Gabor Mate is wrong about ADHD, addiction, women and disease.

Gabor Mate makes huge speculations with little evidence and gets many things plain wrong.

At some point I began to wonder how social media got to treasuring the insights of man who struggled with shopping addiction for at at least 5 years after writing a book on addiction. He admits his social life is negatively affected by the fact that his mind is still “stuck in the distant” past, yet today he is the go-to expert on dealing with childhood trauma.

While researching Gabor Mate’s claims, I couldn’t help but notice the juxtaposition between him and another Holocaust survivor, Victor Frankl. Frankl spent almost three years enduring torture in four different concentration camps. His brother, father, mother and wife were all killed. Yet, in contrast to Gabor Mate, Victor Frankl’s lectures are uplifting and filled with as much if not more zest than an inspirational locker room scene in a sports movies.

Their philosophies are quite different in terms of where they put their focus.

・Gabor Mate focuses on vulnerability. He argues all our dysfunction comes from the fact that we were all traumatized in our distant pasts. Society, parents and all of us need to change to prevent vulnerable humans from being traumatized.

・Victor Frankl focuses on resilience and purpose. He argues that regardless of the circumstances, man always has the power to choose how to respond. He can transform tragedies into triumphs, predicaments into achievements and man has an inner greatness that is achieved through his own quest for meaning.

Since there were too many issues with Gabor Mate to cover in just one post, here were are again. Today, we’ll focus on why Gabor Mate is not just dreary, but wrong.

1. Gabor Mate is overconfident despite flimsy evidence
2. He misleads us on cancer.
3. He is worse than wrong about ADHD.
4. He is worse than wrong about addiction and trauma.
5. He misleads us on women and autoimmune disease.

As mentioned in my last article, much of my criticism towards Mate stems from the fact that he:

(1) Sets such a low bar for trauma - trauma is very easily acquired, according to him. He says mundane experiences of stress, even just “good things not happening” can induce a form of trauma.

(2) Discourages a hierarchy of traumas. Traumas can be big or small and it depends on how someone felt about a circumstance, so we should not try to compare the two because everyone’s different.

(3) Says that practically everyone has trauma, that not having trauma would make you an “outlier.”

(4) Says that trauma is the root of all human dysfunction. It can cause anything from passive aggression to ADHD, addiction, cancer and autoimmune disorders.

To be clear before we move on, I’m not saying something like “trauma doesn’t exist.” PTSD was included in the DSM-lll in 1980. People’s mentality and behaviors can be significantly affected by dramatically negative events.

Mate even sets up a conceptual trap such that you pretty much have to have trauma. Taking a page from Freud, Mate buys into this concept of “suppressed” or “repressed” emotions having negative impacts on us. If someone’s behavior doesn’t match the negative behavior patterns of traumatized people, then it’s actually the case that they are repressing their trauma-related emotions.

He says that ADHD and the exact opposite of ADHD - being extra conscientious is evidence of trauma or repressed emotions. Considering a 2022 study found “conscientiousness is a robust and prospective predictor of subjective and physical well-being,” maybe Mate’s imagined “emotional repression” is a good thing?

Now, conscientiousness (a sign of repressed emotions) may heighten your well-being, but it will make you sick, according to Gabor Mate. He claims that people who appear stoical, responsible and extra conscientious are actually disease-prone due to repressed emotions.

He lays out his ‘heads you have trauma, tails you have trauma’ mentality in his interview on The Diary of a CEO podcast. The host asked him why two people with similar adverse experiences can turn out totally differently. Mate explains that:

“that really peaceful person may be really peaceful for genuinely good reasons … but they could also be very nice and peaceful because they're suppressing their healthy anger because they're actually sitting on their rage unconsciously which is going to show up in a form of some kind of health manifestation I guarantee you later on so you can't tell from the outside without asking some questions.”

Note the guarantee. Way too often Mate speaks with far too much certainty for such unverifiable things. He writes that X “invariably” leads to Y or that in his clinical experience he has “yet to find an exception” for X. As Journalist Jo Adetunji puts it: “in the probabilistic world of human psychology, claims to certainty are simply not credible. They should raise red flags.”

Gabor Mate says your personality causes cancer

In his book The Body Says No, Mate heavily implies that “repressed” emotions lead to cancer and chronic illness because all the people he’s seen with chronic conditions invariably had their emotions “repressed” during childhood.

