WATCH: Jordan Peterson’s Daughter Provides Update on Dad’s Health

As you may or may not know, Jordan Peterson has been suffering from a severe illness since autumn.

Initially, he was hospitalized in serious condition.

Thankfully, his condition somewhat improved, and he was released from the hospital. But, he is still sick.

Jordan’s daughter, Mikhaila, has been periodically providing updates on her father’s condition.

If you missed it, we covered her last update here:

Jordan Peterson’s Daughter Gives Hopeful Update on His Health

Today, after several months, Mikhaila dropped another lengthy video update.

She says that they found out that Jordan is suffering from a neurological injury caused by psych medications he took years ago, which flared up after he came into contact with mold last summer.

Watch here:

We figured out that dad has a psych med induced neurological injury, and has been suffering from akathisia. It’s been 6 years since any psych medications. Last summer his symptoms started, after a flare up likely induced by mold (CIRS) and stress. It was complicated by pneumonia… pic.twitter.com/wPjAz4XsLT

— Mikhaila Peterson (@MikhailaFuller) April 18, 2026

We figured out that dad has a psych med induced neurological injury, and has been suffering from akathisia. It’s been 6 years since any psych medications. Last summer his symptoms started, after a flare up likely induced by mold (CIRS) and stress. It was complicated by pneumonia and associated sepsis a month later. It’s been horrible. Neurological injuries from psych meds are far more common than people know. I made this video to explain what they are and what akathisia is because they’re not talked about enough, they’re misdiagnosed, nearly impossible to treat, and hidden by the pharmaceutical industry. I don’t plan on making another update about my dad, it stresses my family out, and myself, and there’s nothing more to say about it until things get better. I will be jumping up and down about psych med injury awareness from now on as it’s impacted my health as well, and is devastating. Prayers are appreciated still.

For those who prefer to read, here's a full transcript:

