Link between pot, psychosis goes both ways in kids

sekio

sekio

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(Reuters Health) - Marijuana (cannabis) use may be linked to the development of psychotic symptoms in teens - but the reverse could also be true: psychosis in adolescents may be linked to later pot use, according to a new Dutch study.

"We have focused mainly on temporal order; is it the chicken or the egg? As the study shows, it is a bidirectional relationship," wrote the study's lead author Merel Griffith-Lendering, a doctoral candidate at Leiden University in The Netherlands, in an email to Reuters Health.

Previous research established links between marijuana and psychosis, but scientists questioned whether pot use increased the risk of mental illness, or whether people were using pot to ease their psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions.

"What is interesting in this study is that both processes are going on at the same time," said Dr. Gregory Seeger, medical director for addiction services at Rochester General Hospital in upstate New York.
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http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/25/us-kids-psychosis-idUSBRE8BO07D20121225

Findings

Significant associations (r=.12-.23) were observed between psychosis vulnerability and cannabis use at all assessments. Also, cannabis use at age 16 predicted psychosis vulnerability at age 19 (z=2.6, p<.05). Furthermore, psychosis vulnerability at ages 13 (z=2.0, p<.05) and 16 (z=3.0, p<.05) predicted cannabis use at, respectively, ages 16 and 19.
Conclusions

Cannabis use predicts psychosis vulnerability in adolescents, and vice versa which suggests that there is a bi-directional causal association between the two.
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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.12050/abstract
 
so if you smoke pot when you are a kid you will end up crazy and older pot smokers were driven to smoke pot because they were already crazy....yay science. :)
 
No, the two are interrrelated in that if you use cannabis at age 16 you will be more predisposed to psychosis, and if you are diagnosed predisposed to psychosis at a young age then it is likely you will use cannabis late in life.

A Slashdot post summed it up pretty well. This study basically confirms two long standing myths.
1. Cannabis use at a young age is probably not good for you, mental-health wise.
2. Some people with a predisposition to mental illness will try to self medicate.
 
This is not news to anyone who works in healthcare. Still, this finding pisses me off every time I hear it, not because it's untrue, but because it's often presented in a way that baits less scientifically literate people to conflate correlation with causation.

Foreigner's point is a good one to remember. The vast majority of people who use marijuana, including frequently and heavily, will never have a psychotic break.

I remember in that recent article about the Israeli scientists who've developed a strain of marijuana with no THC and all CBD, that they found CBD alone actually has anxiolytic and antipsychotic properties. My working theory is that people with psychotic disorders, latent or active, get a faint taste of this soothing property when they smoke conventional marijuana, especially CBD-heavy strains, and are willing to tolerate the THC temporarily exacerbating certain psychotic symptoms, in exchange for (in their opinion) some of the more bothersome symptoms of psychosis being ameliorated.

Also, I've said it before and I'll say it again: Marijuana is not for kids. Period.
 
http://www.reuters.com/ said:
As the study shows, it is a bidirectional relationship
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i wonder what the difference is between a relationship and a bidirectional relationship..
 
sekio said:
A Slashdot post summed it up pretty well. This study basically confirms two long standing myths.
1. Cannabis use at a young age is probably not good for you, mental-health wise.
2. Some people with a predisposition to mental illness will try to self medicate.
Click to expand...

No longer myths then I guess
 
trees_please said:
i wonder what the difference is between a relationship and a bidirectional relationship..
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Relationship suggest that one attribute may have causality in another, but a bidirectional relationship is exactly that: each attribute by itself may have the tendency to bring about the other. In this case, Sekio's slashdot summary is perfect:
A Slashdot post summed it up pretty well. This study basically confirms two long standing myths.
1. Cannabis use at a young age is probably not good for you, mental-health wise.
2. Some people with a predisposition to mental illness will try to self medicate.
Click to expand...
 
yea i was being somewhat sarcastic. the definition itself is pretty self-explanatory, i just think the authors choice of rhetoric made him sound very douche-like.

and this study doesnt prove shit.. its a chicken and the egg argument. i dont believe cannabinoids or psychosis are understood well enough for this study to be conclusive.
 
this study doesnt prove shit.
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Sure, it doesn't prove any mechanistic underlying link between cannabis use and psychosis, but they do observe an association. Openly shitting on a study where all the researchers are doing is observing a large sample size (n>200) isn't very productive.
 
yes, they observe an association. and thats about it as far as im concerned (great job, guys). the link between marijuana and mental illness has been studied hundreds of times, yet i do not believe anyone can make a definitive statement about it. as said before, it really seems like a chicken and egg argument. seeing as we do not fully understand the mechanics behind mental illness..
 
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