This column in my series, "Second Thoughts" in Psychiatric Times reviews the books and careers of 2 Canadian bestselling public intelectuals - Jordan Peterson and Gabor Maté

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Psychiatric Times
Home page teaser: Challenging what is normal and the value of order
Column: Second Thoughts
Link: https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/the-trouble-with-normal-reading-2-canadian-
bestsellers
“The Trouble with Normal”: Reading 2 Canadian Bestsellers
May 1, 2024
Vincenzo Di Nicola, MPhil, MD, PhD, FCAHS, DLFAPA, DFCPA
Gabor Maté’s The Myth of Normal1
and Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order2
Canada is the world’s second largest country by land mass and 37th by population of 40 million.
For a smallish country, we punch above our weight in education and culture. Alice Munro won
the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 for her marvelous short stories and Margaret Atwood may
well be the most famous Canadian from the celebrity that came with her dystopian novel, The
Handmaid’s Tale (1985),3
a worldwide bestseller which has spawned adaptations in film, radio,
theater, ballet and opera, television, a graphic novel, a bestselling sequel, The Testaments
(2019),4
and a political movement, The Handmaid Coalition. I’m waiting for the Broadway
musical!
In the 1960s, the unquestioned public voice in Canada was Marshall McLuhan, the media guru
at the University of Toronto who coined the visionary term “the global village.” Which brings us
to the question, who has that voice today? There are several candidates: Atwood herself, along

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with McGill philosopher Charles Taylor, Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, University
of Toronto clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, and independent family physician Gabor Maté.
For this review, I will focus on Maté and Peterson. This is a study in contrasts. Jordan Peterson
is a genuine academic (he was educated at McGill University and taught at Harvard University)
with all the dressings (he was a tenured full professor and is now professor emeritus at the
University of Toronto who conducts and cites scientific research meticulously), a clinical
psychologist who gave voice to an unspoken wave of feeling and alienation in Western society,
especially among young men. Whereas Gabor Maté is a family physician working on the
ground, in communities, with no academic institutional affiliations, who uses a combination of
personal experience and insight and decades of clinical work as a physician to launch
impassioned pleas about health, medicine and society, citing a wide variety of thinkers and
research, from Erich Fromm to evidence-based medical literature to give these personal
impressions a patina of credibility.
I am tempted to reverse the titles of their books. Peterson wants to get “beyond order” and
enters mythical territory. Maté wants to challenge the “myth of normal” and get beyond it.
Jordan Peterson: The Myth of Order2
For some time since the twenty teens, Canada’s public intellectual has been Jordan Peterson, a
clinical psychologist who came to fame for resisting gender pronouns and launched a new
career as a social commentator with his internet following and bestselling 12 Rules for Life
(2018), followed by Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021),2 another bestseller. For a time,
it seemed that Peterson was everywhere, commenting about everything and debating
Slovenian Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek about what Peterson calls “cultural Marxism.”
Despite being labeled a conservative, Peterson calls himself a “classic British liberal” and a
“traditionalist.” Here are his new “12 rules for life”:2

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• Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.
• Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that.
• Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
• Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
• Do not do what you hate.
• Abandon ideology.
• Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
• Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible.
• If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely.
• Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship.
• Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.
• Be grateful in spite of your suffering.
My first reaction to Peterson’s title was that it’s bold. Most people seek order and stability,
while some demand justice and change. Henry Kissinger, who recently died after a formidable
career as America’s top diplomat and international relations guru, often quoted Goethe on
order and justice. In his biography, Walter Isaacson noted that Kissinger often said: “Given a
choice of order or justice, he often said, paraphrasing Goethe, he would choose order. He had
seen too clearly the consequences of disorder.”5
So to Peterson – having argued against chaos
in his first bestseller, Peterson now cautions against too much order. “Beyond order” – to
what? Social justice? A search for a new identity for this century’s “lost generation”? A survival
guide?
Gabor Maté: Beyond Normal1
Gabor Maté is known for his previous work on Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
and its relation to trauma (Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit
Disorder, 1999), stress and health (When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress, 2003),

