Another Mind-Body Book

    'When The Body Says No' by Dr. Gabor Mate, M.D., Vintage Canada, 2004. 306pp.


    Gabor Mate, a doctor of medicine, has carved out another career as a writer. His book 'When The Body Says No' urges people to see the mind-body illness connection in a new
way.
     "Repression of anger increases the risk of cancer," writes the Vancouver-based doctor. "It magnifies exposure to psychological stress." And psychological stress, Mate points out, lies behind many other illnesses too, like sclerdoma, multiple sclerosis or M.S., amytrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease as it's called, and types of cancer.
    Here the doctor is leaning on the ideas of Dr. Hans Selye, who Mate co-dedicates the book to. 50 years ago Selye  pioneered the ideas that stress lies behind many illnesses. The book forced me once again to look back at my own childhood and adolescence. For 'When The Body Says No' is chockful of patients whose early years like my own, were far from ideal.
     And these patients later became victims of cancer, skin diseases and so on. My family like many others was a breeding ground for stress and illnesses. My father was an Orthodox Jew, though not a Hassidim Jew. Still he believed in every word of the Old Testament. He was at times a warm caring man but he could also erupt into frightening spasms of anger.
     My mother was a long suffering woman from an upper middle class English family. "your father gave her warmth and love," one of my father's future partners said. My mother surely needed both of these emotions. For her father was a tyrant who drove his wife to deafness by his constant shouting.
     Many of the patients in the book remind me of my mother. She nearly always put other people's needs ahead of her own needs. She died of breast cancer in the late 1960's of breast cancer. She was only 50 or so. My younger sister Valerie died at about the same time at the age of 20. I still feel that the estrogen-dosed birth control pills caused the stroke that killed her.
      I didn't mourn my sister and mother when they died. As a result, when my dad died about 15 years later, I was seized by rage and great feelings of sadness. Then I started to mourn for my three dead family members. Yet I still blamed my father for the poverty our family endured from the early 1950's to the mid-1960's. And for many years I ended up like my father, full of rage and arguing with everybody.
     "David is still fighting with his father," a woman said about me after I had a terrible argument with her.
     All of this was brought back to me while reading this book. It took me down memory lane and often I erupted in rage and sadness after reading some pages.  Dr. Mate by the way, likes anger but not rage.
    "Health rests on three pillars," he points out near the book's end. " They are the body, the psyche and the spiritual connection. To ignore any one of them is to ignore imbalance and dis-ease."
    Gabor Mate touches on all three pillars and opened my mind once again, to the connections between emotions and illness, not only in my own life, but the lives of many others. Though ten years old now, it's still a fine book.