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Marijuana Mental Health

i against i said:
the OP didn't even mention cannabis potency. he didn't ask about alcohol. he is asking for people to report cannabis's effects/perceived effects from their subjective viewpoint, so maybe let's do that.

about a year ago i had OCD really badly. weed didn't really cure me of it or help with the anxiety, but it was a nice was to calm down and get relaxed and feel happy after a day of bugging out and doing all sorts of mega time consuming stressful rituals.

a few months ago i was really depressed, severely, the worst in my life so far (and i'm chronically clinically [i.e. diagnosed by a psych] depressed since the age of about 14) brought on by a summer of smashing mdma all the time, becoming homeless and splitting up with my gf. whenever i smoked weed i would get super paranoid, and come up with all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories about my friends being out to get me. after continuing to smoke weed for a month with this happening, i faced the facts that i should stop smoking weed, as it was just screwing me up more. so i gave up for 3 months, now i'm back to normal and smoking weed gets me high in a good way again. i never really understood weed paranoia/anxiety before this but now i do, so i'd advise if this starts happening to stop smoking weed and have a look at your life and any issues you may have.
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Firstly, read the whole post, secondly, alcohol is a convenient point of comparison due to how commonly it is used and thirdly, your personal experience is just an anecdote, so hardly is proof of anything. Anyone can share some emotive sob story but it doesn't prove anything. Also I might add that depression can frequently lead to psychosis and abuse of mdma has been known to lead to people suffering from it as well, so those are two possible alternative explanations for what started it. But like I say, it's just an anecdote.

edit: there I've snipped the first bit. I suggest you actually read it rather than just skimming through the first paragraph and dismissing it.
 
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O.K I'm going to jump in and say that chronic heavy marijuana use took a huge toll on my mental health, mainly because, when I was high, I wasn't dealing with the issues that were actually causing me problems. Yeah, pot is a great TEMPORARY cure for depression, but as soon as you're (me) not high, well you're depressed again. Any pyschedelic drug can cause someone who is predisposed to mental illness to suffer from those symptoms sooner than they would had they not taken said drug.
I'm not getting dragged into the whole alcohol/weed debate, and this whole 'modern weed is twenty five times stronger' seems a little bit too high a number. But there is a lot more good weed floating around these days than there was in the 60s/70s. We have better lights, better fertiliziers and growing techniques, and more avenues to disseminate the information on growing the good shit. Not that there wasn't amazing pot back then, but ask any old hippie, and a lot of people out there, were smoking a lot of pretty shwag weed, a lot of the time. There are a few other threads in this forum about the problems weed has caused for people, it's an awful lot of anecdotal eveidence to just write off.
 
I never said there wasn't a link between cannabis and psychosis, but that's all it is. They have never proved cause and effect. This is why you can take all the anecdotes as you want and it will never prove anything.

If you go to any psychiatric ward you'll find the vast majority of schizophrenics or people suffering from psychosis smoke tobacco, but I don't see anyone warning of the dangers of tobacco or nicotine causing psychosis. Think about it.
 
This thread isn't about trying to prove anything, we're not looking to do that.
Nor is it my intention to rationalize marijuana in retrospect to other drugs...they all have their downsides.
We can talk about our personal experiences and there is no need to try and discredit that.



This thread isn't about alcohol or tobacco and we don't need to turn this into this a war against what you believe is propaganda. All this going back and forth arguing with people is just counterproductive to what actually may be a helpful thread.

I've never been to a psychiatric ward lately so I wouldn't know that the majority of people there smoke tobacco also have psychosis but I'm guessing this is just an general assumption. This thread isn't mean to go on about how tobacco effects your mental health...hints the title. I'll put that aside for a moment, maybe some people have bad experiences with tobacco but I never heard on anything quite similar to the bad times people are faced with those experiencing bad trips and/or lasting effects from smoking cannabis...its a completely different ballgame as far as that goes.
 
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Artificial Emotion said:
I never said there wasn't a link between cannabis and psychosis, but that's all it is. They have never proved cause and effect. This is why you can take all the anecdotes as you want and it will never prove anything.
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I'm with AE on most of this, and, I swear to God, I think this is about to become my new motto or some shit:

Jibult said:
Marijuana is a catalyst, not a cause, to mental health issues.
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What I mean by that, is that weed in no way causes any kind of mental health issue. It can, however, very easily speed along the onset (even temporarily, for the duration of your high) of any underlying mental health issues that you're already predisposed to for whatever reason.

Proof? Honestly, I don't have any studies that adamantly confirm this. I've come to the conclusion after a decade plus of my own habitual use, witnessing others' habitual use, reading everything I can get my hands on about substance abuse (with a preference for learning about marijuana, in particular), speaking/smoking with weed heads much older than myself and lurking then eventually participating in this harm reduction site.
 
yteek said:
This thread isn't about alcohol or tobacco and we don't need to turn this into this a war against what you believe is propaganda. All this going back and forth arguing with people is just counterproductive to what actually may be a helpful thread.

I've never been to a psychiatric ward lately so I wouldn't know that the majority of people there smoke tobacco also have psychosis but I'm guessing this is just an general assumption. This thread isn't mean to go on about how tobacco effects your mental health...hints the title. I'll put that aside for a moment, maybe some people have bad experiences with tobacco but I never heard on anything quite similar to the bad times people are faced with those experiencing bad trips and/or lasting effects from smoking cannabis...its a completely different ballgame as far as that goes.
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Nobody's making it into a thread about tobacco or alcohol. My point was that if you worrying about substances causing psychosis or schizophrenia, alcohol, which most people are familiar with, is far more of a risk than cannabis will ever be. I don't see many people talking about the alcohol-psychosis link which is telling.

