You have these cells in your brain called Microglia. They are responsible for cleaning up neurons and plaques and other weird proteins. These Microglia are activated by the firing neurons which release 2-AG and AEA (Anadamide). AEA binds to the CB1 receptor in these Microglia. 2-AG binds to CB2. THC binds to CB1. CBD binds to CB2.
Autistic adults have significantly low blood serum levels of AEA. Autistic people’s neurons prune slower. Schizophrenic people’s neurons prune faster.
It seems the ECS system is the principal driving mechanism behind both conditions. We need a lot more research in this area, but it could be THC has a positive neurological affect on Autistic people whereas finding a blocker for AEA binding on Microglia may result in a positive neurological affect on Schizophrenic people.
The next few years will be especially interesting.
Empirically (based on my own observations) I've known for decades that weed induced episodes in schizophrenic people. I didn't know it was helpful for autistic people.
On the same (personal observation) basis, I'd say that schizophrenic people are drawn to cannabis. I have no idea why; perhaps because they're often very marginalized and precarious.
If the definition of disease is any condition that puts you in a state of dis-ease, then a drug that promotes a state of ease would be a valid treatment!
> schizophrenic people are drawn to cannabis. I have no idea why
I think that there are a number of reasons for this. CBD, exploration/play of mental states, and the hundred+ other cannabinoids may all be a factor.
First, cannabis can contain CBD, which has strong, known anti anxiety and anti-psychotic effects. Couldn't a person vulnerable to episodes recognize this effect when enjoying a higher CBD strain, then seek it out again?
It is very unfortunate for these people that prohibition selected for high THC, low CBD strains.
Second, it can be a great benefit to know, from experience, that smoking a herb can bring on near-psychosis. Certainly, some people try to get a handle on their condition by 'playing' with it in this way.
Learning about the physical feelings and clues that go along with the early stages of an episode may help in some way to feel in control, and even learn to recognize and change the course of a budding episode.
Again, it is more than unfortunate that prohibition and propaganda have prevented any real exploration of these possibilities. For thousands of years shamans have played with mental states, and it was seen as not just positive but necessary.
It is too often seen as heresy if you suggest that psychosis doesn't actually need to be treated with hardcore pharmaceuticals, for life. I do believe though that it could - at least sometimes - be better treated as a mental state which can be self-recognized, and integrated.
Third, cannabis contains hundreds of cannabinoids other than THC and CBD. Some of these may have positive effects on all sorts of things related to schizophrenia and psychosis - mood, humour, insight, metabolism, gut health, etc.
Studies which only examine THC and CBD in isolation can only ever understand so much - these interactions may be a lot more complex than we commonly guess.
Ah, the old shaman argument. The dude living in an essentially black-and-white wasteland up north with months of darkness. He strongly believes in the need to go consult the ancestors, moves in a hypnotic fashion, beats a monotone rythm on the drum for hours staring into a fire. And thus needs a minuscule plant-based push to have a profound experience. And still the old stories always have the element of being very careful and struggling to return from the other side. And then there’s a modern everyday flashing-lights-and-technicolor life kind of dude just looking to have some fun. The context is too different for “they did it thus it’s natural” argument to work.
I don't think you understand my argument - and I certainly don't understand yours.
My argument is wholly secular and realistic. It's summed up as 'exploration/play of mental states', which applies even to your flashing-lights-and-technicolor straw-man.
It doesn't rely on 'hypnotic movements' or 'rhythmic drumming'; or a monomyth, or cultural surroundings, or 'they did it thus it's natural'. Or flashing lights, or wastelands, or ancestral visions, etc.
Perhaps you could read my comment again, with a little more care and a lot less caricature.
My understanding is that schizophernia is a predisposed condition. Cannabis can trigger it but not really cause it. (That's at least what I got from talking to a professional). One clue to find out whether you are predisposed is if you have someone in the family (related genetically) who has at-birth mental health issues. Then stay a gazillion miles clear of any drugs.