I was watching an interview with Gabor Mate on Youtube when he explained that women with severe PTSD have double the risk for ovarian cancer. He confidently mentions the same study in his interview with The Guardian:

“women with severe post-traumatic stress disorder had double the risk for ovarian cancer. Despite the fact that this study came out four years ago, from Harvard, the average oncologist doesn’t have a clue.” (The Trauma Doctor: Gabor Mate on happiness, hope and how to heal our deepest wounds)

Mate uses studies like this to support his argument that “trauma is underneath all human dysfunction.”

In his book, he dedicates a good 30 pages to discussing ovarian cancer and includes anecdotes of women whose stressful lives allegedly lead to their ovarian cancer. For example, he links the ovarian cancer diagnosis of one woman, Jill, back to her being a “perfectionist.”

Now we might look at more tangible aspects of women’s lives to get an idea of their risk factors for cancer - things like diet. But wait, Mate says diet is caused by trauma too. Heads it’s trauma, tails it’s trauma. He says:

“Troubled eating patterns are inextricably linked with unresolved childhood issues…”

Never mind Gilda Radner’s family history of ovarian and breast cancer, Mate says that the comedian’s ovarian cancer was linked to her childhood issues which lead to dysfunctional eating and then cancer.

Let’s take a look at this ‘PTSD causes cancer’ narrative. A 2023 meta analysis in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that “PTSD was not associated with cancer risk compared with controls.” However, they say that for site-specific cancer:

“PTSD was not associated with the risk of gastrointestinal cancer, breast cancer and lung cancer,” but that “women with PTSD were associated with higher risk of ovarian cancer than controls.

So something seems unique for ovarian cancer. Only one study was available for their analysis and it is the same 2019 study that Gabor Mate confidently presented. Let’s take a look:

Indeed, as Gabor Mate says, based on cancer diagnoses between 1989 and 2015, those with severe PTSD (as in 6-7 PTSD symptoms) had double the risk of ovarian cancer. However, take a look at the women who had trauma but no PTSD. They had less risk of ovarian cancer - their risk for ovarian cancer was 35% lower than those without trauma. Even the women with trauma and 1-3 PTSD symptoms had a 21% lower risk of ovarian cancer.

If we go to the other table where they looked at women diagnosed with ovarian cancer between 2009 and 2015, they found that even the women with trauma and 4-5 PTSD symptoms had a 26% lower risk for ovarian cancer than the women with no trauma and no PTSD. This data suggests that compared to having no trauma at all, having some trauma or even having anywhere from 1-5 PTSD symptoms was actually protective against ovarian cancer.

Now this data is statistically very weak - I’m not trying to say that you can reliably expect a medium dose of trauma to protect women from ovarian cancer. However, this one particular study Mate cited himself does not support Mate’s idea that something as simple as having a perfectionist personality or something as vague and fuzzy as “repressed emotions” can cause ovarian cancer. Nor does it support his overall point that potentially anything, big or small, can be trauma or that trauma is at the heart of “all” our dysfunctions.

Further, As I pointed out in my earlier article, research actually supports this idea that some “trauma” is good for people. A 2011 study on the “Silver Lining” to adverse life events explains that people exposed to some trauma had better life satisfaction than those who had no trauma. Though yes, too much trauma is definitely not good either. This contradicts Mate’s idea that trauma is very easily acquired and that ‘trauma causes all our dysfunctions.’ We know this too, we know that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, overcoming tough obstacles makes us more confident and more resilient to stress. Though, yes being absolutely crushed by life is definitely not good

To be clear, there is research linking notable adverse childhood events to negative health outcomes. The issue is that Mate exaggerates these studies and speculates far too much based on them.

“…many of the associations [from these studies on adverse childhood events] are relatively modest (like obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease) and even the strongest (like problematic drug use, perpetration of violence) are far from perfect. Most people who live through the greatest levels of adversity do not become ill or impaired.” At the same, time people who have lived seems to be the perfect life can become ill or impaired. -The Conversation

Now, I’m not the only one criticizing Gabor Mate.

In 2021, eminent psychologist Dr. James Coyne said he “could not stand watching Gabor Maté piling bonkers claims on bonkers claims” with his “impenetrable fog of pseudoscience and nonsequiturs.” James Coyne quickly gets to the heart of the issue with Mate’s ‘everything is trauma’ narrative:

“Maté urges us to abandon what has evolved over time to be evidence-based solutions to health and social problems. We should get involved in long-term, perhaps interminable therapy to exorcise the demons of trauma hidden in our subconscious.”

