Renowned physician and author Gabor Maté is in Saskatoon this week to speak at a special conference organized by the Saskatoon Tribal Council.
He is the author of four books on mental health including Scattered Minds which explores healing methods for attention deficit disorder.
Maté is well known for innovative ideas and STC Director of Education Valerie Harper says they wanted to bring him in to discuss some of these ideas in an informal setting.
“We work with such diverse challenges in our schools, so we wanted to have the rest of our schools have that opportunity to hear him and learn from him how we can better meet those challenges and try to help the children overcome them,” she says.
He says First Nations people are particularly vulnerable to addictions because of the traumatic experience they have suffered though colonization.
“Those things have happened to some people who are non-Native as well – you know trauma, abuse and so on,” he says. “But, it wasn’t accompanied by the destruction of culture.”
Maté also says whether the problem is depression, anxiety or addictions – the source usually stems from broken relationships within the family early on in life.
Once people are able to determine the source of a particular mental health disorder, they can then start the process of reconnecting with themselves, he says.
Maté has also written extensively on attention deficit hyperactive disorder in children.
He says the medical field is currently leaning too heavily on psychotropic drugs to treat the disorder in children and not ensuring the conditions that have created the disorder in the first place are altered.
Maté also teaches at Simon Fraser University and works in harm reduction clinics on Vancouver’s downtown eastside.
The two-day conference winds up Friday afternoon.