Lordy, even with my sweet tooth I can't stomach the amount of sugar they are lathering on Peterson in this article. He is hardly an "intellectual hero" or one of the "most famous authors in the world". He is famous (or infamous) because of political ideology rather than the substance of his arguments. He is the kid who loved playing devil's advocate, but never understood the role.
Edit: Having said this - addiction and mental illness is sad in any case. While I hope never to hear from him again in the public sphere, I wish Jordan a quick recovery.
Addiction and mental illness can hit anyone, no matter their political ideology and bad luck, such as his wife's cancer diagnosis, doesn't descriminate.
However his addiction was caused by his insomnia which in turn was caused by his all meat diet.
His going to Russia to use a nonstandard treatment for his addiction rather then an evidence based treatment was also something that was not pure happenstance.
You have it backwards. His all meat and greens diet resolved his autoimmune disorder and thus cured his insomnia. This has nothing to do with why he was prescribed clonazepam.
Changing your diet to avoid insomnia and crippling pain is not something that reasonable people could call idealogical motivation.
Illnesses of any kind, physical and mental, are probably extra likely to hit someone who eats a diet composed of literally nothing but beef, as Jordan Peterson has and has strongly advocated, even claiming a while back that it cured his depression.
Of course, that kind of extreme dieting (and the extreme malaise he talked about feeling when he ate/drank things besides beef and water) may have started in the first place as a symptom of severe mental illness, which must have fed back into worsening it further.
As much as I disliked Jordan Peterson and his rhetoric back when he was a prominent public figure, I feel sad about what's happened to him. Being taken out of medical care by family members and sent to quack doctors who put him through untreated benzodiazepine withdrawal that gave him severe neurological damage is something nobody should ever go through.
He has never advocated that people eat all beef. He said he has an autoimmune disease that causes severe symptoms if he eats just about anything else. His daughter switched to an all meat diet and cured her lifelong crippling RA and suggested he try it. He was skeptical but eventually did, and his autoimmune symptoms went away. He is obviously aware that the general population does not have that rare autoimmune disorder that his family has.
His adult daughter advocates it to everyone and seems to have her own thing going on around it, but diet is not a topic he discusses. I definitely advocate many things that my parents would disagree with too.
He definitely has discussed it with the media; he talked about it in his Joe Rogan interview among others. But after a quick search, it does appear I was probably mistaken about him advocating it for others, so I'm sorry for falsely stating he has.
I'd like to hear a credible doctor talk about what kind of autoimmune condition could possibly be only triggered by everything besides beef. It reminds me of the character Chuck in Better Call Saul, who experiences severe psychosomatic pain when he's aware of electrical devices around himself and believes he's allergic to electricity. Of course, not all strange never-before-seen medical problems are psychosomatic.
I'm skeptical that Mikhaila had severe physical illness that went away entirely with her all-beef diet. People making money selling medical miracles that don't mesh with any known science should not be easily trusted. Especially people who'd have their benzodiazepine-dependent family members go through cold turkey "emergency benziodiazepine detox"--the facts around that are extremely clear on it being detrimental in pretty much every way and life-threateningly dangerous.
Benzodiazepine withdrawal can last months or even years, and it tends to wax and wane over day/week timescales. I hope the other people around him are willing to advocate against Mikhaila for him to get treatment if his withdrawal symptoms become severe again.
1) I have a problem, 2) the cause is rare and unusual, 3) the solution is something ill-advised and out-there that just happens to work for me.
I've noticed that this way of thinking is very common among those with dependency/addiction issues, and whether this way of thinking is a cause or result of said addiction, it often spills out into other areas of life.
My personal experience is that I've had a number of friends where this was true, and while things never got as bad for me as for them or Peterson, I've also noticed how my own thinking got warped in periods where I struggled with dependency issues.
Pothead friends who advocated weed as a cure for cancer and argued it is actually good for the lungs. Also their depression cannot be cured through therapy because therapists wouldn't be able to deal with the specific nature of their problems.
Alcoholic friends who argued they "weren't so bad" comparatively, and in fact their lifestyle was better than the poor sober suckers who work 9-5, their life structurally falling apart obviously being a result of very unusual circumstances that they had no control over.
If you bothered to make even a small effort to educate yourself on the circumstances and timeline of events instead of make up wild speculation and then condemn someone for it, you’d know how absurd this comment is.
She was literally crippled as a child and had to get hip and ankle replacement surgery before she was 18. Yes, it must be completely psychosomatic (even afflicting multiple independent doctors and surgeons involved in the diagnoses and treatment!), and an elimination diet just happened to trick her into thinking she was cured.
Political ideology has virtually nothing to do with what he talks or writes about, aside from occasionally emphatically denouncing ideology of any kind.
Edit: Having said this - addiction and mental illness is sad in any case. While I hope never to hear from him again in the public sphere, I wish Jordan a quick recovery.