Coyne’s concern with the repercussions of Mate’s approach is quite significant, because as psychologist Dr. Stanton Peele explains:

“While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future—and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue struggling because they over-predict failure and rejection.”

So he’s saying it is your fear of the future, not your qualms with the past that is the issue. Yet another critic of Gabor Mate, Dr. Russel Barkley has said that…

Gabor Mate is worse than wrong about ADHD

Mate has publicly stated that he has ADHD and he talks at length in his writings and various podcasts about how ADHD is not genetically inherited, but it is trauma that causes ADHD and that ADHD “is rooted in multigenerational family stress and in disturbed social conditions in a stressed society.” This perspective of his got 3.5 million views on a video of him on the Joe Rogan podcast.

The only issue with this perspective is, as neuropsychologist specializing in ADHD research Dr. Russell Barkley says it’s completely backwards.

In his video, Dr. Barkley cites multiple studies showing that Mate’s claim that ADHD is not genetically inherited completely goes against the existing research.

He points to a 2018 study that explains that ADHD has a high heritability of 74%. Barkley explains that this means that: “Vast majority of variation in the human population in degree of ADHD symptoms is driven by differences in genetics …not by the environment, not by parenting, by genetics.”

Barkley presents another 2020 study that echoes the exact same point.

Barkley says “we could stop here - end this video. Mate is wrong. He is worse than wrong.”

But to go a step further, Barkley presents a 2010 study which takes the results of 13 separate large scale studies of twins and adoptees where they examined the degree of ADHD symptoms. Again, they found that over 70% of the variance in ADHD is accounted for by genetic factors.

Here’s the tricky part with Mate’s argument. Mate argues that ADHD is not genetically inherited. Rather, he says we can inherit trauma from our parents. So, we can’t inherit ADHD but we can inherit the trauma that causes ADHD. Except the issue is that specific risk factor genes for ADHD have been identified.

Barkley points out that trauma causing ADHD is backwards. A 2019 study found that the more ADHD risk genes you had, the more severe your ADHD was, the more likely you would be to experience adverse events. Barkley clarifies saying:

“We know this to be true, that having ADHD sets you up for a variety of adverse outcomes as a result of your symptoms and risk taking and limited self regulation and poor executive functioning and these adverse events that you’ve seen in many of my videos span the whole range of social, familial, educational, occupational, sexual, substance use disorders and so on and so on. All of these adversities are related to ADHD severity."

That is, unfortunately having worse ADHD can cause people’s impulsive behavior to get themselves into dangerous situations, make life derailing decisions, frustrate close people, ruin precious relationships, piss off the wrong people and so on.

Then, Barkley presents another 2020 paper reinforcing this point.

One commentor on Dr. Barkley’s video wrote that: “I can confidently say that I did not experience trauma until my ADHD symptoms became a problem in my family and in school.”

Interestingly, three of Mate’s children have been diagnosed with ADHD… However, Mate argues that it’s not due to the genetic nature of the disease, it’s because he traumatized them. He attributes their ADHD to “emotional stresses” in their early environment, which includes his own parenting.

Why is this worse than wrong? Because it muddles the treatment pathway for ADHD. If someone is lead to believe that trauma caused their ADHD, they may squander their time (a resource that is already hard to come by for people with ADHD) on costly and lengthy therapy and psychoanalysis sessions without getting to practical strategies to manage their ADHD.

Note that Barkley does acknowledge that there is evidence that it’s plausible that adverse life events could have an exacerbating effect on ADHD, but they do not cause ADHD.

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Gabor Mate can spot your trauma from a mile away

On The Diary of a CEO podcast, Mate “diagnosed” the host with ADHD. Also on that podcast, he said you can see Trump’s “trauma in every moment he opens his mouth.” He also said his opponent Hillary Clinton was also traumatized.

Mate has deduced that other national leaders like Stephen Harper and Justin Trudeau have trauma. If he came across my criticism of him, maybe he would brush away my critiques by explaining my “trauma” is causing me to be overly critical. After all, that’s basically what he did in a conversation with psychologist Dr. Stanton Peele.