Your analogy isn't equivalent to what was said. To be 1-1 with the OP, you'd be arguing that the lighter caused something to be flammable. Causing a *fire* is something else.
Similarly someone can be schizophrenic but have an *episode* caused by weed. The weed didn't make them schizophrenic but it did cause an episode to happen.
Sometimes, but not always. In chemistry, catalysts can help initiate or facilitate chemical reactions, but there is often another input required to kick start the process (e.g. heat). A catalyst won't do anything if there are other things missing.
We know that cannabis can act as a catalyst for schizophrenia, but we also know that not everyone who is predisposed to schizophrenia develops it 100% of the time after cannabis use. There are degrees of predisposition, and a bunch of other factors that contribute to this.
Marijuana causing schizophrenia would be easy to determine if nobody was schizophrenic before the reefer. Before then they were just possessed by demons.
I think it's just that schizophrenic people are often depressed, and depressed people are drawn to drugs in order to alleviate the negative feelings, one of the drugs being cannabis.
Schizophrenic people are also very often smokers, but there's a good reason for this; nicotine is actually a very effective treatment for schizophrenia symptoms, better than the actual medicines.
These are all group-level findings, meaning they aren't true for every individual. You can do a study and find that there is a statistically significant difference in mean X between two samples – autistic vs control or schizophrenic vs control. But pretty much always, although there is a statistically significant difference in the mean, the two samples overlap – which is consistent with this being a factor which only explains some of the cases.
> It seems the ECS system is the principal driving mechanism behind both conditions.
Claims like that ("the principal driving mechanism behind psychiatric diagnosis X is biological difference Y") have been made many times before, and few of them have gone anywhere. I'd be surprised if this one turns out differently.
Both autism and schizophrenia are bundles of different conditions which we've grouped together on the basis of nothing more than overlapping systems. Two people can both have "autism", yet at a biological level they've got two completely different things. The same applies for two people with "schizophrenia". This is why a number of researchers have been arguing that diagnosis-centric research is a dead-end.
I wouldn't be surprised if ECS system issues (or any other system in the brain) turn out to be the cause of some cases of autism and some cases of schizophrenia; but there will be other cases of both in which it isn't the "principal driving mechanism" at all.
You know whats really interesting? Autism and Schizophrenia used to refer to the same condition. The term "autism" was invented by Bleuler, who worked with Freud, as a shortened version of his "autoerotism" and referred to a state where a patient was totally absorbed in their own fantasies to the point of hallucinating them. This becomes clear if you look at Jung's "introvert/extrovert" dichotomy (Jung, who worked in Bleuler's lab!), where someone extremely introverted could be BOTH autistic--not communicating with others--and schizophrenic--absorbed in their own fantasies, not concerned with the real world.
Now, clearly, mainstream psychology disassociated these terms sometime in the 60s, when the goal with autism diagnoses was moreso to find and identify "abnormal" children (Hans Asperger famously used Autism diagnoses to euthanize children, that's who "Asperger's Syndrome" is named after!), and Schizophrenia gained its own separate classification. But its interesting to note that there was a time when social disaffection in general was considered a single set of disorders.
> (Hans Asperger famously used Autism diagnoses to euthanize children, that's who "Asperger's Syndrome" is named after!)
Asperger was assigned to identify autistic children for exterminatiom, but mafe the case that certain ones were useful to the Reich, which is why “Asperger’s Syndrome” became the name for the manifestation of autism that was seen as a leader impairmemt.
He wasn't assigned to identify "autistic children" specifically for extermination. Hans Asperger was a psychiatrist. Psychiatrists in Nazi Germany (post-Anschluss Austria in his case) were expected to evaluate all of their patients for potential extermination, children included. Some psychiatrists refused to cooperate with the regime, at great personal cost to themselves. Other psychiatrists signed up to become enthusiastic members of the Nazi Party. Asperger chose a middle path – he chose not to join the NSDAP, but he joined some of their affiliated organisations; he chose to cooperate with the regime, and be supportive of it–not in an overly enthusiastic way, but with sufficient enthusiasm to ensure his Nazi superiors would not stand in the way of his career advancement.
