(Reposted) - Peterson Family Update June 2020

hi there I'm Michaela Peterson Jordan's daughter just so everyone knows this podcast was originally posted on my channel so some of you may have already seen it dad thought it was a good idea to post it on his channel as well to increase viewership and today's also world benzodiazepine Awareness Day so it seemed like a good time to post it the past year was absolutely horrible both mom and dad almost died repeatedly Andre my husband and I have spent every day for the last six months trying to find my dad help looking everywhere traveling around the world if it hadn't been for Andre we wouldn't have made it this was a difficult interview it flattened both of us the evening we recorded it he's been in the public eye for years now and we both thought explaining what's gone on in the last year could help other people avoid the same hell we've been through we're gonna do another jbp update in two to three weeks on the Michaela Peterson podcast to keep people informed of dads progress and maybe delve into his future plans please check out the links in the description and in the show notes to learn more about the topics we're about to cover hi dad hi kiddo it's really nice to be doing a family update with you rather than about you yeah well it's it feels like a good thing from this end of the universe as well good when was the last time you used a mic to record anything for YouTube mm-hmm last fall likely early fall maybe September it was long maybe yeah almost a year yeah yeah a long time so I felt like a long time too it felt like a very very very long very long time yes well in the most Canadian fashion I can muster what the hell happened eh right that's what people were asking online name right right what happened well you know an accident is when three or four or five unlikely things happen at the same time and I would say happened I mean first of all I spent last January with you in Zurich yeah but a hospital I wasn't in the hospital but I was there most of the time you're in the hospital a lot I was in the hospital a lot yeah well I had to feed you you know me or make food for you yeah so I was there okay through all of January and you were getting some pretty invasive surgery done on your foot and then your mom and I Tammy and I went to Australia New Zealand for most of February and that was actually not too bad a trip I felt all right and she was feeling all right - but we knew her surgery for what was hypothetically a relatively treatable cancer was coming up in March so that was hanging over our heads although we weren't overwhelmingly worried about it and then she went and had her surgery and they then we were informed six weeks after that after she had recovered but was still suffering some pain that the easily treatable and non dangerous slow growing malignancy that we were told she had was in fact something fast growing with about with a some something near a hundred percent fatality rate within a year regardless of treatment mm-hmm like treating cancer like yeah so that was deadly we got all we were told that in about ten minutes and so when we were just expecting uh well if not a clean bill of health at least a we represent a ssin of what we'd already been told she went in to have more invasive surgery and hypothetically that work but it created syrup terrible side effects and that was the start of a whole other six months long nightmare of trying to deal with surgical complications which we did eventually resolve but not until mid the middle of August in fact not and literally not until the day of our 30th wedding anniversary yeah so that was all hare-raising and stressful to say the least I mean you know I've talked about that but we seem to have a life-threatening emergency on Tammy's part for both every three days for about six months and then I had my own problem start to develop really in with any degree of severity in about April May something like that I had been taking benzodiazepines since 2016 so why be before we get into there what why why did you start taking benzodiazepines well in in over the Christmas vacation in 2016 you and I and Julianne and my son and Tammy went out to Vancouver Island to visit her parents and siblings and when we were there you and I and Andre your husband ate something that didn't agree with any of us and solve a very severe reaction to that I'm so unborn it was logical conclusion but I was well it the same we have the same symptoms I don't know if I was any more seriously affected than you or not but I was freezing cold for about a month I couldn't get warm no matter how much I wore I couldn't stand up without fainting I couldn't sleep I don't think I slept at all for for something on the in the or on the order of three weeks yeah people like you went on Joe Rogan and talked about a sulphite reaction you had and how you didn't sleep and people commented that oh it's not possible to stay awake for that long but if you actually look into sodium metabisulfite allergies the symptoms that we experienced aren't unheard of there are people it's also impossible to stay awake voluntarily that long that's not the same as not being able to sleep those are very very different things whatever it's possible that when I was laying there thinking I wasn't sleeping that now and then I drifted off and would wake up and not notice I mean I can't eliminate that as a possibility but I can certainly tell you that I slept little enough so that it was exceedingly unpleasant it's a very long time to stay awake and when we went back to Toronto our family physician prescribed benzodiazepines which are often used as a sleeping aid and an anti-anxiety medication