LINDSAY BEYERSTEIN - What Happened to Jordan Peterson? A philosopher, a medical crisis, and a mystery
The Canadian psychology
professor Jordan Peterson has been described as “the most influential public intellectual
in the Western world.” He is an exponent of the Jungian concept of the hero’s
journey, in which an ordinary person heeds a call to adventure and goes out
into the world to struggle and suffer, only to return with heightened
self-knowledge. (He has described himself, without apparent irony, as being
“raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta.”) His stern
ethos of self-help and bootstrapping has made him a darling of the so-called
intellectual dark web, and a gateway drug for countless budding right-wingers
who have stumbled upon one of his lectures on YouTube.
So it was something of
a surprise to learn, in early February, that Peterson had spent eight days in a
medically induced coma at an unnamed clinic in Russia. Peterson’s daughter
Mikhaila, a 28-year-old food blogger, posted a brief but
dramatic video claiming that she and her father had traveled to Russia
in early January seeking an unorthodox treatment for his physical dependence on
the drug clonazepam. Dependency goes against the core tenets of Peterson’s
philosophical brand: stoicism, self-reliance, the power of the will over
circumstance and environment. “No one gets away with anything,
ever, so take responsibility for your own life,” he admonished in
his self-help book 12 Rules for Life.
According to Mikhaila,
he nearly died several times during his medical ordeal. After weeks in
intensive care, he was unable to speak or write and was taking anti-seizure
medicine.
The news was met with
bafflement by doctors and laypeople alike. What was Peterson doing in a
drug-induced coma in Russia? Based on interviews with medical professionals and
a close reading of various statements that Mikhaila and Peterson himself have
made on podcasts and social media, it is clear that Peterson ended up in Russia
after an extended battle to wean himself off clonazepam. And it seems likely
that Peterson, a self-proclaimed man of science, succumbed to the lure of a
quack treatment - with devastating consequences.
Peterson’s saga has
mostly been covered in conservative news outlets, which have relied almost
exclusively on a disjointed narrative put forth by Mikhaila, a nutrition
“influencer” with no medical credentials who claims to have cured her
idiopathic juvenile arthritis, clinical depression, and a C. difficile infection by eating nothing but meat,
salt, and water. Peterson promoted his daughter’s snake oil diet and even
embraced the program himself. In July 2018, he told celebrity podcaster Joe
Rogan that he’d been eating nothing but beef, salt, and water for two months at
his daughter’s suggestion, following a year of eating almost nothing but steak
and salad. It’s unclear whether Peterson continued to follow this extreme diet.
Peterson’s health
problems first surfaced in September 2019, when his family announced that he
had undergone a stint in rehab in upstate New York. According to Mikhaila’s
update from Russia, he was prescribed the sedative clonazepam, a
benzodiazepine, by his family doctor in 2017 for anxiety stemming from a
“severe autoimmune reaction to food.” Peterson’s doctor allegedly increased his
dose after Peterson’s wife was diagnosed with kidney cancer in April 2019.
Peterson supposedly didn’t realize he’d become dependent on clonazepam until he
suffered agonizing withdrawal symptoms when he tried to quit the medication
cold turkey during the summer of 2019.
Mikhaila has
consistently and emphatically claimed that her father is suffering strictly
from physical dependence, and not from addiction. And it is important to stress
that the two are distinct. Dependence simply means that a person gets
withdrawal symptoms when they stop taking a drug. The National Institute on
Drug Abuse defines addiction as “compulsive use despite harmful
consequences.” It is possible to be dependent on a drug without being addicted
to it. Media reports have claimed that Peterson is suffering
from addiction, but have offered no evidence to support the claim. If Peterson
were addicted, you’d expect see signs of loss of control over his drug use,
which might include buying drugs on the street; “doctor-shopping”; unauthorized
dose increases; and drug-related problems with work, family, or the law.
So far, there is no
evidence that Peterson displayed any of the so-called “aberrant behaviors” that
define addiction. But again, all we have to go on is reports from his daughter,
whose family has a strong financial incentive to spin away any suggestion that
the man who made his name engaging in a kind of intellectual Spartan cosplay is
hopelessly addicted to a sedative. In fact, Mikhaila has jokingly alluded to
how bad an addiction diagnosis would be for her father’s lucrative self-help
brand, which purports to rid adherents of weakness through grit and
self-sacrifice. “We figured we should let people know [the facts] before some
tabloid finds out and publishes [that] Jordan Peterson, ‘self help guru,’ is on
meth or something,” Mikhaila said in a video update after Peterson checked
himself into rehab in the U.S.
Still, as soon as
Peterson’s initial stint in rehab became public in 2019, threads sprang up in
Peterson-related forums about whether his fans should think less of him in
light of his struggles with benzodiazepines. “He was using a drug to escape the
pain of reality, period. Call it whatever you like, but it doesn’t change the
facts,” wrote the user KingLudwigII on Reddit. In fact, dependence and addiction are health
issues, not character defects, and if you pressed Peterson on that point, he’d
probably agree. However, that message is a tough sell to many of Peterson’s
fans, who are drawn to his macho image and his personal story of triumph over
adversity.
