Jordan Peterson, a renowned clinical psychologist who gained notoriety in 2016 when he spoke out against a bill in Canada which proposed amending the country’s human-rights act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and expression, during an interview with the Sunday Times discussed his drug addiction, suicidal thoughts and controversial treatment in Russia where he was put into an induced coma for eight days.
“I don’t remember anything. From Dec. 16 of 2019 to Feb. 5, 2020,” the former University of Toronto professor said of the period he was sent Russia for treatment. “I don’t remember anything at all.”
Peterson’s spiral, according to the Times, started when he had a violent “sodium metabisulphite response” to an all meat and greens diet. He couldn’t sleep for 25 days during this time and doctors as a result gave him a low dose of antidepressants. When his wife, Tammy Peterson, was diagnosed with cancer, though, he sunk into depression and doctors increased his dosage.
“And things just fell apart insanely with Tammy. Every day was life and death and crisis for five months,” Peterson told the paper. “The doctors said, ‘Well, she’s contracted this cancer that’s so rare there’s virtually no literature on it, and the one-year fatality rate is 100%.’ So endless nights sleeping on the floor in emergency, and continual surgical complications… So I took the benzodiazepines.”
Tammy recovered from complications with a kidney surgery, but Peterson’s dependency on the anti-anxiety medicine worsened. So he went to a Toronto clinic where he was taken off the drugs and prescribed ketamine. He then checked himself into a New York rehab in 2019 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia around the same time.
He didn’t get better.
“I had put myself in the hands of the medical profession. And the consequence of that was that I was going to die,” he said. “So it wasn’t that [the evidence from Moscow] was compelling. It was that we were out of other options.”
In Russia, he was diagnosed with pneumonia and put into an induced coma for eight days with the use of propofol.
He emerged “catatonic,” his daughter, Mikhaila, told the news outlet. “Really, really bad. And then he was delirious.”
Mikhaila then flew him to a private hospital in Serbia, where he was diagnosed with akathisia, a restless condition linked with benzo withdrawals.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.