At the end of an antagonistic discussion over breakfast about the parts of Mate’s work that Stanton Peele disagreed with, Gabor left his critic with his diagnosis: “Stanton, you have deep unresolved pain.”

Just by reading Prince Harry’s book Spare, Mate diagnosed him with ADD.

“Reading the book, I diagnose you with ADD … I see it as a normal response to normal stress, not a disease.”

So why is Mate diagnosing people like Prince Harry with ADD only based on childhood events? Because, as Mate says:

“Childhood developmental disorders such as ADHD, ODD, and other mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, personality disorders, etc. can all be traced to either negative childhood experiences or the absence of sufficiently positive ones. Addiction and adult mental health issues also flow from the same source.”

So again, the bar for trauma is extremely low. Can’t think of anything really that bad happening in your childhood? Well then your childhood just wasn’t “sufficiently positive.”

The same goes for addictions. He specifically says ALL addicts have experienced adverse events in childhood:

“If you look at why addicts are soothing themselves through chemicals, you have to look at why they have discomfort and you will see that they have all experienced childhood adversity—the pain and distress that they needed to escape.”

This brings us to the next section…

Gabor Mate is worse than wrong about addiction.

Now, before we get into why Gabor Mate is wrong about addiction being caused by trauma, let me address what what he recommends we do to treat addiction first. Gabor Mate asserts his Compassionate Inquiry psychotherapeutic approach can “release the layers of childhood trauma, constriction and suppressed emotion embedded in the body, [which] are at the root of illness and addiction.” Since he says addiction is caused by trauma, his brand of psychotherapy allegedly resolves the trauma and therefore the addiction. The only issue is that a 2003 review of 48 treatments for alcohol addiction found psychotherapy to be just two places shy of being the absolute worst: it ranked 46 out of 48 in effectiveness.

Now let’s get into where he’s clearly wrong. He thoroughly argued that trauma causes addiction in his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and more recently on the The Diary of a CEO podcast which got 3.4M views. He says “all [addicts have] experienced childhood adversity.”

Because Mate is so focused on trauma he denies the genetic influencers of addiction. He has specifically said that “No single addiction gene has ever been found – nor will ever be.” This is just incorrect. (That is, unless he is making some straw man argument like ‘there will never be a gene that 100% causes addiction in everyone.’)

There’s been evidence since at least 1996, 14 years before Mate wrote In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts that the dopamine D2 receptor gene increases risk of addiction. People with the gene were three times more likely to become addicted to gambling. A full 63% of the gamblers with a gambling addiction in the upper half of severity had the gene. 40% of the lower half of gambling addicts had the gene. However, Gabor Mate refutes the idea that the dopamine D2 receptor gene is involved in addiction by citing a single study from 1999 that found “no effect of [the gene] on behavioral phenotypes related to alcohol dependence.” However there has been a ton of research since then.

A 2023 study confirmed that several studies including genome-wide association studies demonstrate that indeed, this particular dopamine receptor D2 gene “and associated polymorphisms are major DNA antecedents linked to [risk for addiction].” The paper cites various studies providing evidence for the link between the D2 gene and susceptibility to addiction and plenty of these were published before Gabor Mate’s book came out in 2010.

Moving on to his other claims about addiction, Dr. Anna Lembke as well pushes back on Gabor Mate’s definition of addiction, which is essentially the “self medication hypothesis.”

“…the problem with that is that it is true that some people begin using substances or engage in addictive behaviors to self-medicate an underlying problem, but a lot of people who get addicted don’t do that at all. They get addicted because they started using a substance to have fun or they were curious or their doctor wrote them a prescription for it and so they were exposed to it. The point here is that there are actually lots of doorways into using addictive substances and behaviors and frankly one of the biggest risk factors for addiction, especially in our world today is… simple access. If you live in a neighborhood where drugs are sold on the street corner, you’re more likely to try them and get addicted to them. Even if you don’t particularly have a genetic vulnerability to addiction, in today’s world, almost anybody can get addicted, especially to digital media, digital content, digital devices… it’s true that underlying trauma or psychiatric illness or psychological distress can be the doorway into addiction but it’s not the only doorway. Frankly you can have the perfect upbringing and perfect family and perfect job, a great house, everything you ever wanted and you can get addicted.”

Remember, Mate specifically said “all [addicts] experienced childhood adversity.”

