In The Realm Of Hungry Ghosts

In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts has been a # 1 Canadian bestseller and will appear this year in French translation. It will be published in the U.S. in 2010.

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or the past decade Gabor Maté has worked as the staff physician at a clinic for drug addicted people in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, many of them with other mental health issues and HIV. In his most recent bestselling book, In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts, he shows that their addictions do not represent a discrete medical disorder but only the extreme end of a continuum of addictive behaviours rife throughout our society.  The source of addictions is not to be found in genes, but in the early childhood environment where the neurobiology of the brain’s reward pathways develops and the where the emotional patterns that lead to addiction are wired into the unconscious. Stress then, and later in life, creates the predisposition for addictions, whether to drugs, alcohol, nicotine, or to behavioural addictions such as shopping or compulsive sexual acting out.

Helping the addicted individual requires that we appreciate the function of the addiction in his or her life. More than a disease, the addiction is a response to a distressing life history and life situation and, at the same time, a limitation of the addict’s own possibilities.

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1. What is the source of addictions
2. What happens chemically and physiologically in the brains of people with substance dependency or behaviour addiction;
3. How much choice does the addict really have and how much responsibility;
4. What are the “blessings” of addiction as experienced by the addict (e.g., as emotional anaesthetic, as personality booster, as social lubricant, and so on)
5. Developing a therapeutic relationship in which healing is possible
6. How to encourage the addict to take responsibility
7. The prevention of addiction in adolescence and before
8. The spiritual void at the heart of addictions

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