and is something called zopiclone in moving and I hardly took the EMA vein at all maybe four or five times but I took the benzodiazepine the way that it was prescribed to twice a day point to five milligrams and that seemed to bring the symptoms to a pretty rapid halt which is also part of the reason I didn't need the EMA vein and then there are so many other things going on around me at that time that I never really thought about it again you know I thought they were that it was a relatively harmless drug and I was taking it in a prescribed fashion at not too high a dose and I developed symptoms that I now recognized were associated with its use weakness on the my left side and like a feeling of detachment from people around me people I loved some decrease in the ability to experience joy but it wasn't until much later that I actually associated with the pince-nez being use yeah when well when your mom got so sick my anxiety levels had been climbing up again yeah that was unbearable I mean the response I had if you're told your parent or your wife of almost 30 years has no chance and is going to be dead in the next ten months that's what we were told that surgery doesn't help and that chemo doesn't help and that this is a fast-growing cancer and you're screwed no matter what right what we heard in one day anxiety went all over North America to New York and to Houston and to LA looking for different opinions before we decided to settle on surgery but and everyone gave us the same opinion yes which was that nothing is going to help but surgery was probably the best mm-hmm the best low-probability bet yes so so so I asked my doctor to increase the benzodiazepine dose but what seemed to happen as a consequence of that was that I just got more anxious like so again in retrospect it seems like I had a rather uncommon but not unheard of reaction to benzodiazepines where increased dose makes anxiety worse instead of better so then at one point when things weren't getting better and Tami was still in the hospital I was trying to take care of her we had lots of help I stopped taking them entirely and tried ketamine which is a treatment for depression while that neither of those were very good ideas as it turned out so I had to stop taking benzodiazepines entirely the ketamine oh yeah yeah then I didn't go then I stayed off them for something approximating a week not knowing that that was a very bad idea and I often think I should have known these things because I did a lot of scientific research when I was a graduate student on alcoholism and I knew that alcohol and benzodiazepines and barbiturates were all the same chemical class at least in terms of their effect on neurological effects and but what I knew about benzodiazepines was that they were comparatively safe compared to barbiturates which they basically replaced but that's much less true than everybody who's taking them hopes and they're very widely prescribed and I don't remember what the probability of developing a dependency on them is if you take them for more than two weeks it's 50% I believe it's something like 50% yeah if you take them for two or four weeks yeah and over four weeks it's much much higher most people prescribed them stay on them for life and that could have something to do with the fact that they're very difficult to get off of yeah well it was unbelievably unpleasant I mean it was unbearably unpleasant and so I started stopping started tapering off when Tammy was in the hospital but I couldn't push that too fast because wasn't bearable and what what do you mean it wasn't well my anxiety levels went higher than I'd ever than anything I'd ever experienced and I also developed this condition called akathisia and the best way I can describe that is that it was like being jabbed with something look with a prod like a cattle prod something electric or something sharp non-stop for hours for all the hours I was awake was absolutely I couldn't sit or lay down or stop moving and even if I did get up and move it wasn't like that made it better I just couldn't stop doing it it was horrible a Kathi's ii is horrible it's a it's it's well it's like being whipped that's another way of thinking about it although I really think I would have you know this is sounds melodramatic but I think if I had to pick whipping or arc áthisá those it would depend on how big a whip but maybe not what an obvious choice has five pronged whips yes yeah cat-o'-nine-tails that might be worse but it was it was plenty bad yeah and so and things just fell apart more and more Tammie recovered rather miraculously in the middle of August and but I continued my sort of downhill spiral and ended up in a clinic in on the eastern seaboard that claim they could do a rapid yeah benzodiazepine detox which was a complete bloody lie yeah well what we figured was we didn't realize that there was this physical dependency until you stopped to try and do the ketamine and then we tried tapering and you couldn't stand it because of the akathisia and so we thought well let's go get some professional help right and well and I went to the clinic on the understanding that they could do a multi-day detoxification and treatment for withdrawal and when I got there what they told me instead was that they'd substitute essentially they'd substitute one benzodiazepine for another which wasn't the least bit helpful because clonazepam was already a long-acting benzodiazepine and they're easier to wean off than the shorter acting benzodiazepines and they had nothing to offer essentially I came out of that clinic worse than I when I went in so like significantly worse yes on to more sedative like drugs in order to dampen down