
the development of the brain.

Now, I can tell you about
two experiments with mice.

You take a little mouse
and you put food in its mouth

and he'll eat it and enjoy it
and swallow it,

but if you put the food down
a few inches away from his nose,

he will not move to eat it;

he will actually starve to death
rather than eat.

Why?

Because, genetically, they knocked out
the receptors for a chemical in the brain

called dopamine.

Dopamine is the incentive
and motivation chemical.

Dopamine flows
whenever we are motivated,

excited, vital, vibrant,
curious about something,

when we are seeking food
or a sexual partner.

Without the dopamine,
we have no motivation.

Now what do you think the addict gets?

When the addict shoots cocaine,

when the addict shoots crystal meth
or almost any drug,

they get a hit of dopamine in their brain.

And the question is,

what happened to their brains
in the first place?

Because it's a myth
that drugs are addictive.

Drugs are not by themselves addictive,

because most people who try most drugs
never become addicted.

So the question is,

why are some people vulnerable
to being addicted?

Just like food is not addictive,
but to some people it is;

shopping is not addictive,
but to some people it is;

television is not addictive,
but to some people it is.

So the question is,
why this susceptibility?

There's another
little experiment with mice

where infant mice,

if they are separated from their mothers
will not cry for their mothers.

Now what would that mean in the wild?

It means that they would die,

because only the mother protects
the child's life and nurtures the child.

And why?

Because genetically
they knocked out the receptors,

the chemical binding sites in the brain,
for endorphins

and endorphins are indigenous
morphine-like substances;

endorphins are our own
natural painkillers.

What morphine or endorphins also do is
they make possible the experience of love;

they make possible the experience
of attachment to the parent

and the parents' attachment to the child.

So these little mice without
endorphin receptors in their brains

will naturally not call for their mothers.

In other words,

the addiction to these drugs and
of course the heroine and the morphine,

what they do is they act
on the endorphin system;

that's why they work.

And so, the question is,

what happens to people that they need
these chemicals from the outside?

Well, what happens to them is,
when they are abused as children,

those circuits don't develop.

When you don't have love
and connection in your life,

when you are very, very young,

then those important brain circuits
just don't develop properly.

And under conditions of abuse,
things just don't develop properly

and their brains then
are susceptible when they do the drugs.

Now they feel normal,
now they feel pain relief,

now they feel love.

And as one patient said to me:
"When I first did heroine," she said,

"it felt like a warm soft hug,
just like a mother hugging her baby."

Now, I've had that same emptiness,
not to the same degree as my patients.

What happened to me is that
I was born in Budapest, Hungary,

in 1944, to Jewish parents,

just before the Germans occupied Hungary.

And you know what happened
to the Jewish people in Eastern Europe.

And I was 2 months old
when the German army moved into Budapest.

And the day after they did,
my mother phoned the pediatrician

and she said,

"Would you please come and see Gabor
because he is crying all the time."

And the pediatrician said,
"Of course, I will come to see him,

but I should tell you,
all of my Jewish babies are crying."

Now why?

What do babies know about Hitler
or genocide or war?

Nothing.

What we were picking up on
is the stresses and the terrors

and the depression of our mothers

and that actually shapes
the child's brain.

And of course,
what happens then

is I get the message
that the world doesn't want me,

because if my mother is
not happy around me,

she must not want me.

Why do I become a workaholic later?

Because if they don't want me,
at least they are going to need me.

And I'll be an important doctor
and they are going to need me

and that way I can make up

for the feeling of not being
wanted in the first place.

And what does that mean?

It means that I am working all the time,

and when I am not working,
I'm consumed by buying music.

What message do my kids get?

My kids get the same message
that they are not wanted.

And this is how we pass it on,
we pass on the trauma,

and we pass on the suffering,
unconsciously,

from one generation to the next.

So obviously, there are many,
many ways to fill this emptiness,

and for each person, there is a different
way of filling the emptiness,

but the emptiness always goes back

to what we didn't get
when we were very small.

And then we look at the drug addict
and we say to the drug addict,

"How can you possibly do this to yourself?

How can you possibly inject
this terrible substance into your body

that may kill you?"

But look at what
we are doing to the earth.

We are injecting all kinds of things
into the atmosphere

and the oceans and the environment

that is killing us,
that's killing the earth.

Now which addiction is greater?

