I've been wondering what Peterson has been up to and just saw this update. It would seem he's someone prone to paradoxycal and rare reactions to prescription medication. Thank-goodness he's on the mend.


February 12, 2020
Jordan Peterson is slowly recovering from a near-death experience
By Andrea Widburg

After his wife was diagnosed with cancer, Jordan Peterson went on an anti-anxiety drug to cope with the stress. It turned out that the drug was toxic, and he was sensitive. His daughter, Mikhaila Peterson, who first notified people about the situation in September, recently posted an updated video about Jordan Peterson's near-death experience.

In her September 2019 video, Mikhaila talked about the shock to the family when Tammy Roberts, her mother and Peterson's wife, was diagnosed with cancer. After a successful surgery, Roberts had a bad reaction and almost died. Because Canadian doctors couldn't cope with Roberts's illness, she ended up hospitalized in America. The American doctors saved her.

Peterson never left Roberts's side, but the stress was extreme. His doctor put him on a low dose of Clonazepam, a benzodiazepine. What no one in the family knew is that Clonazepam is highly addictive (two weeks will do it), and some people's chemistry makes withdrawal unusually difficult.

Peterson ended up in a rehab program to get weaned off Clonazepam. He was put on other, milder, shorter-acting benzodiazepines. Mikhaila was happy to report that her dad was recovering and her mom was out of the woods. And that's where the story ended in September 2019.

Last week, though, Mikhaila came back with a deeply disturbing update about Peterson:

Here's a brief rundown of what Mikhaila says: the rehab treatments were not working. The family finally found a rehab center in Russia that offered emergency medical benzodiazepine detox. By the time Peterson was hospitalized in Russia, though, he had pneumonia and ended up spending four weeks in the ICU. He was put in an induced coma for eight days and almost died.

As a result of the medications, the withdrawal, and the time in the ICU, Peterson has neurological damage and can neither type nor walk well. His muscle strength was so depleted that he had to get therapy to sit up by himself.

It's a horrific story of well intentioned medical care run amok. It's also appalling to think how close the world came to losing a man who has helped inject meaning back into ordinary people's lives.

What's so important about Peterson is that he does not offer the cheap and easy self-improvement, self-realization, and self-actualization that characterized the 1970s and that still haunts the self-help aisle in any library or bookstore. Al Franken perfectly summed up that type of self-improvement with Stuart Smalley's catchphrase, "I'm good enough, I'm smart enough and — gosh darn it! — people like me." Vapid affirmations are part of what weakened the American psyche, paving the way for safe spaces, triggering, and the politics of perpetual offense.

For Peterson, recognizing that you are an individual worthy of respect is only the beginning. That idea isn't the end of the self-examination, but only the beginning: every person inherently is a worthy child of God, but it's after acknowledging this reality that the real work begins. To optimize your potential, says Peterson, you have to stand up straight, organize your surroundings, treat yourself with dignity and respect, choose friends who value and cultivate the best in you, raise likable children, and work to make yourself a better person every day.


Peterson also argues that truth is the dividing line between order and chaos. Lies are chaotic. Truth is clarifying. To the extent that we speak the truth, we align ourselves with reality and order. This is why, Peterson says, it is so important that we have free speech. Government-coerced speech too often forces people to live in a world of lies, lies that will inevitably collapse, bringing the system down with them. These lies also force people into moral contortions that pave the way to Auschwitz, the Gulags, and the re-education camps. Enforced lies have the power to invade the inviolable core of every individual. That is the fundamental evil of Marxism.

In a shallow, non-religious, material world, one in which the left is doing its darnedest to deny reality, people crave truth. Peterson gives them a rationale for demanding that the world be an honest place and a meaningful one. In that way, he's important, and his recovery matters, not just for himself and for his family, but for a world that needs his message about beginning to improve the world by improving oneself, through hard work and honesty.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/202...experience.html

Peterson Family Update - February 2020
•Feb 7, 2020
Jordan B Peterson

Jordan Update February 2020

Hi everyone, it’s been months since we’ve given an update on Jordan and my family’s health and it’s time for one so here goes.

The last year has been extremely difficult for our family. Dad was put on a low dose of a benzodiazepine a few years ago for anxiety following an extremely severe autoimmune reaction to food. He took the medication as prescribed. Last April when my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer, the dose of the medication was increased. It became apparent that he was suffering from both a physical dependency and a paradoxical reaction to the medication. A paradoxical reaction means the drugs do the opposite of what they’re supposed to. These reactions are rare but are not unheard of.

For the last 8 months he’s been in unbearable discomfort from this drug, made worse when trying to remove it, because of the addition of withdrawal symptoms, stemming from physical dependence. He experienced terrible akathisia, which is a condition where the person feels an incredible, endless, irresistible restlessness, bordering on panic, and an inability to sit still. The reaction made him suicidal.

After several failed treatment attempts in North American hospitals, including attempts at tapering and micro-tapering, we had to seek an emergency medical benzodiazepine detox, which we were only able to find in Russia. It was incredibly gruelling, and was further complicated by severe pneumonia which we’ve been told he developed in one of the previous hospitals. He’s had to spend 4 weeks in the ICU in terrible shape, but, withthe help of some extremely competent and courageous doctors, he survived. The decision to bring him to Russia was made in extreme desperation, when we couldn’t find any better option. The uncertainty around his recovery has been one of the most difficult and scary experiences we’ve ever had.

So: Finally Dad is on the mend, even though there’s a lot of physiological damage that he needs to recover from. He’s improving, and is off the horrible medication. His sense of humour is back. He’s smiling again for the first time in months, but he still has a long way to go to recover fully.

It appears that we are going to get through this by the skin of our teeth.

So let me make a couple of things clear:

1. Neither our family nor the doctors here believe that this is a case of psychological addiction.
2. Benzodiazepine physical dependence due to brain changes can occur in a matter of weeks. It can be made even worse by paradoxical reactions that are difficult to diagnose, and can be extremely dangerous.
3. We’ve been told and hope that Dad will recover fully but it will take time and he still has a ways to go.
4. We are extremely lucky and grateful that he’s alive.

The next update will come from him directly. Thanks again for all the support.

Previous update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPwaixIuTrU


As an aside, this makes two member of his family who have had to go outside Canada's vaunted socialized medicine to get saved, his wife and himself.