Dr Gabor Maté is a retired physician and worked for over a decade in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side with patients challenged by drug addiction and mental illness after 20 years of family practice and palliative care experience. The bestselling author of four books published in over twenty-five languages, including the award-winning titled “In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction.” Gabor is an internationally renowned speaker highly sought after for his expertise on addiction, trauma, childhood development, and the relationship between stress and illness. For his groundbreaking medical work and writing, he has been awarded the Order of Canada, his country’s highest civilian distinction, and the Civic Merit Award from his hometown, Vancouver. To learn more, join his e-news list at www.drgabormate.com.

Dr Richard Schwartz began his career as a systemic family therapist and an academic. Grounded in systems thinking, Dr. Schwartz developed Internal Family Systems (IFS) in response to clients’ descriptions of various parts within themselves. He focused on the relationships among these parts and noticed that there were systemic patterns to the way they were organized across clients. He also found that when the client’s parts felt safe and were allowed to relax, the client would experience spontaneously the qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion that Dr. Schwartz came to call the Self. He found that when in that state of Self, clients would know how to heal their parts. A featured speaker for national professional organizations, Dr. Schwartz has published many books and over fifty articles about IFS. Learn more at: https://ifs-institute.com/

Dr Marc Lewis is a neuroscientist, professor, bestselling author, and one of the world’s leading experts on the neuroscience of addiction. In his academic work, he has authored or co-authored more than fifty journal articles, and for many years was a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Toronto before retiring. In recent years, he has focused on making his work more accessible to a wider audience through public talks and interviews. He is the author of two bestselling books on addiction: “Memoirs of an Addicted Brain” and “The Biology of Desire”, a book which Dr. Gabor Mate argues “effectively refutes the disease model of addiction.” You can learn more about Marc’s work on his website: https://memoirsofanaddictedbrain.com.