As for psychiatric wards, I've been in a few and I can confirm from my own experience that most smoke. Wondering whether this was just my experience I did a bit of research into the topic and it seems that smoking is incredibly common amongst people with psychosis or schizophrenia. You may not have heard of the psychosis-tobacco link but the mere fact that you've heard about the cannabis-psychosis link and not the tobacco-psychosis link suggests that your concerns are likely to be at least partly due to media propaganda and bias and not based on reality.
 
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Rather its the direct cause of it not...I don't think it really matters.

Its like wondering what came first the chicken or the egg...no one knows but they're here now and we gotta deal with it.

Not the best example but still.

If I were to say marijuana causes feelings of joy and happiness....no one would probably argue "oh you're just predisposed to it, the weed did not cause it". I say marijuana caused something negative and thats all I hear.


Honestly though rather its a direct cause or not it still effects people for better or worst.

You were saying that you believe marijuana is a better option for your mental health...for some it isn't.

Like I said, I can take a moderate dose of cannabis and have anxiety....many people are like this.
Then I can have a few drinks and suffer nothing nearly as bad as far my mental health goes.

I know many people that suffer more negative then good from taking a dose of cannabis, then they would in comparison to a dose of any other drug or alcohol.

Thats not everybody though^
I'm not talking about a link to psychosis, marijuana hands down can create those kind of symptoms..rather you want to argue that or not.
 
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yteek said:
Rather its the direct cause of it not...I don't think it really matters.

Its like wondering what came first the chicken or the egg...no one knows but they're here now and we gotta deal with it.

Not the best example but still.

If I were to say marijuana causes feelings of joy and happiness....no one would probably argue "oh you're just predisposed to it, the weed did not cause it". I say marijuana caused something negative and thats all I hear.


Honestly though rather its a direct cause or not it still effects people for better or worst.
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Whether.... you mean whether it's a direct cause or not.

And no, I don't think marijuana causes feelings of joy/happiness or feelings of anxiousness and depression-- I'm of the opinion that marijuana amplifies whatever feelings you're already experiencing. When I'm sad, smoking weed doesn't make me happy; likewise, when I'm happy, smoking weed doesn't make me sad.

The issue we have here is that the human mind is complex enough to experience multiple, sometimes contradictory feelings at the same time. To simplify it, you can be happy about just landing a new job and, at the same time, saddened because your girlfriend just dumped you without a legitimate reason. Smoking weed is likely to bring one of those feelings to the front of your mind and allow it to dominate your psyche, even if it wasn't the dominant thought before you decided to go smoke some weed.
 
i against i said:
the OP asked for personal anecdotes you incredibly grating person.
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Okay, I smoked weed while I was happy once and it made me more happy.

Another time I was pretty sad and my buddy handed me a joint and it made me more sad.



Better?
 
Well you have been nothing but counter productive to this whole thread..you've just turned into a big argument instead of a productive discussion.
 
yteek said:
Well you have been nothing but counter productive to this whole thread..you've just turned into a big argument instead of a productive discussion.
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Actually, if it weren't for him you'd probably still be looking at a thread with hundreds of views but zero replies... I think he did your topic some justice by bringing another viewpoint to it.

Just my $0.02.
 
i against i said:
saying you sound like you are 12yo and calling you grating for repeatedly misreading posts and constantly going off topic, calling what the OP asked for "emotive sob storys" is "below the belt insult"? crybaby
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Considering he didn't call you a "little bitch who just can't handle his shit," and instead tried to reason and converse, yeah, I'd say it's a bit out of line to start throwing insults around all willynilly-like.


(I like coming on BL after a few hours of drinking. It's more entertaining than usual. =D)
 
Big man with a big dick in his hands (I'm talking about me, and it's my own genitalia... just to clear any confusion up).
 
Artificial Emotion said:
If you go to any psychiatric ward you'll find the vast majority of schizophrenics or people suffering from psychosis smoke tobacco, but I don't see anyone warning of the dangers of tobacco or nicotine causing psychosis. Think about it.
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Umm, many people with mental illness do rely on nicotine--which is theorized to suppress the symptoms of mental illness rather than catalyze it. In addition comparisons with weed to alcohol regarding anxiety are moot--alcohol has a GABAergic action, killing anxiety swiftly [right along with a hefty amount of brain cells--where on the other hand marijuana has been shown to do the opposite].

Marijuana [along with other drug use and abuse] is highly prevalent among those with mental illness--but are we looking at a cause, effect, or some sort of complex feedback loop of behavior and consequence?

Using a "most people who smoke marijuana are fine" line of reasoning is an abuse of the availability heuristic to assess the health affects of marijuana. In addition, mental health and cannabis use is a topic regarding much longer term effects than the short term effects profile which we can all agree to be pretty innocuous.

The reality is that this argument/topic is pretty biased from many standpoints--from users who turn a blind eye to some of the aspects of use [addiction, respiratory health, etc.] to the people doing research on it with money from certain interests, and even the narrow minded people who refuse to even consider the issue.


My view from experience and observation is that marijuana reinforces complacency and sometimes anti-social behavior with heavy use--both of which can be arguably detrimental to one's personality and health--and, while safe for most people, marijuana use can catalyze the development of mental illness (which arises in young adulthood, the largest proportion of marijuana users].
 
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