the akathisia symptoms rights which wasn't helping much given the fact that the benzodiazepines were causing the akathisia yes yeah so and then I went back to Toronto that's November Nova and things maintain their downhill trajectory apart from the fact that Tammy was recovering quite nicely which of course was great but then I ended up in the hospital in Toronto and the hospital I ended up went in was also worse than useless yes so and I don't remember this part of it it from December 15th onward you and Andre your husband took me out of that hospital and we went to Russia of all places near Moscow to try a treatment offered by clinic there that used they use proper fall index tour right right proper fall too as a heavy heavy sedating agent it's basically made me unconscious for nine days yeah so you were completely out for nine days well I also had pneumonia which I developed apparently in the hospital in Toronto oh yeah it was quite quite entertaining the whole the whole string of events we got questions about you know why why on earth would you go to Russia when you could get you know world-class care in North America and the reason for that was because we had tried the Ashton protocol we switching over to valium we tried the Ashton protocol and lots of people have success with that although it sounds horrible lots of people don't have success with it yeah i'm i put out a the first family update we did was when you went to the first rehab center in the states and after i put that out and said this is what's going on I had hundreds if not thousands of people respond telling me how horrible benzodiazepine withdrawal could be how they couldn't work how they were pacing around their backyards for a year and they basically said just keep him alive make sure he psychiatrists that I spoke with said you know when I asked him how long the it's easy it was likely the last they said well it could be two years and I thought no one could live like this for two years it's like you can't live for two years if you're being constantly prodded with something excruciatingly ly painful on a moment-to-moment basis it's just not and there's no escape there's no relief that's just not possible wasn't possible or I sir I mean the reason I did survive certainly wasn't because I was enjoying my life the reason was is that I had family that I was very attached to and friends who went above and beyond the call of duty helping to care for me but the experience was intolerably dreadful and it's so strange was we're now in Serbia weirdly enough in Belgrade of all bloody places and we've been here about two weeks and went to yet another specialty clinic run by an anesthesiologist and they modified the medication that I was taking in Florida which is where we were last and I don't know I can't understand it but virtually all my symptoms have disappeared I'm still weak if I get up and walk around I don't have my stamina but I can think clearly I feel I'm back to my regular self such as that is yeah during the mornings and during the days I can work you know it's very surprising to me that this happened so rapidly but it it has and that's why we're doing this podcast and yeah or this this this video but and hopefully the last but Tami is coming she's been I haven't been with her for more than a few days since middle of December and that was partly because I was in bad shape and she wasn't in good enough shape to be patient with me she almost died like every day for six months like you said and you were in you were suffering so much that anyone around you suffered yes because of how horrible it was to watch it was horrible so just to back up a bit you went to a hospital in Toronto and they were going to make things worse rapidly they weren't willing because of your akathisia which was making you crazy they weren't willing to slow tapered you down they just wanted to stabilize you by keeping the benzodiazepines there so Andre and I found a clinic in Russia that would actually put you to sleep using proper Falls so you wouldn't have to suffer while they took the benzodiazepines out and doing a detox or as much Halla least you'd be unconscious for that period time and doing a detox on benzodiazepines isn't recommended you're supposed to do a slow taper but you're akathisia was so bad that even staying at the same dose was dangerous right so we needed to get rid of that so we spent time in Russia managed to get it out and it was or well you guys took a big risk taking me out of the hospital in Toronto which nobody recommended the psychiatrist certainly weren't in favor of it and taking me somewhere as foreign as Moscow and and then attempting this what generally unadvised treatment was all surreal yeah what was terrifying and when I woke up so as I said - that was complicated by the fact that I double I had developed pneumonia in both lungs but when I woke up I was first catatonic and then delirious I can remember the delirium that lasted a whole day consisted of a sort of dreamlike hallucination that I had been kidnapped by you were you were delirious for nine days nine days yeah nine days you remember the last last day yeah I remember that I was kidnapped by people oddly enough who lived in Florida and they were like very rural backwoods people landlord a tree people root Florida tree people yeah and that they were gonna keep the leader of this little gang who kidnapped me we're gonna kill me because the leader was going to kill me because he wanted to impress his girlfriend and it was a very very vivid dream that I had while I was awake I knew I was in the hospital at the same time I was just one of them and I also remember that when I first woke up I was irate