Name: 【TEDx】The Power of Addiction and The Addiction of Power: Gabor Maté at TEDxRio+20
Uploaded: 2014-03-14T16:32:36.000Z
Duration: 18 min 47 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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 loose everything. They loose their health,

they loose their beauty, they loose their teeth, they loose their wealth, they loose

human relationships and in the end, they often loose 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." A 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 is the person getting from the addiction? What are they

getting that otherwise they don't have? What addicts get is release from pain, what

they get is a sense of peace, a sense of control, a sense of calmness, very, very temporarily.

And they question is: why are these qualities missing from their lives, what happened to

them? Now if you look at the drugs like heroin, like morphine, like codeine, if you look at

cocaine, if you look at alcohol, these are all pain killers. In one way or another, they

all soothe pain. And thus the real question in addiction is no why the addiction, but

why the pain? Now, I just finished reading the biography of Keith Richards, the lead

guitarist of 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 says "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 the three things that people are afraid of are 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, 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 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 the 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,

you know, who "hey buddy, have you listened to the latest Mozart symphony cycle?" "You

haven't?" So I missed the delivery of that baby, and I come 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 these 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 twelve 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 over and over again. And that's why the

pain. And there is something else here too: the human brain. The human brains itself develops

an interaction with the environment; it's not just genetically programed. 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, whether

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 getting 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 the 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 pain killers. Now...what endorphins also do, 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 then