By August or September
2019, Peterson’s health had deteriorated to the point that the family was more
worried about him than his cancer-stricken wife, Mikhaila said in an appearance
on RT, the Russian propaganda network aimed at audiences outside of Russia. There are established
ways of treating a dependence on benzodiazepines, a class of
sedatives - including Klonopin (clonazepam), Valium (diazepam), and Xanax
(alprazolam) - used for anxiety, insomnia, and epilepsy. Introduced to the U.S.
market in 1960 as an alternative to barbiturates,
benzodiazepines can be useful in treating a variety of conditions from panic
attacks to muscle spasms. They can be very helpful for short-term and
intermittent use, but their benefits tend to wane when
they are used every day. They can also cause physical dependence within four weeks. If a person who’s physically dependent on
benzodiazepines stops taking the drugs suddenly, they can suffer from
withdrawal symptoms including severe anxiety, agitation, and even
life-threatening seizures.
Dr. Olivera Bogunovic,
the medical director of ambulatory services at Boston’s McLean Hospital and an
assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, developed an
outpatient program to wean patients off benzodiazepines almost a decade ago.
Prior to that, she recalls, patients were being detoxed over four days in the
hospital, because that was all insurance would pay for. Four days is a very
rapid detox, and it sometimes resulted in the patients having seizures.
The state-of-the-art
treatment for benzodiazepine dependence is not some grueling ordeal. Patients
aren’t strapped to a hospital bed, white-knuckling it through withdrawal;
instead, they are gradually weaned off the drugs outside the hospital over the
course of months. In general, doctors try to decrease a patient’s dose by 25
percent every two weeks. Bogunovic reports that this method has a very high
success rate: “Up to 80 to 90 percent of patients have successfully completed
detox in our clinic,” she told me. Jordan reportedly
unsuccessfully attempted to quit cold turkey at least once on his own, which
may have set him up for future problems. “It’s called the kindling effect,”
Bogunovic explained. “If you don’t detox properly the first time, every
subsequent detox can be more difficult.”
Mikhaila also claims
that, in addition to his dependence on clonazepam, Jordan suffered from a
paradoxical reaction to the drug, which allegedly made him extremely restless.
(A sedative, of course, is meant to have the exact opposite effect.) Bogunovic
says that such paradoxical reactions to benzodiazepines occur in about 1–2
percent of patients. The clinical term is akathisia. The
patient may shift positions, cross and uncross their legs, rock, or writhe. A
severe case of akathisia can make a person completely unable to function.
The picture that
emerges is of a man who was trapped: He couldn’t tolerate the medication, and
he couldn’t tolerate the withdrawal. Mikhaila told RT that her father was
looking for a place that had the guts to detox him “cold turkey,” a place where
doctors “aren’t influenced by the pharmaceutical companies.” Apparently that’s how
a man who didn’t want to use drugs traveled thousands of miles to be placed in
a drug-induced coma. Mikhaila said that her father was diagnosed with pneumonia
“upon arrival” in Russia. If that’s accurate, then his medically induced coma
may have had nothing to do with benzodiazepine withdrawal. If pneumonia is so
severe that it causes respiratory failure, the patient needs to go on a
ventilator simply to breathe. Because it’s so unpleasant to be on a breathing
machine in an intensive care unit, patients are usually heavily sedated.
The more alarming
possibility is that Peterson was placed in a coma as part of his detox regimen.
Mikhaila described her father’s treatment as “an emergency medical
benzodiazepine detox, which we were only able to find in Russia.” The term
“medical detox” suggests that drugs were an integral part of the program, and
the fact that this treatment is only available in Russia implies that it wasn’t
one of the more conservative forms of drug-assisted detox available in North
America.
Bogunovic says she’s
heard of people using medically induced comas to treat benzodiazepine
withdrawal, but that it’s extremely rare and not scientifically sound. It’s a
little more common to offer this kind of sedation for opioid withdrawal, she
says, but there’s no evidence to support the efficacy or safety of sedation
detox for opioids, either. The problem, Bogunovic says, is that the patient
still has to cope with withdrawal symptoms after they wake up. And the risks of
being sedated and placed on a ventilator alone are considerable: Ventilators
can cause pneumonia, and prolonged immobility puts patients at risk of blood
clots, which can cause strokes.
Another possibility is
that Peterson’s doctors didn’t set out to put him in a coma, but that he
developed such severe withdrawal symptoms from quitting “cold turkey” that they
were forced to do so for his own protection. Sometimes, in cases of severe
benzodiazepine withdrawal, the patient becomes so agitated that they have to be
sedated; their heart rate and blood pressure can skyrocket, and their extreme
agitation can make them a danger to themselves and the medical team. Seizures are by far
the most feared side effect of sudden abstinence from benzos. If someone vomits
during a seizure and inhales the vomit, they can stop breathing or develop
pneumonia, either of which could have landed Peterson in a coma.
Mikhaila blames
Western medicine for her father’s predicament, and not just because Western
doctors prescribed the pills. Allegedly, Peterson’s pneumonia was the fault of
a North American hospital, too, though she doesn’t say how she knows that.
Mikhaila is essentially weaving her own “hero’s journey” into her father’s
ordeal, one in which she brought him to a far-flung clinic that had “the guts”
to do what Western doctors wouldn’t. It’s a tale that burnishes her brand as a
wellness influencer and shoves aside awkward questions about whether the
treatment harmed Peterson.
When it comes to
recovery, there are no quick fixes. But that doesn’t mean the most arduous
option is necessarily the most effective. If Peterson’s sad story has a moral,
it’s that a drug problem is neither a dragon to be slain nor a sin to be
ashamed of. It’s a mundane health problem that should be treated
scientifically, without heroics.