In an article titled The Seductive, But Dangerous, Allure of Gabor Maté by psychologist Dr. Stanton Peele, Phd, he explains that he opposes Mate’s idea that addiction traces back to childhood for 3 key reasons:

1. “It's inaccurate: although abuse and trauma are bad for people, most addicts weren't traumatized as kids; most traumatized people don't become addicts.”

2. Referring to Mate’s idea that pretty much everyone has trauma, Peele says “I really disrespect how Mate goes from there. If the trauma isn't apparent, then you search for it, in which case it will always be found, or else made up.”

3. “In Mate's hands (and he's one of many) it becomes a new disease theory, since abuse and trauma aren't erasable (and Mate has these elaborate, Rube Goldberg connections proving they're embedded in your brain) their addictive effects can never dissipate, which is (a) untrue, (b) unhelpful, and just one more burden against overcoming addiction. Our whole approach is to emphasize the truth that most people leave addiction behind and use that reality to inspire people.”

Peele brings up the work of Vincent Felitti who conducted a huge epidemiological study on early childhood experiences.

“He found that only a tiny group (3.5 percent) of people with four or more adverse childhood experiences became involved in injection drug use. So Maté's model is highly undiscriminating.”

…[Well, it] might be that injection drug use is low among this population because so few people who have experienced abuse are exposed to injectable drugs. But this argument does not hold either. Felitti has included alcohol in his research. And, with drinking, the rates of dependence… are still not much higher for abuse victims, 16 percent.”

Dr. Peele explains that Mate is wrong to the point of being harmful because:

・Mate’s view is so reductionist that it limits the approaches to properly understanding addiction.
・He says that Mate’s imbalanced focus on Ayahuasca as a potential remedy for addiction diverts the addiction field away from practical tools for reducing the harms of addiction. He says this reductionist perspective is another “fool's gold quest for an addiction vaccine in the forlorn hope that we can remedy addiction without improving human lives.”

Peele rather thinks the focus should be to acknowledge all the potential contributors to addiction and encourage the person to address those to both reduce their likelihood of abusing the substance or behavior and at the same time improve their lives.

“A true harm reductionist should accept a wide range of contributors in the development of addiction, but particularly those that encourage human agency—and particularly the person who is addicted himself or herself—can address and improve. Without this sense, we are lost.”

This jives with my last post where I discussed how the sense of agency is understood to be a key component of life satisfaction and how this victim narrative reduces the sense of agency.

As for another angle regarding Ayahuasca: I have done Ayahuasca and found the experience to be really profound. I can definitely see how it could induce a dramatic change in perspective that may help some people with addiction. However, the issue is Mate’s insistence that addiction is caused by a huge sticky part of your psyche that is rooted in your childhood makes the barrier to remedying the addiction too high. First you have to “work on your trauma” before you can make meaningful progress on your addiction. Someone might come to think they need to fly to Costa Rica and do Ayahuasca to treat their addiction rather than focusing on practical, immediately actionable steps.

By the way, I do not agree with Mate when he says that Ayahuasca can “[heal] all manner of medical conditions [including] cancer...”

Mate does recommend all kinds of things: Yoga, Meditation, Breathing Exercises et cetera, which are good …But if you are convinced that you are addicted to something because of trauma, then isn’t there an insinuation that ‘as long as that trauma is not resolved, I you still be in the grips of your addiction?”’

How do you make that practical? How do you know when a trauma is “resolved” ? You don’t. Even Gabor Mate admits he hasn’t completely resolved his own trauma. Apparently, in 2015 he was still struggling with his own shopping addiction 5 years after he wrote his book on addiction.

On the other hand, if addiction is detached from “trauma,” then you can just focus on what is fueling your addiction right now. You can focus on practical markers of progress, instead of the fuzzy attempt to track how much progress you’ve made on “resolving” your trauma.

To be clear, did Mate specifically say that fixing the trauma is the course of action for fixing the addiction? Yes.

In an email to Stanton Peele, he said:

“The goal [of my] process is to help people shed the physical and psychological patterns of old trauma, so that they are no longer trapped in the past. If successful, substance use is no longer an imperative.”