Hey guys, this is a video update on dad's health, as well as a much longer portion of information about what he's suffering from, what a lot of people are suffering from unfortunately, and what my experience with these issues was. These updates are not fun for me. They're really stressful and I would have updated you guys sooner, but he's still been really sick and he got worse over the last few months. I'm 25 weeks pregnant and I wasn't able to record anything without weeping the whole time until this week apparently.It stresses out my whole family to talk about it online. There's no point in adding stress to an already stressful situation, except that because we're public — dad in particular — it's also stressful not talking about it because then rumors get started and that's all people wonder about. So, here goes.Dad's been suffering from an old neurological injury that's more recently been causing akathisia. Akathisia is the worst thing I've ever seen anyone go through. That sounds dramatic, but it's true. We talked about it in 2020 and 2021 when he experienced it after Klonopin injured him. I'll explain why it's an injury in a bit. I had a very brief experience with akathisia with symptoms that were extremely horrifying, but not as severe as his, when I went through antidepressant withdrawal from Lexapro just over 10 years ago. That withdrawal period that was really severe lasted two and a half years for me, where I was nearly disabled. This was kind of before I had a public thing going on — that's when I just had a blog.I've linked a bunch of papers below about everything I'm going to talk about so that people watching can get scientific background information about what this is, because it's not talked about nearly enough for how catastrophic it is in my opinion. Psych med injuries and psych meds as a whole should be considered a national emergency, given that one in six Americans (or possibly more, depending on the stat) is on one of these medications. Long-term use appears to cause mitochondrial dysfunction that manifests as a neurological injury. I'll get into more of that in a bit, too.Akathisia is a side effect that's way more common than people know, usually caused by psychiatric medications, although other medications can sometimes cause it and so can sudden cessation from those medications — that's a huge trigger. Sometimes people with Parkinson's can experience it too. It is intolerable discomfort that makes people want to crawl out of their skin. It's a neurological injury. A lot of people don't survive it and there's no quick fix, although I'll go into how we've dealt with it without videotaping me sobbing.It seems like a bunch of my sadness this week has turned into anger, which is at least more enjoyable for me. Without posting a video of me sobbing, I don't know how to describe how bad it is in words, but I'm going to take a stab at it. You guys could look up videos of other people suffering with it if you want to. It's catastrophic.Before I get into it, let me be super clear: Dad has not been on a psych medication since January 2020. This recent flare-up of neurological symptoms wasn't due to new medications. That's partly why we had no idea what was going on for about six months. We went to specialists, obviously, and it was misdiagnosed repeatedly, which is super common. Then he got pneumonia and sepsis, and obviously that's a whole thing to recover from too — and dangerous. This year's just been terrible.This recent flare-up that started last August was likely due to the stress of both of his parents (my grandparents) dying last year, moving countries, selling his home, and mold exposures, which was enough to trigger a recurrence of neurological symptoms like what he experienced in 2020 and 2021. Something we obviously didn't think was possible after five and a half years away from these psych medications. But I've talked to psychiatrists who say they have patients who experienced this.This has been unbelievably hard on my family. Every day for the last year has been hell. I haven't been posting podcasts regularly online because until a few days ago, I've cried every single day. My brother's stressed out. My mom is stressed. It's impacting so many people — and of course my dad. Mom's been such a strong person and thank God for faith. If it weren't for my dad and our love for him and the strength of our family and how we've been through so many health problems, you almost adapt. You don't, because it's too awful, but we have good communication skills and we're closer if anything now. Otherwise this would have just crushed us.I've certainly been walking around in a state of panic for almost a year now, and pregnancy hormones definitely don't help that. To make matters worse, I don't even want to mention this really because I don't want to give it any attention, but some journalist online reached out to me trying to pin dad's symptoms on stem cell treatments, which is so dumb it's hard to fathom. I responded, which was stupid — you should just never respond to a journalist. But I was like, "Hey, I really appreciate you looking into doctors, but that's not what's going on with dad. I'm going to talk about what's going on with dad, but it just isn't associated with stem cells." And he ignored me.Dad had stem cell IVs over the years a couple times to see if they could help with neurological pins and needles and pain and sensitivities and things. I had mentioned in one of my videos that last summer in June, he had a stem cell IV from a specialist. This is a specialist I don't know — he was hooked up with him from one of his friends, a great specialist, but it's not someone I'm connected to. He stayed in a moldy hotel for that treatment and that brought back symptoms. It wasn't the stem cell IV. He's had hordes of those. Trying to link the stem cell IV in June to sepsis from pneumonia in October is insane. Sepsis happens within days of an infection.So not only are we dealing with missing my dad, pregnancy for me, taking care of him, and being really sad, but we also have to deal with morons on the internet. That sucks.The problem this year likely was that because we didn't know stress and mold exposure could re-trigger old neurological injuries, it was misdiagnosed a bunch. Then medications and supplements that were