Jordan Peterson is a popular and controversial psychology professor who has gained a degree of Internet fame. He came out with a philosophy invoking historical and religious references that essentially incorporates 1950s pull-yourself-up advice with a distaste for progressive politics.
His book “12 Rules For Life” is pretty good, for what it is. He has made some comments others dislike about the uselessness of liberal arts and identity politics.
Apparently he has been ill the last year. I don’t know the details. I had read he switched to an all-meat diet, which seems extreme. He became addicted to benzodiazepines, and suffered from restlessness and tremors during withdrawal. Frustrated with his doctors, he went to Russia to be put into a medical coma for eight days.
From a medical point of view, benzo withdrawal takes months and can be very difficult. I’ve never heard of being sedated for it, and doubt eight days would do that much given the length of time usual withdrawal takes. His daughter praised this drastic treatment.
I don’t follow the man closely, nor his Internet stuff at all. Anyone have opinions on the man, his philosophy or his problems?
From what I’ve read of his ideas, he’s a weird, sexist, pseudo-scientific ignoramus. Not surprising that he’s apparently harmed himself with substance dependence and quackery.
Benzo withdrawal is definitely difficult (and potentially fatal) but I think ‘months’ is an overstatement.
I can’t say I’ve ever seen somebody ‘all the way through’ benzo withdrawal but I’ve had lots of experience caring for people with alcohol and GHB withdrawal (which I’d say are equivalent to benzo withdrawal) and the physical manifestations never lasted more than a week.
Peterson’s ostensible symptoms of benzo withdrawal seem very atypical in nature and duration. Makes me think we don’t know the whole story or the real story underneath it.
I think it was H. L. Mencken who said "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong’. That sums up my opinion of Jordan Peterson, he’s the guy with clear, simple, and wrong solutions. Kind of a Canadian Dr. Phil.
As far as the physical manifestations of benzodiazepine withdrawal I can’t see them taking months to clear up, the eight day coma seems adequate, maybe even overkill. I’ve never really considered the medically induced coma as useful in treating the psychological aspects of drug addiction, it always seemed to me to be a way for people to snooze through the physical withdrawal. They still need to do the hard work to clean up their psychological need for the drug. After all, they’re the same people they were when they went into the coma. I almost feel like without having undergone the discomfort of withdrawal they might be more likely to relapse than someone who went through it awake, but with medical support.
Yeah, but his solutions are clear and simple, and that has an undeniable appeal to people who aren’t smart enough to see the flaws in them. I don’t think he’s a nutcase, I think he’s a conman who knows how to appeal to suckers and thereby get rich. Like Dr. Phil, or Rush Limbaugh.
Benzo withdrawal isn’t like alcohol. I’ve seen a fair bit of it, and taking months isn’t unusual. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes years. No kidding. Presumably they had already tried more basic withdrawal locally.
I agree the symptoms sound atypical, though, and there is important information that is missing.
His opposition to some aspects of progressive politics seems reflexive, even when I think he’s right. For example, I once heard him respond to a question about gay marriage by answering that it wouldn’t stop extreme progressives from whinging. Perhaps, but surely gay marriage isn’t primarily about the whingings of Tumblr gits. Yet that’s what it was about to him.
When talking about his opposition to hate speech-related rules obliging people to use someone’s preferred pronoun, he conjures up Solzhenitsyn which seems a little much. There may very well be authoritarian progressives who are too harsh on the West and too naive/forgiving towards Communist regimes, especially in academia, but the West isn’t at risk of being taken over by Stalinists if some rule requires calling someone by their preferred pronoun. He seems very apprehensive about slippery slopes that would turn us into the USSR.
That kind of reflexive adversarial attitude reminds me of my aunts who were fervent Maoists in the '70s because my jerk of a grandfather hated Communists. If I had to bet, his father was a jerk and a Communist. I think something similar may drive his focus and some of his positions. The horribleness of a person and their philosophy can become merged in one’s mind. Incidentally, both those aunts took psychology degrees in college. I think psychology degrees may be common among those who were around toxic people during their formative years.