The huge thing is that there is evidence that long and fuzzy psychotherapeutic approaches like Gabor Mate’s are very very ineffective compared to other treatment approaches for addictions like alcoholism. As mentioned earlier, it’s just two ranks away from being at the complete bottom of the list. As Stanton Peel explains:

“In a comprehensive review of clinical trials of alcoholism treatment, psychotherapy was ranked 46 in effectiveness out of 48 therapies, while brief interventions and motivational enhancement were ranked 1 and 2 on the evidence, according to [Miller et al., 2003]”

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Gabor Mate misses the mark on autoimmune disease

In The Myth of Normal, Mate argues that women’s anger suppression and self-silencing, and the burdens of care that they shoulder, are sources of their high rates of anxiety, depression and a range of autoimmune diseases.

Indeed, women have about double the rate of anxiety and depression and where autoimmune diseases afflict only 8% of the population, about a full 78% of those people are women.

Though, I would argue, that the issue is not a society that makes women “self silence” and “suppress” their anger, but that women’s biology is …very different from men. Namely, they have somewhere between 1/15th-1/8th the testosterone of men and 4x the estrogen of men.

This paper explains that women’s sex hormones which are dramatically different from men, are likely the reason for the difference in autoimmune disease rates. They say that autoimmune disorders are likely the result of an aberrant response to infections.

“Sex hormones may further amplify [the] hyperimmune response to infection in susceptible persons, which leads to an increased prevalence of autoimmune diseases in women …Sex hormones, such as estrogen, testosterone, and progesterone, may mediate most of the sex-biased differences in the immune response.”

OK so what about anxiety and depression? Why are the rates so high in women?

Well, testosterone has dramatic effects on depression and anxiety. Several studies have shown that testosterone significantly decreases anxiety and it substantially reduces social anxiety. Testosterone also has an antidepressant effect, it reduces the risk for stress-evoked depression, and some studies suggest some cases of depression in men may just be low testosterone.

Studies have found this isn’t limited to men: some studies show anti-anxiety and antidepressant benefits from testosterone for women. Giving women with treatment-resistant major depressive disorder a low dose of testosterone significantly improved ratings of depression.

This 2015 study in Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology says that the reason women suffer from higher rates of anxiety and depression is likely to be that their lower levels of testosterone means they lack this protective benefit that men experience.

(In case it needs to be said: I really hope people don’t conclude that women need to be given exogenous testosterone.)

Gabor Mate also says society is sick because it encourages women to suppress their “healthy anger” which leads to dysfunction later in life.

Mate misses the big picture yet again.

Work by researchers like Joyce Benenson and Anne Campbell have revealed very clearly that women engage in indirect aggression whereas men engage in direct aggression. Aggression doesn’t have to mean violence, it also refers to directly confronting people verbally - expressing your anger to others. The function of testosterone is very complex and it’s not as simple as “more testosterone equals more aggression,” but it’s likely due to the function of testosterone that men are more willing to be direct with their aggression.

So the question is why are women more indirect with their aggression? Well, it’s safer. If you clearly and directly aggress against someone, there is the chance for retaliation. The academic literature clearly establishes that women engage in indirect aggression like telling rumors or speaking about others behind their back to destroy their reputation much more often than men because it is safer. Like Lindsay Lohan said in Mean Girls, “in girl world, all the fighting has to be sneaky.”

As Joyce Benenson’s work highlights self-protection is an adaptive female strategy. Without getting too into the weeds on this, the reason women are disposed to be more self-protective is because from an evolutionary perspective:
・They are straight up more vulnerable than men. Shorter stature, lower muscle mass, less bone density.
・Women are the primary caregivers of infants, and infants are incredibly vulnerable, so women need to have an innate disposition towards self (and baby) protection.
・Further if a woman were to die, there was a very high chance her baby would die and her genes would reach a dead end. Considering a man can impregnate multiple women and go out and hunt, go to paleolithic Home Depot and so on while the woman takes care of the child, his dying is much less likely to mean the end of his genes.

Women are known to incline towards suppressing anger and revealing vulnerable emotions like their insecurities to others whereas men are understood to be more willing to express anger and but not as willing to sharing their self-doubts. This is observed from early childhood and is likely due to the function of testosterone as it suppresses emotional expression. Further, testosterone increases risk taking - getting angry at others confers a risk. You risk being punched, losing a friend and so on if you’re trigger happy with anger.

So Mate’s “everything is trauma” perspective blinds him to some fundamental and basic things about human psychology. Why is his short-sighted speculation worse than just being a speculation? Because similar to his other paper-thin claims, it muddles the picture and prevents us from getting a meaningful answers to serious puzzles like how to deal with the fact that autoimmune diseases are more prevalent in women.