In a solemn video posted to X this week, Mikhaila Peterson provided a brief update on her father, psychologist and author Jordan Peterson, revealing that the 63-year-old is now recovering at home after an extended hospital stay. However, his exact condition remains a bit cloudy.
“He’s still very unwell, but he’s not in the hospital,” Mikhaila said in the nearly five-minute clip. “I’m seeing him every day for hours, which is really nice. We’re working with great specialists and giving him more time to recover. I’m hopeful he will recover with time.”
She would go on to describe the situation as “really bad, but not as bad as it was a month ago or two months ago,” expressing some cautious optimism.
Mikhaila admitted some uncertainty about the root cause of her father’s health problems -potentially involving immune system issues, neurological complications, or a combination of both.
“We still don’t know 100% what’s going on, but we have great specialists, and we’re waiting, hoping, and praying for recovery,” She wrote in the clip’s caption.
The update video, which has garnered close to 2 million views and thousands of supportive replies in under 24 hours, comes after a year of profound challenges for the Peterson family.
Mikhaila, a health advocate herself and co-founder of Peterson Academy, along with her dad, has been candid about the toll it has taken on the family, saying that the past months have felt “otherworldly.”
She also spoke about her own recent adversity, including a difficult pregnancy and a life-threatening health scare for her now seven-month-old daughter, Audrey, who suffered idiopathic pulmonary hypertension in June but is healing well.
“Audrey, on the other hand, is doing really well. Praise God for that,” Mikhaila said.
Jordan Peterson’s health journey has been a long one, to say the least.
His troubles trace back to 2016, when an apparent autoimmune reaction to food triggered severe anxiety, leading to a prescription for clonazepam, a benzodiazepine.
His dosage allegedly escalated to a dangerous amount, according to Peterson’s own book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life, due to some family stressors – including his wife Tammy’s 2019 kidney cancer diagnosis, which initially appeared terminal but from which she has since recovered.
Attempts to taper off the medication in 2019 reportedly threw some tough withdrawal symptoms at Peterson, prompting him to enter a drug rehab facility in upstate New York.
When those efforts didn’t offer enough help, he even sought out experimental treatment in Russia in early 2020, where doctors reportedly induced a nine-day medically supervised coma to mitigate withdrawal risks. Complications allegedly quickly sprouted from that controversial treatment, including double pneumonia and sepsis, leaving him reportedly unable to speak or move independently for weeks, according to CBC News.
Peterson later developed akathisia, a debilitating neurological disorder characterized by “intense restlessness,” further sidelining him from some public speaking engagements he had previously scheduled.
This latest chapter began earlier in 2025, when Peterson was diagnosed with chronic inflammatory response syndrome (CIRS), a condition linked to mold exposure and immune dysregulation that he first identified in 2018.
Symptoms for CIRS, including unexplained neuropathy and muscle weakness, all of which had allegedly impacted Peterson for years but intensified dramatically over the summer. A flare-up occurred after he helped clear out his late father’s mold-infested basement, exacerbating neurological issues that led to polyneuropathy and myopathy.
By July, Peterson had fallen gravely ill while staying with Mikhaila and her family, requiring emergency hospitalization.
He spent nearly a month in intensive care battling pneumonia and sepsis, coming perilously close to death, according to his daughter’s October update on social media. That previous X post, viewed nearly 11 million times, painted a dark and difficult picture: slow, day-by-day recovery overshadowed by fears of a depression, possibly compounded by “a lot of bad luck” or even spiritual warfare – a nod to the biblical reference in Ephesians 6:12 that Mikhaila referenced.
In the meantime, Mikhaila highlighted her father’s quiet engagement with Peterson Academy, the online education platform she co-founded with him, where he has been reviewing courses from his bedside.