used by a few of the doctors and hospitals worsened symptoms enough that it got to the point where we were like, "Oh, we know what akathisia is. Oh no."Now that we know what it is and have proper doctors, it can be carefully healed again like it has before. It is healing. So thank God for that. It's just horrifying and it's so infuriating that these sensitivities — this damage that can cause severe symptoms like this — can last for so long after stopping psych meds and then apparently be re-triggered.People online — this is another thing I'm frustrated about. If I come off as frustrated in this, I apologize. I've probably tried to channel all my sadness because I've been so sad into anger because I'm tired of being sad.Calling this neurological injury an addiction is so stupid. Dad doesn't fall into that category. We've made that clear so many times. He quit smoking and drinking when he was 27. He just isn't that. Instead, he falls into the unfortunately common category of people who were prescribed psych meds long-term. It's not like they were prescribed for no reason. Severe, crippling, life-ruining depression — the kind where you can't get off the couch for 30 years — runs in my family. It's not the kind of depression you can normally diet and exercise away, like people like to say. They like to look at depressed people and go, "Why don't you eat better and exercise more?" And it's like, "I'm in hell. You think that's going to help?"Although obviously that was before we knew about only eating meat, which did help, but in a really complicated way. Who was going to guess that? So it wasn't something you could get rid of from cutting processed foods, for instance. Myself, my dad, my grandpa, my great-grandpa had it. My great-great-grandpa was left on a doorstep, so I can't imagine he came from a very stable family.When dad started to be badly impacted by depression in the '90s — and he said he had it since he was a kid — he was impacted enough that he was having a hard time lecturing. He took an SSRI. We were told it was a genetic serotonin problem and antidepressants were basically a vitamin for a serotonin deficiency, which is still what people are told even though that has been completely debunked.When I started having symptoms when I was a kid — OCD, suicidal thoughts, extreme anxiety, anger — my psychiatrist, who was assigned to kids with autoimmune disorders (like so many people with autoimmune disorders are on psych meds), put me on Celexa at the time and that was eventually changed to Lexapro. They helped a lot initially. I thought they saved my life for years, like a life from hellish depression, and so did dad.One out of five or six people in the US is on a psychiatric medication. They're not addicts. They don't even know these medications are dependence-forming because their doctors say they're not. The dangers surrounding these medications certainly aren't well known even now. That's a large part of the reason for this video. I don't want to talk about it really, but it's happening and it's so bad that people need to know because it's not rare.Dependence-forming, to clarify that, is different than what people think of when they think of addiction. It means your brain changes to adapt to the medication. So if you pull it out, especially quickly, your brain can't handle it. It's not that you want to take it or enjoy taking it. It could be causing severe side effects. This is what happened with dad. He started getting akathisia on Klonopin, but pulling it out is impossible and it worsens it. It's a terrible situation.Apparently that differentiation between being on a psych med and being an addict is too complicated for most people, or at least for the people complaining on the internet. But I thought it should be addressed anyway.I'm someone who honestly looks at classic addicts (say, heroin) and thinks they must be suffering and it's a complicated issue and I feel bad for them. There's more to it in my opinion than someone who just took drugs and is an addict. I think there's likely physiological issues at play for classic addictions. But dad's not in that category.My experience with akathisia — for me it hit for the first time two weeks after I stopped Lexapro in 2015, after going on a ketogenic diet that I kind of randomly went on when I went on an elimination diet that just happened to be ketogenic. I cut out almost everything like meat and vegetables and that put my depression into remission. My depression went away. I could feel it go away one day about three months into the diet and I thought, "I'm never going to take another pill again," and I stopped everything.That depression, even on the Lexapro, was so debilitating that when I started doing dietary intervention, testing it out and removing things, I focused on my arthritis, which was crippling. I had joints replaced from it because I thought that was the easier thing to fix and that there was no way dietary intervention was going to touch something as severe as that depression that runs in my family. That's how you know the Lexapro wasn't fixing the depression, because I felt the depression go away on the ketogenic paleo diet I was on (kind of like meat and vegetables and a bit of fruit) while on Lexapro.So I stopped Lexapro over a two-week period, which is basically cold turkey, which was crazy after taking it for 11 years. This was 2015 and even now doctors will wean people down in two to four weeks. If you have a doctor that suggests you wean down off of a long-term psych med in two to four weeks, run. That can literally give people neurological injuries. People need to hyperbolic taper — and I have links below to it — which is roughly a 10% reduction every new dose. Sometimes that takes years and sometimes people still can't do it.I developed insane sensitivities to food, light, sound, stress, smells, chemicals, vitamins, supplements. My body freaked out. This is why I eventually started only eating meat. That wasn't for fun. It was because I was insane and getting to the meat diet took me two years to figure out and I suffered quite a bit even on the paleo and ketogenic diet during that two-and-a-half-year period.The akathisia and the bad psych med injury symptoms felt like I was overwhelmed with a sense of impending doom that was stronger than anything you can