On a trip from Vancouver, Dr. Gabor Maté stopped by Occupy Wall Street on Monday. He observed: “50 percent of American adults have a chronic medical illness, and much of that has to do with stress.

For Penn, the project was personal. It was 2018, and he had been six months sober. He had recently moved home to Vancouver after a decade-and-a-half of living in New York and Los Angeles.

In the book, I quote Bessel van der Kolk, who says that we’re taught to think of ourselves as individuals, but we barely exist as individuals at all. So the solutions can’t be just individual.” ...