When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

Gabor Maté, MD, is a Canadian physician. As a general practice doctor, he has a clinical history in family medicine and palliative care. He has also worked in Vancouver, including in the Downtown East Side—an area of the city characterized by addiction and impoverishment—with patients experiencing drug addiction and mental health conditions. In this role, he became interested in the role of chronic stress in illness; many of his patients tended to have stressful childhoods that contributed to maladaptive coping strategies in adulthood. In particular, Maté is interested in the role that the repression of one’s needs, inherent truths, and anger plays in creating chronic physiological stress in the body. Maté’s interest in childhood development and trauma is also influenced by his own life experiences, including the impact of the Holocaust on the earliest months of his life. 

Maté is now retired from practicing medicine, but many of the case studies in When the Body Says No and his other works are based on real patients he treated. He has presented his findings around the role of trauma and childhood development in terms of individuals’ physical and mental wellbeing in later life in a number of works of nonfiction, including books focused on addiction and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).