because I had been being secured to the side of the bed because apparently I was tearing out the IV tubes that I was connected to because I didn't want to be in the hospital I had no idea why I was in the hospital or where the hospital was or where anybody I knew was we had to back up a bit again we had agreed when you were in the hospital in Toronto like our whole family had sat down and agreed that the best option was this rapid detox in Moscow and you'd been part of that discussion but when you woke up after the detox in Russia you couldn't remember any of that right I remember being really angry with you when you first showed up because they were very limited yes but I didn't know that it was this oh man it was so awful it was we ended up in like the outskirts of Moscow in a clinic for severely ill people yeah and it was like Soviet ask guard guarded so the visiting hours were two hours from driving how far are they to come and visit I was like two hours each way right right and in in in Moscow winter winter in in rough traffic in bad weather yeah to visit an ICU that was full of people who were in very rough shape including me oh yeah you fit right in when you first got there and at first it was like how oh my god we brought dad to Moscow and destroyed him well that's what the doctor told you wasn't it the first said that oh yeah under I couldn't even like there was one day that was so bad I couldn't go in and Andre went in and they said you know why are you here of all places in Russian and Andre said there was no one to help him in the West which there wasn't we looked everywhere right and we tried to clinics and talked to multiple psychiatrists and none of them could help and she said great you've brought him here to die so and that was you know the scary thing about the hospital you were in in Toronto is you had pneumonia that wasn't picked up until we got to Moscow so when you arrived in Moscow you had a fever and pneumonia in both lungs and so when they sedated you I the end to intubated means we had to intubate you during the sedation because of the pneumonia so we weren't getting care anywhere and getting off of benzodiazepines almost killed you on the place in Russia managed to stabilize you what it was yeah to some degree like I didn't have easier was much reduced yeah when the benzos were finally so they um they did some plasmapheresis as well to get rid of the benzodiazepines in your blood because the half-life of benzos are so long that even when you stop taking little dates of that particular kind you get early it takes a really long time for it to get out of your blood so one of the things they did when you were under was plasma frees us to get rid of all the benzodiazepines so when you woke up the only good thing that had happened was you weren't taking benzodiazepines and you weren't a Cathie's 'ok we're totally screwed but you weren't a Cathie's right yes and that that was a great relief and then we went when we went to rehab center for a while in moscow that was less medical and more physiotherapy yeah oriented and for a while I couldn't I couldn't type because I couldn't remember how to put my hands on the keyboard I couldn't walk up and down stairs because I couldn't see the stairs properly I couldn't do up buttons and one night I got up to use the washroom and then came back into the my bedroom and I couldn't remember how to lay down I tried for about 40 minutes I couldn't remember the sequence of actions that would enable me to lay down so this was probably two or three in the morning I ended up calling for a nurse so that the nurse who was a very helpful person could come in and tell me how to lay down so that was very strange kind of cortical blindness so I stayed in there for what two weeks and then we went to Florida where we thought it would be sunny and easier to recover which might have been but when I was in Florida the aunt my anxiety levels were I wasn't a Cathie's ik most of the time but my anxiety levels were unbearably high and net that finally got so bad that I had family members there who were taking care of me you were there of course and Andre but also my parents my sister some friends Tammy came for a wild my son came for a while but it got to the point where it was obvious that just the care of family members no matter how well-intentioned a wouldn't be sufficient and Bea was just too much to ask of people the responsibility was too great and so that's when we you at you and Andre had been communicating with the Serbian medical clinic for about six weeks something like that and they'd been quite helpful five months okay well this is partly why we're doing this together is because I don't know all the facts at at hand yeah but they were helpful they were helpful we Andre managed to get in touch with this when it can Belgrade where it's not at least people who are treating you it's not run by a psychiatrist it's run by an anesthesiologist which seems to be how you need to be treated well it's working for it seems to be working for me at the present anyways and that's the best we've got and it's pretty good because I felt better probably I felt better see the things about the benzodiazepines too that I didn't really understand until I began to decrease their use I was very I beat had become quite isolated from my family members yeah right it was not most noticeable I would say in my relationship with my son but it was like there was a barrier up between million people it was noticeable it was noticeable I thought I thought attributed that to strange twists and turns my life had taken in the previous two or three years because there was no shortage of strangeness on that front but and