Jordan Peterson‘s health has been a subject of public concern for years, and the full picture is far more complicated than most of his followers realize. At the center of it all is a decades-long struggle with benzodiazepine use, a series of increasingly unconventional treatments, and a hospitalization in 2025 that left him out of public life entirely.
Peterson’s troubles began with a prescription for benzodiazepines to manage anxiety. What followed was a cascading reaction that a condition called BIND, or benzodiazepine-induced neurological dysfunction, may explain.
As Dr. Joseph noted in his own examination of Peterson’s case, “It’s a type of neurotoxicity that happens when you take benzodiazepines long term. This does not happen in everyone, but there is a substantial minority of patients where this d**g actually hurts their brain over time and they get sicker almost like a chemotherapy or some kind of toxic reaction.”
Peterson described the resulting pain as constant and debilitating. When his Toronto medical team could not offer relief, his daughter Michaela and son-in-law located a clinic in Russia willing to use propofol sedation to manage a rapid benzodiazepine detox.
Peterson woke from that treatment disoriented, having developed pneumonia in both lungs during the procedure.
Though he eventually returned to public life, his health never fully stabilized. He tried a strict all-meat diet, which he credited with some improvement, telling audiences, “I’ve only been eating meat, beef fundamentally, for almost five years now. I never imagined in my wildest dreams, number one, that you could just live on meat, and number two, that it would have such a salutary effect.” However, his daughter later confirmed that diet alone was not enough to keep his symptoms under control.
Peterson then sought out regenerative medicine treatments, including intravenous stem cells and natural killer cell therapy administered by Dr. Adeel Khan, a physician also connected to a separate high-profile sepsis case involving functional medicine figure Mark Hyman. In a 2023 conversation with Khan, Peterson appeared willing to try virtually anything, including fecal microbiota transplants.
In July 2025, Michaela announced that her father had been hospitalized in an ICU with pneumonia and sepsis. Her explanation attributed the illness to CIRS, chronic inflammatory response syndrome, stemming from decades of mold exposure. She wrote, “We don’t have a better explanation for his neurological symptoms at the moment other than spiritual attacks.”
What the full timeline reveals is a pattern of pursuing treatment after treatment, many outside any regulatory framework, with no clear accounting for outcomes.