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addictions and their relations to trauma (In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with
Addiction, 2008).
Now, there are public intellectuals whose credibility hinges on their stature in mainstream
fields and those who are auto-didacts or polymaths, ranging far from either their own or
established authority. When he offers palatable, reasonable and socially shared truths, Maté
walks on well-trod ground and when he deviates from established wisdom and medical science,
it is not evidence-based. As I outlined in my column on polarization [hyperlink here], Maté
slides easily from facts to values, conflating description and prescription throughout.
In this volume, Maté wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to grandstand on his social
values and undergird it with medical science. It’s a tough balancing act. Steven Pinker
(Enlightenment Now, 2018; Rationality, 2021) does it exceptionally well; most physicians and
scholars do not.
As a non-psychiatric physician, Maté wants to have a major voice on what are key psychiatric
matters, from addictions and stress to ADHD and trauma. While we do need to work across
disciplines, we must also affirm that psychiatry has a body of knowledge and achievements and
just setting them aside with a dismissive and cavalier attitude isn’t convincing (see Peterson’s
first new rule: Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.). I have
always held that we need critics of our field – but one has to know the tradition well before
criticizing it. R.D. Laing (The Divided Self, 1960; The Politics of the Family, 1969, the latter based
on his Massey Lectures in Toronto) comes to mind as a classically trained psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst who held up a mirror to the gaps and errors of our field. And I consider myself a
mainstream academic psychiatrist who is also critical of the state of psychiatry in the footsteps
of Laing and others.6
Maté addresses trauma here as something that affects everyone. Well, no. That approach has
cheapened trauma as something exceptional, a rupture, to describe the vicissitudes of life from

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“daily hassles” of stress inventories to what psychiatric curmudgeon T.S. Szasz airily dismissed
as “problems in living.” British writer Will Self7
has taken this on forcefully:
I shall be advancing the heretical notion that trauma as we now understand it is not a
timeless phenomenon that has affected people in different cultures and at different
times in much the same way, but is to a hitherto unacknowledged extent a function of
modernity in all its shocking suddenness.7
Self grounds this modern phenomenon in “the ubiquity of traumatogenic technologies in our
societies: those of specularity and acceleration, which render us simultaneously unreflective
and frenetic.”7
To get around this, Maté suggests “two types of trauma” – “small-t trauma” and
“big-T trauma” (pp. 21-24). I know this territory well, having dedicated my career in great part
to trauma [hyperlink to my column on trauma, “Bound Upon A Wheel of Fire”]. Maté’s notion
isn’t new and we have had attempts to talk about Type I and Type II trauma (US child
psychiatrist Lenore Terr), PTSD and Complex PTSD (ICD-11), and PTSD and Dissociative PTSD
(DSM 5). In the face of devastating incidents that cause debilitating reactions, clinicians have
been trying to maintain trauma as the new generic term for stress while invoking something
distinct for more impactful incidents.
In fairness, Maté does address “What is Not Trauma” (pp. 24-25), but he nonetheless sees a lot
of trauma, everywhere: “Trauma pervades our culture,” in every sphere of life (p. 20). I agree
with Self that the preoccupation with trauma is pervasive.7
How to take stock of whether that
reflects the extent of actual trauma is very complicated but I recommend the critical work of
Fassin and Rechtman8
and my own.9
[hyperlink to my trauma column again]. I have argued not
just for two types of trauma but discern two trauma communities – the clinical trauma
community and the cultural trauma community; although they use similar terms and cite some
of the same sources, their goals and conclusions are radically different. The source of much
confusion in society and in Maté’s work is the conflation of these two trauma communities.
Self’s essay is closer to the truth about trauma than Maté and others involved in “trauma-
informed care.”

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Here are the five sections of Maté’s book:
• Part I: Our Interconnected Nature
• Part II: The Distortion of Human Development
• Part III: Rethinking Abnormal: Affliction as Adaptations
• Part IV: The Toxicities of Our Culture
• Part V: Pathways to Wholeness. It ends with a vision for a “saner society” – echoing
Erich Fromm’s classic The Sane Society.10
Now, the entire 20th century project of modernism is founded on two ideas – what Australian
art critic Robert Hughes11
called “the shock of the new” – new art, new sciences – and the idea
of progress (surveyed in American historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch’s
masterwork12
) – improvements to society. Both of these books find the world wanting in some
way, reflecting today’s social discontents, looking for a “saner society” (Maté), “beyond order”
(Peterson).
Yet another Canadian, Bruce Cockburn, one of our finest songwriters, had an album in the
1980s called “The Trouble with Normal” that bristles with anger and outrage:
“It’ll all go back to normal if we put our nation first”
But the trouble with normal is it always gets worse
Maté, is aligned with Cockburn in his critique of “normal” as complacent. The normal that Maté
(p. 3) perceives is a “toxic culture”:
the entire context of social structures, belief systems, assumptions, and values that
surround us and necessarily pervade every aspect of our lives (italics in original).1
As a social psychiatrist, I subscribe to a broader view of psychiatry – and where possible the
kind of “encompassing” vision (his word) that Maté reaches for. So much in his book is