then also I had two strange muscle weakness that plagued me and I now realize in retrospect that that was all a consequence of benzodiazepine use so using him well this is part of the reason we're doing this this podcaster video is well to let people know these are very widely prescribed drugs and they are not safe to take for more than two weeks or a month at the absolute maximum and if you take them longer than that and you end up addicted you're gonna or dependent which means that you'll suffer withdrawal symptoms on their cessation you are gonna be one sorry person some people you know have a better time of it when they stop their use than others but enough people have a terrible time so that it's an absolute it's a it's a medically-induced epidemic it's a complete bloody catastrophe here it's probably worse than the opiate epidemic and that's really saying something so and I don't know if I'm out of it or not you know I mean I'm I have a hard time believing how much better I feel that I did two weeks ago it's it's it doesn't seem plausible so you know it's possible all the things will just deteriorate for me again although I wouldn't I don't feel like that at the moment I feel like things are put back together in an important way fortunately one thing I've been able to continue doing through all of this as I'm writing a new book and it's due in the middle of July and that's going quite well and I was able to do that even when I was in these different clinics hospitalized in all these different clinics although I don't think I did any writing in Russia no not till the very end yeah at the very end you did before we went to Florida yep you were editing yeah well I remembered one other thing we were gonna discuss you know some people okay first of all I've had a tremendous amount of support from family members and friends like really I mentioned this earlier but it's worth mentioning again people have gone far beyond the call of duty to help me and Tami and I in the last year and a half and there's been an unbelievably massive outpouring of public support which has really taken me by surprise in some sense because you know it's one thing to be to express your condolences if you're discussing someone who like my wife is suffering from something clearly of her know of that's clearly not of her making cancer for example but a dependence is more ethically questionable right because you think well everyone thinks well you know what did the person the person obviously made some errors in choice that contributed to this and that's a reasonable objection but and despite the fact that there are many people who found that their opinions didn't align with mine let's say the proportion of negative comments I got about what I was going through was very small so that was really something but nonetheless one of the things I wanted to talk to you about today was the fact that what's the old saying physician heal thyself right I wrote a self-help book I'm a psychologist it's like well why the hell didn't I see this coming and why wasn't I more cautious and I think those are a reasonable question why should people take it well then that's the next question is why should people take anything I say seriously because of that and I guess what I would say is if you're gonna wait to learn from people who don't mistake don't make mistakes or don't have tragedy into their life you're gonna spend a long time waiting to learn something and the second thing I would say is in my lectures and my writings I've never suggested that I was anything other than one of the people who also needed to learn this lesson these lessons so I included myself in the population of people who needed some moral improvement and and then the last thing would be you you have to make that the decision about whether or not to attend to anything that I'm doing based on your own judgement about what I've done and said and if you find that that's not convincing then that's your prerogative than if you find that it's useful then well I'm delighted by that obviously and that's that that's as that's as much as there is to say well I think one of the points of doing this podcast was to inform people so that other people don't have to go through the same thing you went through because watching it from the outside was the worst thing I've ever seen definitely and hopefully educating people on the dangers of this well that's saying something cuz when you awake when they replaced your ankle last year in January oh yeah but that was like there was still an element of yes I was awake when they replaced my ankle because I was trying to avoid the general anesthesia because I didn't want the general anesthesia hangover I should have just done the general anesthesia which is something I realized when they were hammering my ankle but yeah watching you in how long you've been in pain has been significantly worse and I did want to mention too because people are going to be wondering why didn't you again why you didn't get more help in North America and one of the reasons was oh we went to Russia we successfully got dad off with benzos which to clinics in North America hadn't been able to do we did manage to do that and the damage that the benzos had caused and the detox caused was significant but there wasn't any akathisia so they brought you back to Florida because we thought there's no point in leaving you in a center somewhere right you can come back you can stay with family and we can just wait and maybe it's gonna take two two years it looked like it was gonna take a really long time if you were ever going to recover Foley we thought we'll just it'll be more comfortable in somewhere like Florida