Anatomy of Melancholy

Late one night at a racial-healing retreat in the woods of West Virginia, I found myself listening to an intense young man who unexpectedly declared, “I don’t know why everyone is running around to psychologists and psychiatrists when we all have the same problem.” By highlighting the commonality of our suffering, he conveyed what Gabor Maté calls “the compassion of recognition.” In The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture, the renowned doctor describes this as a capacity “to perceive and appreciate that we are all in the same boat, roiled by similar tribulations and contradictions.”

The metaphor might seem odd coming from a man who has witnessed first-hand the kind of debilitating suffering that most people never see. As a former staff physician at North America’s first supervised drug injection site, located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood, Maté treated, among others, severely distressed street addicts and...