Jordan Peterson on Getting Off of Benzodiazepines, Being in the Spotlight

What is it like to be you? Like, what is it like to... And then I know, you know, you've gone through a lot of shit. And this latest thing with getting off of the benzodiazepine, that to me was a real shocker. Because, first of all, I had no idea that you were taking it. And then to find out that it's that difficult to get off of, and then to hear from other people that have tried to get off of it how difficult it is. And then to realize how many people around me have an issue with that stuff. Xanax is a motherfucker. And I didn't know what a motherfucker it was until I talked to a friend who is a counselor at a drug rehab center. Where he was saying that that is one of the ways that people get locked back into drinking and doing drugs, is a psychiatrist will prescribe Xanax. And sober people who get on Xanax all of a sudden start drinking. He said it's super common. He said that it's one of the most difficult drugs to get off of. He said, and this is something that Dr. Carl Hart, who's a, I love him to death, he's brilliant. He speaks so openly and honestly about drugs, and you know, the guy's a professor at Columbia. He said that there's two drugs that will kill you when you get off of them. He goes, it's alcohol and benzodiazepine. Those are the two that if you just quit, you'll fucking die. And... Or you wish you would. Meanwhile, they're handing those things out, like tic tacs. Yeah. Well, they were regarded as a safe substitute for barbiturates. And you could easily overdose on barbiturates, especially with alcohol. When did they know? When did they know? When was it in the literature, the difficulty of detoxing yourself from these? Very recently. Really? Yeah. Jesus Christ. And when did they start being handed out? 20 years ago. Fuck. More. So what happened? People just stayed on them? Often. I have one good friend that takes it every day and takes it oftentimes with alcohol, which I know you're absolutely not supposed to do. There's not a damn thing I can do about it. I just as a friend that I love to death and I just go, I put my hands up and I go, there's not nothing I can do. And he's been on it for more than 10 years. Yeah, well, I started taking them because I was ill. Yeah. You know, and they helped because I couldn't sleep. Ill in what way? I couldn't sleep at all. I don't know. I don't know. What I still really don't know what happened. You couldn't sleep. And so an anti anxiety medication. Do you think that this is the one one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about through why I brought up the fame thing. How much of the pressure of being attacked by all these different people and having these people write these horrible articles about you. And I know you read that stuff, which is different for me. I don't read stuff about me. And I think that's helped me tremendously. And that like my gauge of how I deal with people is like I said. Tucker Carlson doesn't read things about him either. You can tell by the way he communicates, he seems free. You know, there's a burden that people carry around when they read things about themselves. Like Eric Weinstein has that burden sometimes. You know, when people read. Yeah, well, part of the reason, so did I read things about me? Well, yeah, but that wasn't what was stressful exactly. Although it was. Well, it's a multitude of things. When I first got, I've had a history of depression and that runs in my family. And that's probably stems back for me right to the time when I was a kid. And I think when I really got sick in 2016, it was partly a manifestation of that. But at the time my job was threatened, like actually. Yeah. And my clinical practice was threatened. And the Canadian Revenue Agency was after me all at the same time. And they were after me because of a mistake they made, which they admitted three months later. And the college was after me because of a vindictive client who came after me with a pack of lies. And basically I emerged from that unscathed, but that was by no means obvious that that was going to be the case. I was accused of sexual misconduct. And the evidence, when I was dealing with this client, I would turn my wedding ring around. You'd spin it? Well, I play with it. Right. And that was sexual misconduct? Yeah. Well, to her it was a signal of some dark underlying desire that I wasn't, that was polluting our therapeutic relationship. I've been doing that with you the whole conversation. Yeah. I have this silicone wedding ring. Yeah, I'm going to report. I'd report you if you had. Stick my finger in there. Yeah, exactly. I do that all the time. Well, there you go. Is that bad? It's really bad. And if there was a college that governed the behavior of reprobates like you, I would definitely report, no, don't do that. I do this. I do this. That's terrible. I stretch it out. No, that's Freudian to the extreme. Although I don't know what turning it means. How could this stretching a silicone wedding band be Freudian? Well, you're putting your finger in the little hole. It's rubber. What kind of vaginas you're dealing with? Rubber is, you know, that's good. Anyways, we don't have to go there. So that was all you had done was turn, play with your wedding ring. Yeah. Yeah. And that- And I was really, I really helped her a lot. Well, so unfortunately, when you're dealing with people that are extremely troubled, oftentimes they look for external reasons why they're troubled and they find oppressors. Well, she was also angry with me because when all this blew up around me, it interfered with my clinical practice and she had come to rely on our weekly meetings. Oh, you had to disrupt them. So she was angry about being abandoned. And it was really sad because I didn't want to abandon my clients, but I had to stop my clinical practice, which was also very upsetting to me because I had like 20 clients and I knew these people, man, like they were, I knew these people. You know, I'd fold them through thick and thin. And then all of a sudden, so many things piled up around me that I found when I was in a clinical session that I was distracted. So you can't be distracted in a clinical session. Right. And so anyways, what emerged from that, and it was in the middle of the winter and I have seasonal affective disorder, I couldn't sleep at all for quite a long time. And I went to my doctor and I said, I can't sleep. And he gave me a sleeping medication and an anti-anxiety drug. And I took the, a little bit of the anti-anxiety drug and I could sleep. And my life was pretty stressful and I thought, okay, I'm much better. I'm just gonna leave this be. This is working. I'm not going to muck with it because I could barely go back to work. And was it a low dose? Yeah, yeah. I couldn't even feel it. Ozanix? Really? Yeah, it was a low dose. So it alleviated the anxiety, but it didn't affect your cognitive performance or it didn't affect the weight. Well, it didn't affect it as much as how sick I was. Like that really affected it. So sick meaning depressed. No, no. You mean when you say you're sick. No, no. When it hit, if I stood up, my blood pressure was really low. If I stood up, I'd faint. I was fainting five or six times a day. When are we talking about here? 2016. Okay. So this was when all the pressure from all these different sources was coming at you. Yeah. And that was making you sick. So it was changing physically. Yeah, that was part of it. I think what it did was it stressed me enough so that I was susceptible, more susceptible to whatever was wrong with me in the first place. So there was something- Because I've had a lot of immunological problems. How long did it take you to recover from the benzos? Well, when I finally, two years, and I haven't fully recovered, but also I was also sick. You haven't four years out? No, my left hand is quite numb and was way more numb. Both hands and my feet were completely numb. And I was in excruciating pain for two years. Pain at levels that I didn't even know it was possible. All the time or on occasion? No. This is one of the things that was terrible about it is that it was really, really bad in the morning. And did it start right after you got off of the Xanax? No, but it got way worse. So it just started showing up eventually? Yeah. And then- It started to get worse about the same time that Tammy went into the hospital. But because she was fighting her way through catastrophic cancer at the same time when this started to happen. So this was additional stress? Yes. And that heightened everything? Well, it certainly didn't help. I think it made me, again, it made me more susceptible to something that was already happening. So whatever this illness has that's plagued my family, my father, my grandfather, multiple cousins, and a lot of immunological problems on my mother's side too. I have a cousin whose daughter died of immunological problems, the same ones that Michaela had. And this is all mitigated somehow or another by this only eating meat diet? I don't know. It certainly is for Michaela. For you as well? Well, I don't know that for sure. I know what the diet has done.