and we waited and it probably was yeah well Moscow winter was a little anxiety provoking other than the medical experience you were going through it was a little anxiety provoking so there was Florida and then the pandemic hit so we didn't we weren't really able to go anywhere and Andre and I spent months looking for a place that would take you and actually treat the neurological damage done by the benzodiazepines because this wasn't like I was when I was 17 and had my ankle and hip done I took oxycontin a high-level high dose of oxycontin for a year and getting off of that I experienced physical withdrawal no psychological withdrawal so I'm like lots of people aren't aware of the difference between psychological and physical abuse the difference between abuse and dependence yeah and physical withdrawals means your body gets used to the drug that you're on and when you take it away it's as if your body is missing something yeah so with yeah so it's actually difficult to find it's nearly impossible to find physicians that know how to treat neurological damage done by benzodiazepines it turns out we couldn't find anyone in North America and we contacted places because being treated in North America is would be easier than being treated in somewhere that the main language isn't English right and so it took us five months of negotiations to find the clinic in Belgrade where there was an anesthesiologist who could treat you and thank God that he apparently knows what he's doing and then we got here two days after we were Serbia opened so we weren't waiting around like twiddling our thumbs trying to figure out what to do with you we were actively looking for physicians that could help you but there weren't any and we were absolutely terrified that we'd bring you to a psychiatrist in North America or a center there and they'd say his anxiety is through the roof put him on benzos right and then that would have been terrible so we did look everywhere and it's been very complicated yes that's for sure and it's been very complicated and so you know maybe we've well we're confident enough that we've come out the other side of it at least to some degree that we were willing to risk making this interview this video so yeah you know the reason we're doing it apart from telling people that they should be exceptionally careful with benzodiazepine prescriptions and like a very large number of elderly people are prescribed benzodiazepines most of them women but plenty of men - and that's you do that at your peril it also increases the risk of dementia quite substantially so that's a lovely additional benefit so watch it it's it's a how strophe that benzodiazepines are being prescribed the way they are so broadly and so there's that but then also we felt that because I don't know how he'd say it because people have been party to my certain elements of my private life and me too there's perhaps that it was morally obligatory to bring people who were interested up to date on what's occurred so so far so good you know it's been nice to see you and Andre get a break for at least a couple of weeks and it's been really nice not to be terrified out of my mind for I mean in Florida the best I ever got was not petrified with anxiety but close to it yeah I had that for a few days in a row a couple of times but here and has a tremor my left hand yeah one of the things with benzodiazepine dependence is it increases your seizure risk after you stop taking them so this is how serious to give an example about how serious this physical dependency can be is for some people even on a low dose of benzodiazepines if they become dependent on it and stop they can have seizures that's how that's how intense the brain changes can be so you on each caesar increases the risk of the next one you've been at a seizure risk for six months you're still if you're not on anticonvulsants so then you have tremors everywhere and you're a seizure risk that's ridiculous for six months after taking after stopping well that's right because I completely thought it was interesting too because I was so appalled by what the benzodiazepines had done that well I I went from four milligrams a day to zero last May and that wasn't tolerable so I went back up north part of the reason you did that as people would be like why would you do that you're supposed to taper first of all if you don't know about benzodiazepines it's not obvious that you have to taper but we you have also went to a psychiatrist to deal with your worsening anxiety that you thought was mainly attributed to mom's cancer and his suggestion was triquet Amin and stopped the benzodiazepines so that was the first psychiatrist we tried yes right and we went to we saw at least five of them in different areas before we got to Russia so it's not like we didn't give North America a good try it's just you I mean you ended up you got worse and worse more psychiatrists they're generally insisted on doing was quote treating the underlying problem unquote when you when the underlying problem was benzodiazepine withdrawal not some other issue yeah they didn't know what to do with benzodiazepine withdrawal so they tried to treat something they didn't know what to do with that didn't exist yeah at least in all probability didn't exist yes you got treated by you what you went to two different clinics and then multiple other psychiatrists and they try to treat your underlying problem yes which we had to have huge arguments about no this isn't an underlying there's no underlying problem this is a benzodiazepine dependency and we need to get him off of it but he can't tolerate it because the akathisia so how do you make him more comfortable while