The addiction to oil? Or to consumerism?

Which causes the greater harm?

And yet we judge the drug addict

because we actually see
that they are just like us

and we don't like that.

So we say, "You are different from us,
you are worse than we are."

(Applause)

On the plane to São Paulo
and Rio de Janeiro,

I was reading the New York Times,
on June 9th,

and there was an article about Brazil

and the article was about a man
called Nísio Gomes,

a leader of the Guarani people
in the Amazon,

who was killed last November
and you probably heard about him.

And he was killed because
he was protecting his people

from the big farmers and the companies

that are taking over the rainforest
and destroying the rainforest

and that are destroying the habitat of
the native Indian people here in Brazil.

And I can tell you that coming from Canada
the same thing has happened over there.

And many of my patients are actually
First Nation's Indian people,

native Indian people in Canada,
and they are heavily addicted.

They make up a small percentage
of the population,

but they make up a large percentage
of the people in jail,

the people who are addicted,

the people who are mentally ill,

the people who commit suicide. Why?

Because their lands were
taken away from them,

and because they were killed and abused
for generations and generations.

But the question I ask is,

if you can understand the suffering
of these native people

and how that suffering makes them
seek relief from pain in their addictions,

what about the people
who are perpetrating it?

What are they addicted to?

Well, they are addicted to power,

they are addicted to wealth,

they are addicted to acquisition.

They want to make themselves bigger.

And when I was trying to understand
the addiction to power,

I looked at some of the most
powerful people in history.

I looked at Alexander the Great,
I looked at Napoleon, I looked at Hitler,

I looked at Genghis Kahn,
I looked at Stalin.

It's very interesting
when you look at these people.

First of all, why did they need
power so much?

Interestingly enough,

physically they were all
very small people,

my size or smaller; actually smaller.

They came from outsiders,

they were not part
of the major population.

Stalin was a Georgian, not a Russian;
Napoleon was a Corsican, not a Frenchman;

Alexander was a Macedonian, not a Greek;
and Hitler was an Austrian, not a German.

So a real sense of insecurity
and inferiority.

And they needed power
to feel okay in themselves,

to make themselves bigger,

and in order to get that power,
they were quite willing to fight wars

and to kill a lot of people,
just to maintain that power.

I'm not saying that only small people
can be power-hungry

but it is interesting to look at
these examples,

because power, the addiction to power,
is always about the emptiness

that you try and fill from the outside.

And Napoleon, even in exile
on the island of St. Helena,

after he lost his power,
he said, "I love power, I love power."

He couldn't think of himself
without power.

He had no sense of himself
without being powerful externally.

And that's very interesting
when you compare it to people

like the Buddha or Jesus,

because if you look at the story
about Jesus and Buddha,

both of them were tempted by the devil

and one of the things that the devil
offers them is power, earthly power,

and they both say no.

Now why do they say no?

They say no because they have
the power inside of themselves,

they don't need it from the outside.

And they both say no
because they don't want to control people,

they want to teach people.

They want to teach people by example
and by soft words,

and by wisdom, not through force;
so they refuse power.

And it's very interesting
what they say about that.

Jesus says that the power and the reality
is not outside of yourself but inside.

He says the Kingdom of God is within.

And the Buddha, before he dies
and his monks are mourning and crying

and they are all upset,

he says, "Don't mourn me,"
he says, "And don't worship me.

Find a lamp inside yourself, be a lamp
unto yourselves, find a light within."

And so as we look this difficult world
with the loss of the environment

and global warming
and the depredations in the oceans,

let's not look to the people in power
to change things,

because the people in power,
I'm afraid to say, are very often

some of the emptiest people in the world

and they are not going to
change things for us.

We have to find that light
within ourselves,

we have to find the light
within communities

and within our own wisdom
and our own creativity.

We can't wait for the people in power
to make things better for us,

because they are never going to,
not unless we make them.

They say that human nature is competitive,
that human nature is aggressive,

that human nature is selfish.

It's just the opposite;
human nature is actually cooperative,

human nature is actually generous,
human nature is actually community-minded.

What we see here at this conference
with people sharing information,

people receiving information,
people committed to the better world,

that's actually human nature.

And what I am saying to you is,

if you find that light within,
if you find your own nature,

then we will be kinder to ourselves

and we will also be kinder to nature.

Thank you.

(Cheers) (Applause)