I liked his Bible commentary series but I couldn’t finish it because he spent half the time taking tangents to complain about Commies/Tumblrites. Fine, we get it, they suck, can you get back to the topic? Even when I agree with him, I think he’s still too lead by a reactive, combative, defensive attitude towards something he hasn’t made clear.
Benzo withdrawal survivor here. Clonazepam, to be specific – same shit as Dr. P. was on. For over a year, I wasn’t sure if surviving was a desirable outcome.
I went to live with relatives, thinking it would take about three weeks. Fast forward eight months: Relatives getting fed up with me. I moved into a nursing home (thinking I might well be there for the rest of my life) for another eight months before I felt well enough to move out and live independently again. Even after that, I didn’t feel quite “right” for another year. That was all 15 years ago.
Benzo dependence and withdrawal isn’t like other kinds of drug withdrawal. It’s said to be tougher than kicking heroin. It’s nasty. My major discomforts were primarily severe insomnia and resulting very insufficient sleep, and near constant non-stop panic attacks. For a fucking year and a half.
Six different doctors that I saw didn’t know shit about benzo dependence and withdrawal. Most of them gave me different meds to try to help, none of which worked very well. One suggested I try yoga.
Retired Dr. Heather Ashton ran a residential benzo rehab clinic for a dozen years and wrote a paper on the subject. She seems to know a thing or two on the subject. See: Benzodiazipines: How They Work And How To Withdraw
If I may ask, were you initially prescribed clonazepam by a doctor, then your use of it became a problem? Were you then able to continue getting it through prescriptions, or did you have to get your supply over the black market? I’m just curious about the logistics of benzo abuse. I mean, does a dealer one day ask you, “hey, you ever tried benzos?”, or is it more a case of working the medical system to get over-prescribed?
A big part of his scam is pretending to take the problems of young White men seriously, without comparing them to the problems of other groups.
This is so simple that only a simple mind could come up with it, I suppose; it’s certainly refreshing to people whose only contact with Progressive thought is through the people who can only talk about problems through the lens of their bastardization of the concept of Privilege, wherein Privilege is inherent to certain kinds of people, who therefore have no real problems and deserve no sympathy. If it’s a comparison between people who will laugh at you for being “fragile” and a person who will tell you that you have legitimate problems you’re capable of fixing, there’s no competition. The fact his fix starts with cleaning your room is rather secondary.
TL;DR: Progressives need to get their real messages out more and shout down the assholes who are replacing useful concepts with pointing and laughing. I’m sure this will happen Real Soon Now.
In my case, I think the main problem was that I’m simply hypersensitive to benzos; but I’d put a bit of blame on the doctors. Doctors used to believe benzos were fairly harmless, and tended to prescribe them quite freely. I think most doctors now are more restrained about it. Medicare will not cover benzos.
My doc prescribed them because of anxiety problems. The truth was, I was rather depressed as well as anxious. Benzos are indicated for anxiety, not for depression. But I wanted them mainly for the depression. The doc kept re-upping the prescription with no questions asked.
I knew that benzos were addictive, and I was careful to be very restrained about using them. The Rx was for 1 mg four times a day as needed. I interpret that to mean I can use any amount I care to use up to a max of that. I took just 1 mg once a day. But by-and-by that didn’t help much and I upped to 1 mg twice a day. It helped me sleep too, until it didn’t. Also I began to note that I got very jittery when the last dose was wearing off. I began to crave getting my next dose. I managed to maintain enough self-discipline to NOT start taking doses early. I started watching the clock, counting down the minutes until I could get my next hit.
Note that this was all starting to happen when I was taking just 1 mg twice a day – generally considered a very small dose. I was watching for signs of addiction, and was very aware of what was happening.