he's waiting down and there was they had no idea what to you that's right that's was something they've been very good at this clinic yeah and advising you and me for that matter for the last few months while I've been trying to yeah my head screwed on straight again yeah they tried helping us from afar but we needed more help than that um so I guess one of the things we've learned from this is there may be ways to treat benzodiazepine withdrawal right that we're not aware of in North America that I'm aware of yes there may be ways we'll talk about this again at some point in the relatively near future aspect when we're more certain that what is happening to me now is working yeah it's only been two weeks and like it looks great I'm in way better shape sense of humors wrong you can listen to music you're writing every day yeah and I can I can write I can create not just edit yeah yeah yeah it's a real relief to get my my love for music back and that's like a switch being turned on because it was gone completely and now it's back completely very very strange so yeah so well we will talk more about what's helped if we know that it's helped yes um then we could suggest to people what might be tried in the absence of any other options what they can talk to their doctor but I'd like to reiterate you know I don't remember what I think it's one prescription either in seven or one prescription in nine in the United States is either for opiates or benzodiazepines so that's a huge obviously a huge proportion of the prescriptions and there's it's very probable that someone in your family is currently taking benzodiazepine or or will be prescribed them in the future for long enough to develop a dependence it's like people need to know this it's not good those drugs are for short-term treatment of stress induced anxiety or for surgery they are used in surgery and things right yeah but as a long-term treatment there are complete catastrophe yeah and not everybody like you know they'll be the person or two that'll say well I took them and I got off of you and that's true but if you it seems if you look at the statistics if you're older then it's harder you you're more likely to form a dependency right and maybe that's because your brain isn't as plastic maybe it takes just longer to heal from them what's also true of opiates like not everybody who takes opiates for a long period of time develops a pronounced dependence there's lots of individual variability but the risk is still extremely high mm-hmm I had people messaged me after the video and September is saying they'd gotten off of multiple drugs and that benzodiazepines had been the most difficult by far mm-hmm people with experience with opiates as well or heroin or something said benzodiazepines wasn't completely doable I'd had bouts of depression before before last fall let's say in my life and I would have to say those were among the most among the worst experiences of my life but I'd have to say that after searching long and hard for something that was worse than depression I finally discovered it in our Cathie's iya his Depression was remember we talked about that right and because you had suffered boats of depression as well as the arthritis and one definition we'd agreed on was that being depressed was like hearing that your dog had just died yeah remembering that continually and that's way yeah you thought that and there was a dog you actually like a lot you thought well that's bad but it's not nearly as bad as depression not even close right not even close I thought it was going to be as bad but then my dog died and I was like nah depression is way worse sucks the joy out of absolutely everything can't even see colors vividly like the joy out of seeing colors which you don't even think there's joyous as I did with that but right cuz well with severe depression you lose positive emotion and gain a lot of negative emotion but with this akathisia it was like all of the negative emotion associated with depression plus a very high level of anxiety plus no positive emotion at all plus the inability to ever relax even for a moment and so it was yeah I wouldn't recommend it yes watch the hell out for they're probably not your friend or if they are they're not your friend for very long yeah and one of the weird things I was prescribed lorazepam for sleep I didn't take it very often because I found it didn't work very well thank goodness but the funny thing about them especially at a low dose is they don't or they didn't for me anyway induce any type of euphoria so when you take an opiate when I took the oxycontin I didn't like it but there was some sort of high that had to do with the pain medication but with the lore as a band there was just an absence of something so I think it's probably a sneakier drug to be on right because I think that's partly why I didn't notice what it was doing to me too is that there was no immediate effect in the day of taking it I mean I stopped having that terrible reaction that we attributed to food and so that eliminated the insomnia and the anxiety but there was no noticeable effect from the benzodiazepines and so I know just never paid any attention to them and never occurred to me that they could be causing me serious long-term damage you'd also take and SSRIs for over a decade yes depressant anti-anxiety medication it turns out turns out those are not the same medications I even knew that to some degree because I knew that SSRIs the antidepressants were much more effective long-term treatments for panic disorder than benzodiazepines you know but it's quite shocking to me actually that I didn't know despite my professional specialty that I had no idea