naturally feel. Last summer I was in the hospital with my newborn and we thought she was gonna die. That was the worst thing I've ever experienced. But the stress response I experienced during antidepressant withdrawal was almost hallucinogenic. It wasn't a natural stress response. It felt like I was falling into a volcano while being chased by a bear. I had the physical sensation sometimes that I was falling. There were days when the only thing that felt soothing was wrapping my arms around me, rocking back and forth, stamping my feet, or shaking my hands. It felt like severe restless legs but also in my arms and body.Everything I saw was pixelated. I couldn't see color properly. I felt like I was in the Upside Down in the show Stranger Things. I couldn't listen to music — music hurt my ears. There were days I couldn't watch TV even. I couldn't lay in bed and watch TV. I just had to lay in a dark room and try not to panic. There wasn't a comfortable position I could get into. Light hurt my eyes. Sound hurt my ears. My sense of smell was heightened. I sprouted full-on allergies to things I'd never been allergic to.At the time, I was so unaware that stopping Lexapro could cause these symptoms that I thought it was my autoimmune disorder somehow or sudden extreme food sensitivities. The main thing that flared up my neurological injury were foods and preservatives in foods.For dad, his symptoms when they got really bad years ago and more recently were more severe than that. We're not on an all-meat diet for fun. We're on an all-meat diet because we've been left with extremely long-lasting sensitivities and neurological injuries from these medications. Dad's more sensitive than me, maybe because he was older or on SSRI longer and because of the Klonopin for sure.It lasted two and a half years for me and it only started to go away when I switched from the paleo dairy-free keto diet to only eating meat. In the middle of that antidepressant withdrawal years ago, after a period of not sleeping from a reaction to a preservative called sodium metabisulfite, dad was prescribed Klonopin. Most of you guys know this. He didn't take it for fun. He took it because he hadn't slept in like three weeks.Insomnia so severe you do not sleep can be part of having a psych med-induced neurological injury. Glutamate skyrockets when GABA systems are damaged because GABA is what counteracts glutamate. Severe insomnia is discussed a lot amongst people with psych med injuries. I had a hard time sleeping for years. Even after my antidepressant withdrawal neurological injury went away with the lion diet, I still have a hard time sleeping. That's still probably my most sensitive area, although it's manageable now.Dad's doctor prescribing him Klonopin for insomnia due to the undiagnosed SSRI withdrawal (or more aptly described as neurological injury) injured him further and that's how he ended up with full-blown akathisia for about two years.I wouldn't go into all this detail except I really do want you guys to understand that as horrible as this is, what's worse is this isn't rare. People who get injured by these don't have a voice really. They're too sick to have a voice. But I've talked to and been sent stories from thousands of people that are stuck in this hell.SSRI prescriptions and benzodiazepine prescriptions long-term are super common and the majority of people who take them, especially long-term, have withdrawal or neurological injury from them. It's almost always misdiagnosed as recurrence of their symptoms because doctors will use the same words to describe it. Then these poor people end up on two or three more medications to stabilize their worsening mental illness when it's really neurological damage from the medications themselves.Most psychiatrists are completely unequipped to handle this. They don't even know about this. They certainly aren't taught about this in medical school. Most people don't know it exists. When it happens in families, a lot of the time these people are outcast because people can't understand why they're acting the way they're acting.I remember when I first took Celexa it felt like it worked. I felt my shoulders drop. I felt like I could breathe again deeply. I stopped panicking. I stopped having suicidal thoughts and my OCD disappeared. That was when I was 11. But by the time I was 13, I was certainly still depressed. I stayed on them because I thought, "Oh my gosh, if this is how I feel with medication, imagine how bad it is without it." But what ended up happening is I got more and more mentally ill over the years. I was diagnosed with bipolar type 2. Had a seizure from Wellbutrin when that was added in. Suffered from severe restless legs that was really intolerable that I thought was part of having an autoimmune disorder or something. I didn't know it was associated with SSRIs and I just ended up getting worse and worse and worse.I just always thought I would be even worse without the medications. That wasn't true. What I needed to focus on was mitochondrial health really.Mitochondrial dysfunction is like ketogenic research. In five years, it's going to be mainstream. There's mounting evidence that dementia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, long COVID, and those weird chronic diseases that people get that are hard to treat — like chronic fatigue, Lyme, POTS, MCAS — that have this large array of seemingly unrelated symptoms that include things like chronic fatigue, depression, brain fog, anxiety, chronic pain, lightheadedness, weird chemical and food sensitivities are due to mitochondrial dysfunction because that impacts your whole body and your brain. Ten percent of us by weight are mitochondria.In the previous announcement videos, I talked about how whatever was going on with dad had been diagnosed as CIRS. That's still true. He definitely has CIRS. Otherwise the mold exposures he experienced wouldn't have caused neurological symptoms. That's chronic inflammatory response syndrome and is almost like mold-induced illness. I think that the genetic predisposition to mold illness is likely what caused the severe mental illness that ran in my family that was then treated with medication.There's a biological basis for what's going on with dad and we finally know what it is. But I do think there was a spiritual