Last Thursday (September 19), Jordan Peterson's daughter, Mikhaila, posted a 9-minute video on her YouTube channel, titled "Peterson Family Update". In the video, Mikhaila detailed her father's struggle to get off a prescribed anti-anxiety medication, Clonazepam, also known as Klonopin. Dr. Peterson - who is a professor of psychology at University of Toronto and best-selling self-help author - started taking the medication to cope with his wife's terminal cancer diagnosis in April, but, now that his wife has mostly recovered, he wished to free himself of it. The several complications that his wife, Tammy, experienced throughout her treatment kept him on the pills for a while and his body grew heavily dependent on it.
Mikhaila explained that her father tried to cut out the pills cold turkey, but he began experiencing severe physical withdrawal systems. She said he "looks like a lost puppy" and has been "having a miserable time." Dr. Peterson decided to admit himself to a rehab facility in New York to wean off the medication.
Joe Rogan commented on Dr. Peterson's situation on the latest episode of his podcast, Joe Rogan Experience. Rogan described Peterson as "wise enough to understand his physical limitations." His guest on the episode, stand up comedian, Mark Normand, said that Peterson is "one of those guys that you're like, 'Ah, he's tough as a bull. He'll be fine.' But then, you know, everybody's human."
Rogan also provided a synopsis of Dr. Peterson's rise to notoriety: "It's the best time of your life. You were an embattled professor fighting against social justice warriors over some sort of crazy law that was gonna enforce 198,000 gender pronouns and he was like, 'Hey, this is crazy." and then he becomes a national celebrity." Rogan makes clear that he views Peterson as a visionary when claiming that the psychologist was "right" about the "tyranny" of political correctness. "As time has gone on, he saw all this coming... People are radicalizing and a lot of it is about compliance," Rogan added.