how catastrophic benzodiazepine use could be yeah well psychologists don't aren't psychiatrist psychiatrist prescribed medication psychologist counsel right but it's still useful to keep up on the relevant literature now you know yes well no I definitely I don't think I'll forget that yes so you know it's funny maybe we'll stop with this once I started to decrease my use of benzodiazepines I was never tempted to go back up except right at the beginning when I went to zero and I had to well you were gonna have a seizure yeah it wasn't good you I couldn't even communicate with you but I thought after I got out of the Russian hospital that someone even if someone put a gun to my head and said take this yeah I wouldn't well in the like I think I really think that for me that it's no overstatement that to say that for me the consequence of benzodiazepine withdrawal were worse than death so yes that's what it looked like from the a yes well it it you know you don't want to say something like that lightly you know but there were lots of times plenty of times when it would have been preferable as far as I could tell just not to be there than to experience what I was experiencing when you when you're in pain people who are in I mean being at a certain level of pain is like that right if you're walking around you know anything over really like a seven or an eight you can't stand it yeah so that's what it looked like from the outside um well the other thing that that the benzodiazepine withdrawal did that was absolutely dreadful bus produce a sense of timing distortion so this was really obvious when I first woke up in Russia like the first day that you and I could speak again you were wheeling me around in the aisle of the corridor of the intensive care unit we were gonna wheel I was gonna be wheeled around until it was time for time to eat and I must have asked you how many times in ten minutes what time it was probably every 45 seconds yeah probably something like that yeah and that's because for me it felt like you know what substantial amount of time had passed an hour or two hours something like that some terrible amount of time and so not only was I in pain and experiencing extremely high levels of anxiety the duration of time had extended so that it was really unbearable it was like the days were just lasting forever and that's thank that actually disappeared quite a bit as the akathisia disappeared and it isn't the case now thank God but it was it was brutal it's funny even now you know because it's somewhat stressful to have this conversation I can feel if I lift up my eyes my eyebrows a bit like you might when you're interested in something I can feel the tremors and tremors in my forehead and that's partly stress induced so we should probably stop talking yeah okay we can call it a day yes well was good to be able to sit here and have this conversation we're gonna go eat a steak that's the theory okay all right well thank you for talking with me wow thanks for thanks for being here it's been a healthier thanks for your help do yeah well I gonna give up and now we're in Belgrade and seem to have found an answer thank God thanks for listening I've linked everything we talked about in the description the rare type of cancer my mom had sodium metabisulfite allergy symptoms that caused the original prescription for benzos papers on paradoxical reactions to benzos benzo statistics on dependency information on akathisia something everyone to be aware of and other people's experiences with benzodiazepines what my dad went and is going through isn't as uncommon as we're told benzodiazepine withdrawal can be a life or death situation if it doesn't make the people who suffer through it so miserable they're suicidal they could be at risk for seizures many people do not make it my dad was forced to detox because the akathisia caused by the benzos was intolerable and we had to abandon the prescribed tapering approach after many excruciating months detoxing from benzos is dangerous it nearly killed him but the state the benzodiazepines had put him in was more dangerous and this isn't too uncommon most of the celebrity deaths we hear about are benzo related we're told about the opiates involved in these cases but benzos aren't as commonly mentioned Heath Ledger Amy Winehouse Michael Jackson Philip Seymour Hoffman Whitney Houston Tom Petty Anna Nicole Smith all had benzos related to their deaths when you look at what happened to these individuals you might think well that couldn't happen to me but don't be so sure we had all the resources we could have and it took us over a year to remove the drug and stabilize my dad so that he could function again and not feel like he was in hell he still has neurological damage from the benzos and it's been six months since he stopped taking them he's still at a risk for seizures fortunately we found world-class physicians who are treating him properly now it was not easy to locate these people who would have guessed they'd be in Serbia we are going to disclose what's helping my dad once we're more sure that the treatment is really working hopefully this podcast will help other people avoid the horror my family has had to experience and is still experiencing because of benzodiazepines there are hidden dragons everywhere I'm just thankful my dad is back talk to you next week you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,494,977

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, Jung, existentialism, benzodiazepine withdrawal, benzodiazepine, benzodiazepine awareness day, catatonia, delirium

Id: GzRbEMzr0k8

Length: 56min 16sec (3376 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 11 2020