Beyond Order

Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

By Jordan B. Peterson (2021)

The opening you need to feel

On February 5th, 2020, Jordan Peterson woke up in an intensive care unit in Moscow with six-inch tethers strapping his arms to the bed. He had been agitated enough, while unconscious, to try to rip the catheters out and walk away. He did not know how he had got there. People around him spoke a foreign language. His daughter Mikhaila and her husband Andrey had flown him in from Toronto in early January, after a North American medical system had spent months failing to help him taper off a benzodiazepine he had been prescribed three years earlier for anxiety.

The path to that ICU bed is its own argument for the book you are about to read. In 2017 Peterson started taking a small dose of clonazepam to manage anxiety triggered by a severe food reaction. He kept the dose low for two years. Then his daughter had ankle revision surgery in Zurich. Then his wife Tammy was diagnosed with a kidney cancer that carried a 100 percent one-year fatality rate. He asked his doctor to raise the dose. His symptoms got worse, not better. He tried ketamine and got, in his words, two ninety-minute trips to hell. He tried tapering off the benzodiazepine and went into acute withdrawal: akathisia so severe he could not sit still, suicidal ideation, the complete absence of any happiness. He spent four months at an American clinic that promised rapid withdrawal and could not deliver it. By December 2019 he was hospitalized in Toronto. By January 2020 his family flew him to Moscow because the clinic there would put him in a medically induced coma for nine days while his body weathered the worst of the withdrawal.