In his recent book, The Myth of Normal, acclaimed physician and therapist Gabor Maté makes some startling claims about the relationship between "niceness" and ill health. Having spent much of his professional practice caring for terminally ill patients, he noticed that many of his patients had personality or psychological traits in common. Many of them were what he called "nice people": people who went out of their way for others; who made self-sacrifices for work, friends, and family; and who generally put others before themselves. These people were regarded well by others and, as he reports, had very nice eulogies.

What Maté concludes, however, is that this niceness often came at a cost of personal health and........

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