He did successfully argue that some more intelligent children should be spared, on the grounds they had unique skills which could be valuable to the regime. However, less intelligent children, he was happy to refer to be murdered (in most cases without the knowledge or consent of their parents). He wasn't evil in the way in which many devout Nazis were, just in the more banal way of the many who collaborated in the regime's crimes out of personal self-interest, or through coming to believe its propaganda.
I'm certainly not trying to defend the guy. If anything, I think a lot of people in the "autism community" want to defend him (even if only to a degree), in part because they feel some emotional attachment to the label of "Asperger's" and are trying to shoot down the argument "we shouldn't use that label because it is named after a Nazi collaborator"
For all of Asperger's sins, he was too humble to actually name a disorder after himself – he called his disorder "autistic psychopathy". Lorna Wing renamed it after him, because the word "psychopath" had become very stigmatised, and Asperger was using it in an older and broader sense than current discussions of "psychopathy", which is prone to confuse the uneducated layperson. Wing was actually one of the people trying to defend Asperger–before her death, she wasn't aware of the further historical research published on this topic after she died, and who knows whether she would have revised her position if she'd lived to see that–it is understandable she'd want to defend one of the major decisions of her career–and she was (at best) dimly aware of this aspect of Asperger's history when she made that decision
I will admit to myself sometimes using "Aspergian" in describing some of my own personality traits, not because I necessarily agree with the term, but simply because it is a useful shorthand which my listener is likely to understand, and as much as I'd love to dump all these details and more on them, it risks overwhelming their time, attention and comprehension
I myself am of two minds about it. On the one hand, I'm very appreciative of shows like Extraordinary Attorney Woo and the contemporary diagnostic criteria which does seem to assist many people who otherwise wouldn't get very far in this world. There is definitely some sort of disorder called "autism," and you know it when you see it.
On the other hand, Autism Spectrum Disorder basically doesn't exist, it was designed specifically to cover as many possible definitions of Autism such that nearly anyone, under the right circumstances, could be labeled as Autistic and be given expensive treatment, and I think there is something dangerous in people self-identifying with this label as it only feeds into the larger psychiatry-industrial complex. It's similar to depression--some people legit can't get out of bed in the morning, but the drugs we use to treat it are handed out like candy, are not approved to be used for the terms that they are, and don't even perform better than a placebo.
The problem isn't that some people are "neurodivergent" and others aren't, and neurodivergent people shouldn't be ashamed and should embrace their label. The problem is that everyone is neurodivergent--everyone is "perverse," as Freud famously elucidates in his theory--its just that those who are labeled as "other" under the system get exploited, and everyone else, for fear of the same fate, hide all their psychological proclivities from everyone except from their most intimate acquaintances. And there are some who are lucky enough to avoid both fates, but they are rare among the ruling class, and the commonality of ostensible abnormal psychology among the working class is considered a "problem" to be solved by endless mental health facilities, treatment programs, etc. meanwhile the real pains of being a working class American forces many into addiction, and what they are offered can do nothing much to alleviate the underlying problems which led them there (often times problems, as in the case of the opioid crisis, generated by the very corporate structure which also drives people to treatment for their addiction).
I learned about all what you discuss because I wanted to find a genealogy of "Autism" as a why of critiquing it as a medical category. But I don't know, as I said there is definitely some constellation of symptoms and ways of treating them that would fall under an Autism diagnoses, its just that how such a diagnoses came to exist was not through some pure empirical scientific process but a historical, social process that can't be disassociated from the other socio-economic realities.
