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.