Gabor Mate

Dr. Gabor Maté is a retired physician and one of the world's most influential voices on trauma, addiction, stress, and childhood development. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1944, an infant who survived the Nazi occupation of the city, he emigrated with his family to Canada in 1956. He taught English and literature before turning to medicine, earning his M.D. from the University of British Columbia in 1977.

Over roughly twenty years he built a practice in family medicine and palliative care, including seven years as medical coordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital. He then spent more than a decade as a staff physician in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, one of North America's most concentrated communities of addiction, mental illness, and poverty, work that became the foundation of his writing on why people suffer and how they heal.

Maté is the author of five bestselling books, including When the Body Says No, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (winner of the Hubert Evans Prize for literary non-fiction), Hold On to Your Kids (with Gordon Neufeld), and, most recently, the international number-one bestseller The Myth of Normal (2022), co-written with his son Daniel Maté and translated into more than forty languages. He also created Compassionate Inquiry, a psychotherapeutic approach now studied by practitioners in over eighty countries.

In 2018 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada, his country's highest civilian honor, for his contributions to medicine and his work with people living with addiction. Today he speaks and teaches around the world, drawing audiences to sold-out theatre evenings, healthcare and wellbeing conferences, and major podcasts alike. He lives in Vancouver.