He criticises the "autism spectrum" saying that it "is a convention that changes over time and belongs more to the history of science than neurobiology" (a rather scathing remark but put it in an understated way)
On the other hand, he insists that "prototypical autism" should be retained as a real target of scientific investigation, and he proposes that our failure to discover its causes (despite immense research funding into the project) is largely due to going astray by broadening its definition (through the "autism spectrum") to the point that it is approaching meaninglessness
For a different viewpoint, see Lynn Waterhouse et al – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40489-016-0085-x – who argue the whole category of "autism" (whether a broad "autism spectrum" or a narrow "prototypical autism") is a dead-end, and researchers ought to abandon it and look for new concepts to replace it with. In her book, she proposes (as a temporary measure) replacing "autism" with phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment – which unlike "autism"/"ASD", are only defined in terms of deficits in the social communication domain, but allows those deficits to coexist with deficits in other domains (repetitive behaviours, restricted interests, impulsivity, attention deficits, dyspraxia, dyslexia, epilepsy, intellectual disability, etc)
And then there's Sami Timimi et al's book "The Myth of Autism" which, as well as criticising the science of "autism" (as Waterhouse and, to a lesser degree, Mottron do), goes beyond that to criticising it as a cultural construct, arguing that the harm it causes outweighs its benefits
> The problem isn't that some people are "neurodivergent" and others aren't, and neurodivergent people shouldn't be ashamed and should embrace their label. The problem is that everyone is neurodivergent
> This is why a number of researchers have been arguing that diagnosis-centric research is a dead-end.
Just sounds like they've been diagnosing by symptom because they didn't know the actual etiology. Once it's known shouldn't they just change the diagnosis to be the new, more specific condition? Seems like diagnosis is still the goal?
> Just sounds like they've been diagnosing by symptom because they didn't know the actual etiology. Once it's known shouldn't they just change the diagnosis to be the new, more specific condition? Seems like diagnosis is still the goal?
Well, we don't know the aetiology (in most cases), so while restructuring diagnosis on the basis of aetiology is defensible as a long-term goal, we are nowhere being able to achieve that yet. The argument is, designing research around the current symptom-focused diagnostic categories is blocking progress in research. Two people with the same diagnostic label may have completely different aetiologies, two people with the same aetiology may have completely different labels, two people with the same aetiology one of them may have a label and the other may have none – the same underlying brain dysfunction may manifest with very different symptoms in different individuals, depending on its interaction with other biological factors, and their social environment. If we want to understand "what's really going on", it can be better to put everyone in the same sample (both diagnosed with various diagnoses and undiagnosed), then look for patterns in that big sample. I think this paper is a great example of doing that, with the help of machine learning – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-019-0631-2 – but it needs replication.
"it could be THC has a positive neurological affect on Autistic people". Or it could be not.
I have autism. Tho I didn't know it back then. I've had multiple minor psychoses from using marihuana recreationally. I know they're minor (with one on the mediocre side) because I've also had a longer episode likely related to stress. Oh, and marihuana was decriminalized back then. From my perspective, the last thing I need, is THC, and your post hasn't convinced me otherwise.
Also, take note of the headline. It mentions men. So for about 50% of society, its unknown. Actually, the reach is even lower, as they looked into men aged 21-30.
Honestly, if I compare marihuana to psilocybin I'd say the latter is more predictable. But either way, it all has to be standardized. Recreational usage of marihuana is not, and this is problematic, even though it is decriminalized here (and has been for many decades here). The fact people cannot buy psilo's anymore here shivers me in that regard; they either grow their own (not standardized) or have to resort to things like truffles.
Nice guy, probably on the spectrum, started smoking weed to help him chill out in social situations. Turned into a heavy user.
Few years later he ended up hospitalized due to psychosis, ended up on schizophrenia meds. Spend 2 years working a shit job medicated up to his eyeballs, smoking weed regularly.
He met a girl after I wanna say ~2 years and got off the weed... and didn't have a lick of psychosis. Eventually got off the meds, working a job just fine, does a lot of mountain biking. Can't say what he's doing now but when me and the ex split he'd basically turned his life around, and it was mostly due to getting lots of exercise and cutting out the marijuana.
