"It is important to respect Maté's work with individuals living with addictions. For this reason, people who work with clients from a harm reduction perspective—that is, they accept people as they are, and seek to help those in need—deeply admire Maté. In addition, Maté's exploring the root causes of addiction may in some sense represent progress out of a deterministic disease concept of addiction because it broadens the range of experiences that can lead to addiction and through which addiction expresses itself. Unfortunately, however, Maté is fundamentally proposing a reductionist vision of addiction, where abuse history and posited biochemical changes are now the essential causes of people's self-destructive action. It is not enough to say that this model is highly conjectural. It also isn't true, that is, it makes little sense of the data...at the deepest level, Maté's views limit our approaches to, our understanding of, and even our respect for people living with addiction. Rather than expand our understanding of addiction, his views harm our ability to respond to it."
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Original Language: English
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Stanton Peele, "The Seductive, But Dangerous, Allure of Gabor Maté" (2011)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gabor_Mat%C3%A9
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Gabor Maté
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