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congruent with my own writing – from my sociopolitical essay on the Global South13
[and
hyperlink to my column on the Global South] to my critique of development (see my review of
Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary14
).
Maté’s stated task is “to lift the veil of common knowledge and received wisdom” using
“science and watchful observation” aiming to unfasten “the myths that keep the status quo
locked in place.” And I thought that Socrates did that – in the 4th
century BC! The Enlightenment
was an update in the 18th
century – with Immanuel Kant and his series of “critiques” as it’s era’s
new Socrates. And then the Frankfurt School came along with Critical Theory in the mid-20th
century to update that critique.
We can throw in a lot of thinkers into that box, from social philosopher Erich Fromm,10
cited by
Maté, to Brazil’s Paulo Freire15
on the “pedagogy of the oppressed” and Judith Butler16,17
on
“gender trouble” in the US. It would not be an exaggeration to say that much of Western
culture has been laboring in the same vineyards, harvesting much the same fruit and pressing
the same wine. Is there any new wine here? Again, what is of use here is a reliable wine of
European stock, rebottled and relabeled in Canada for our consumption. On the other hand,
many argue that we need to update our understanding of the world in the language of each
generation.
Both of these Canadian authors are offering – whether in the clinic or as general advice – an
update on Atwood’s18
guide to Canadian literature where she argued that Canadian identity
was reflected in the theme of survival. Both Maté and Peterson are arguing that the received
wisdom of their professions and society is failing us and offer a guide to surviving contemporary
life with its “traumas” and its “chaos.” Read for yourself what these gurus from the Great White
North have to say and come to your own conclusions.
NOTE: There will be no “Second Thoughts” column next week as both the author and the editor
will be attending the APA Annual Meeting in New York City.

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Resources
• For an in-depth exploration of Gabor Maté’s work, consult his website:
https://drgabormate.com/
• And here is Jordan Peterson’s website:
https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/
Dr Di Nicola is a child psychiatrist, family psychotherapist and philosopher in Montreal, Quebec,
Canada, where he is Professor of Psychiatry & Addiction Medicine at the University of Montreal
and President of the World Association of Social Psychiatry (WASP). He has been recognized
with numerous national and international awards, honorary professorships and fellowships, and
was recently elected a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences and given the
Distinguished Service Award of the American Psychiatric Association. Dr Di Nicola’s work
straddles psychiatry and psychotherapy on one side and philosophy and poetry on the other. Dr
Di Nicola’s writing includes: A Stranger in the Family: Culture, Families and Therapy (WW
Norton, 1997), Letters to a Young Therapist (Atropos Press, 2011, winner of the Camille Laurin
Prize of the Quebec Psychiatric Association), and Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social
Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience (with D. Stoyanov; Springer Nature, 2021); and, in
the arts, his “Slow Thought Manifesto” (Aeon Magazine, 2018) and Two Kinds of People: Poems
from Mile End (Delere Press, 2023, nominated for The Pushcart Prize).
References
1. Maté G, Maté D. The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture. Alfred A.
Knopf Canada; 2022.
2. Peterson JB. Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. Random House Canada; 2021.
3. Atwood M. The Handmaid’s Tale. McClelland & Stewart; 1985.

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4. Atwood M. The Testaments. McClelland & Stewart; 2019.
5. Isaacson W. Kissinger: A Biography. Simon & Schuster; 1992.
6. Di Nicola V, Stoyanov D. Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Science, the
Humanities, and Neuroscience. Springer Nature; 2021.
7. Self W. A Posthumous Shock: How everything became trauma. In Harper’s Magazine,
November 22, 2021, pp. 23-34. Accessed April 28, 2024.
https://harpers.org/archive/2021/12/a-posthumous-shock-trauma-studies-modernity-how-
everything-became-trauma/
8. Fassin D, Rechtman R. The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood.
Gomme R, trans. Princeton University Press; 2009.
9. Di Nicola V. Two trauma communities: A philosophical archaeology of cultural and clinical
trauma theories. In Capretto PT, Boynton E (eds.), Trauma and Transcendence: Limits in
Theory and Prospects in Thinking. Fordham University Press; 2018, pp. 17-52.
10. Fromm E. The Sane Society. Henry Holt; 1955.
11. Hughes R. The Shock of the New. Alfred A. Knopf; 1980.
12. Lasch C. The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. W.W. Norton & Co; 1991.
13. Di Nicola V. The Global South: An emergent epistemology for social psychiatry. World Soc
Psychiatry. 2020;2:20-6. Accessed April 28, 2024.
https://www.worldsocpsychiatry.org/text.asp?2020/2/1/20/281130
14. Di Nicola V. Development and Its Vicissitudes – A Review of Pluriverse: A Post-Development
Dictionary, ed. by A Kothari, A Salleh, A Escobar, F Demaria & A Acosta. Tulika

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Books/Columbia University Press, 2019. Global Mental Health & Psychiatry Review.
2023;3(1): 17-19.
15. Freire P. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th anniversary ed. Bloomsbury; 2000.
16. Butler J. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge; 1990.
17. Butler J. Who’s Afraid of Gender? Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 2024.
18. Atwood M. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. House of Anansi; 1972.