At that point, I decided I needed to quit. Since it was such a small dose I was using, I quit cold-turkey one day, and without medical supervision. That apparently was a big mistake. (Discussing it with a doctor some months later, he said that he would have recommended quitting cold-turkey since I was using such a small dose. A different doctor opined that since I was having such a prolonged withdrawal, I might just have to go back on benzos for the rest of my life. :eek: :dubious: )
A strange characteristic of benzo withdrawal is that it can take an unpredictable length of time. Withdrawal symptoms typically last at least six to eight weeks, and in a smaller number of cases, can persist for six months, or a year, or 18 months or more. I was apparently in the 18-month range.
Note, I’ve also used valium, also with unpleasant but very different obnoxious effects. With valium, at least, I was able to quit easily as best I can recall. That was a long time ago.
I think benzos are bad shit, and I’ll be damned before I ever touch them again (except for brief one-day usage for sedation during certain medical procedures).
Thanks for that reply, Senegoid. That’s very interesting and frightening. My wife took lorazepam for anxiety for a while. It was intended to be short-term, and she transitioned to non-benzos without issue. Before this thread I had no real idea of the addiction potential.
Lorazepam (Ativan) has a short half-life, and diazepam (Valium) has a much longer half-life, which is one factor that accounts for the difference in its addictive potential and severity of withdrawal symptoms.
Clonazepam appears to have the highest addictive potential of all the benzos, and IMNSHO should only be used for seizure disorders when appropriate, unless absolutely nothing else works for anxiety.
I was also very surprised to find out how old Peterson was. I just figured he was some newly minted crackpot in his 20s or maybe 30s.
I got to use Lorazepam for anxiety when my initial acute episodes hit me hard, luckily never got past that “prn” use and that was it, but it did work great for that purpose.
That is probably a function of how relatively late did he truly blow up on YouTube and was latched upon by the "Watch Person A get [OWNED/SCHOOLED/DESTROYED()] by Person B about my pet topic"*(*all-caps on the verb mandatory) online social media crowd. So just think, he’s been doing his thing for over 30 years at his university, probably guest-lectured in a few places too over that time, and few of us even noticed until he became trending with the “influencers”.
It most certainly is not. With long term use, withdrawal is quite long in about 50% of patients. The only way to taper it safely is very, very gradually, and, even then, symptoms are quite bad. I barely made it through it, and I’m still suffering some effects to this day. (Granted, I’m probably out of withdrawal itself by now, but that took 3 years.)
Benzos are not taken seriously enough by many doctors. Like the newer opiates, they thought they were less addictive than their predecessors. But they aren’t. The FDA now has guidelines of 2-4 weeks max on Benzos.
Sure, many people take them and seem fine. But, if they ever need to stop taking them–possibly due to them stopping working (tachyphylaxis) or paradoxical effects, but also for other reasons–the results can be devastating. Heck, tachyphylaxis can actually start to induce withdrawal symptoms.
No one is exaggerating. After the hell I went through, I always said I would never wish the experience on even my worst enemy. Well, this is a pretty good example, as Peterson is an awful piece of work, but I absolutely do not think he or anyone else deserves this.
There were times when it was pure torture, panic attacks 24/7, dizziness, car sickness, akasthisia (unable to sit still, very disturbing feeling I still sometimes get to this day), and so on. It was the only time I ever became suicidal–not out of depression, but just because I needed the pain to end. And this was all months after I stopped the medicine.
I beseech you to read up on Dr. Heather Ashton’s work on this sort of thing, and just everything about benzo withdrawal, and take it seriously as a doctor yourself.
In 2020 we have enough info out there that no doctor who prescribes benzos should think that “months of withdrawal” is an overstatement. It may be an understatement.
As for the guy’s symptoms: restlessness was definitely very common–either from anxiety or separately via akasthisia. Tremors less so, though I did get them for a bit. But I could see it happening, especially early on in the same way it does with alcohol.
I actually wonder now if benzos blunted his ability to feel empathy. I think it did for me to some extent. I didn’t feel the anxiety that others did, so it was harder to empathize. Not that it made me transphobic or anything, and there was the “chill” feeling that kept me from being a jerk. But I remember caring less about other people’s emotions than I do now. (Granted, I was also like that in withdrawal, but that was because I was suffering so much that it was hard to think of others.)