element. I'd also say if mentally ill, desperate people are given medication that's supposed to ease their suffering that ends up nearly killing them when they stop or even while they're on it and then they can't stop, I would say that's evil.Have you guys heard of post-SSRI sexual dysfunction? It's way more common than people realize too. It causes seemingly permanent genital numbness and anhedonia. So emotional numbness. It makes people suicidal because they can't feel anything. And that can happen from short-term use to some people of these medications. Finasteride is one of them. SSRIs, any medication that can cause things like akathisia or PSSD — that level of suffering is evil.I think our family has been attacked spiritually because I cannot understand the level of suffering that I've been through, let alone what dad's been through and my whole family, without it making more sense through a spiritual lens. Thank God I'm a Christian.The association between CIRS (chronic inflammatory response syndrome or basically mold-induced illness), ketogenic diets like the carnivore diet, and psych med-induced neurological injury — how do they connect together? Mitochondria. Mold causes mitochondria to hibernate to protect themselves and shut down, which causes this weird array of symptoms. Psych meds cause mitochondrial dysfunction. A ketogenic diet gives mitochondria an alternate fuel that helps them heal and helps them work, which is why it's so massively useful and why we're just eating meat.I'm going to put this video out and people are going to tell me I'm reaching. But this is now well-established research. Mitochondrial dysfunction research is blowing up right now. I'm going to talk about it more on my podcast because it's promising. Understanding what's wrong is really the only way to figure out health problems.In a fit of frustration and anger at this situation and how unfair it is, I put a website together that I linked below called prescribed-harm.com, which goes into the research about psychiatric medications and what they're doing to people. If you're watching this video and have been injured by these medications, you can write your story on that website too and I'll post it. Or maybe that website will be useful to explain to family members what's going on, or doctors who don't usually know what's going on. Or leave a comment below to show people this isn't uncommon.These injured people are so hurt that they can't usually have their story told because they're just trying to survive and they're basically disabled and traumatized and gaslit and misdiagnosed.I'm going to be jumping up and down for a while about the dangers these medications produce, until things are changed or at least until it's common knowledge that people need to be aware of this before they start the medication. Pharmaceutical companies rename these neurological injuries and psych med side effects and use language to hide the symptoms. Calling akathisia "restlessness" makes me want to hurt people. There are no long-term studies on these medications, yet most people take them for more than five years and are told that they're safe or at least safer than their original mental issue.Actually, there's one long-term study, and you know what it shows? That 60% of people have a recurrence of symptoms and need to go back on the medication. They don't differentiate between recurrence and withdrawal. Withdrawal is almost always misdiagnosed as recurrence, even though the array of symptoms with withdrawal is generally way more severe and includes pain syndromes and sensitivities and new symptoms.The industry is so crooked. It's a travesty that now that there's actual solid research linking ketogenic diets to improving mental disorders — treating them, giving the brain the energy that it needs to not be sick — that this isn't first-line treatment. The carnivore diet or ketogenic diet should be first-line treatment for mental illness given they will work and actually treat the energy deficiency that's causing mental illness. Especially because these psych medications cause mitochondrial dysfunction long-term that manifests as a neurological injury and is very difficult if not impossible to treat without time and lifestyle interventions like ketogenic diet, sun, sleep, no stress — serious stress regulation.Prayers are much appreciated still. All this suffering we hope leads to more awareness so other people can avoid this. Withdrawal is a silly name for what happens to people because withdrawal should be solved by the original medication. That's not what happens here. This is a neurological injury.I don't want to promise another update. I'm grumpy and pregnant and I don't want to be on the hook publicly for another update. I don't want to talk about it. But there's light at the end of the tunnel. People need to know about these medications and what they can do to people, especially long-term, but not just long-term. They need to be aware of these before taking a medication.Check out everything I've linked below if you want. Thank you guys for listening and thank you for the support. I'm really sorry for anyone else damaged by these horrible medications, but there's hope. You can recover with time. Ketogenic diets are unbelievably helpful. It's really about avoiding making it worse because bodies and brains do want to recover.Thanks for listening and I'll see some of you on my podcast.[Then the additional segment from what appears to be Jordan Peterson:]I don't think I had any happiness at all for three years pretty much. It was dire. My wife spent a year hovering on the brink of death in a variety of different ways. Before that, my daughter had catastrophic health problems which have mostly resolved. And then I got extremely ill. So we've been in — and at the same time we were facing social pressure of like an unparalleled magnitude. People trying to bring this enterprise to a halt, I suppose that's probably the right way to think about it. Most of that time I was hoping that I would die.I've been grateful for the good things that have happened to me, but I don't think I was grateful enough before just for mundane normality. You think you don't have everything you could have and perhaps that's true, but if you can sit down and breathe, there's lots of people who don't have that.