Some studies find that "schizophrenia runs in lower average IQ families, autism runs in higher average IQ families", from which some suggest that the autism-vs-schizophrenia distinction is grounded in a higher-vs-lower IQ distinction – see e.g. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927579/ – but I think that kind of research is very speculative and needs to be taken with a large grain of salt
Other researchers suggest the boundary between autism and schizophrenia is weaker than is commonly supposed. Common diagnostic tests for ASD perform poorly in distinguishing it from schizophrenia; there is heightened prevalence of each condition among those diagnosed with the other; autism started out as a new name for childhood-onset schizophrenia (in fact the word "autistic" was originally coined to describe schizophrenia), and there is still a lot of dispute about what is the difference between autism and childhood-onset schizophrenia (the former is much more common than the later–subclinical hallucinations are common in children, but clinically significant psychotic symptoms are quite rare)
there is a theory along these lines. something like: the defense against the unconscious is so strong in autism that the person becomes rigid and shut off. the defense against the unconscious is so weak in schizophrenia that the person is overwhelmed with phenomena. but both have something to do with intense unconscious objects.
I found this (relatively) recently published article reviewing Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias which is the book where he first publishes the terms "Schizophrenia" and "Autism." Though Bleuler was using the words with his colleagues starting a few years earlier. (Cf. Freud-Jung Correspondences, May 1907[0], you can ctrl-f "autism,""schizophrenia," etc.)
Some scientists suggest that schizophrenia is the human equivalent of domestication syndrome. Autism is also seen as a type of anti/counter domestication syndrome.
There also needs to be an analysis on higher level brain functions as well.
Delusions of persecution are the most common form of schizophrenia. But drug users are indeed persecuted. Perhaps has no effect, but I could imagine it to be relevant if you constantly have to hide your usage. It certainly is not helpful.
This is a review not a study. It is designed to give you a broad view of current areas of active research. It does not validate any of the research it discusses. It just says “this is what is out there”.
Interestingly, the journal article doesn't bother to mention how cannabis use disorder (CUD) is defined; however, Bloomberg's description "frequent use despite negative consequences" is essentially that of the DSM, and so is presumably what they're using.
That is - not based any particular rate of consumption (which is of course difficult to measure reliably, especially in prohibitionist countries like Denmark). But "continued use despite negative consequences".
And that seems to be the crux of the matter: what the article is saying, basically, is that "people who continue to use despite negative consequences ... continue to suffer negative consequences." Which is rather different from: "Heavy use, by itself, brings these consequences."
> Interestingly, the journal article doesn't bother to mention how cannabis use disorder (CUD) is defined; however, Bloomberg's description "frequent use despite negative consequences" is essentially that of the DSM, and so is presumably what they're using.
Yes, it does: "CUD was identified in the same registers and supplemented with the somatic part of the National Patient Register, defined as ICD-8 code 304.5 and ICD-10 code F12.X." 304.5 is the diagnostic code for CUD. We can infer that a person with CUD themselves have considered their cannabis use to be problematic. Otherwise they wouldn't have been diagnosed.
I'll save everyone a click: yes, this is a case of 'correlation != causation'. We know extremely well, for a fact, that at least a good chunk of the SCZ/marijuana use relationship is confounded/reverse causation. The authors do little to improve over the known-wrong simple correlation strategy.
This is especially lame when they have access to the Danish population registry with its rich metadata and very large _n_, and could so easily control for a lot of confounds, by doing within-family comparisons. (Spoilers: the correlations would shrink a lot if you compare siblings or better yet, twins. Tip to the authors if you're reading this: 'controlling for parental history of schizophrenia', for something as rare as schizophrenia where so few are diagnosed but will still be carrying heavy liability, doesn't control for genetic factors.) They could have done some actual science, and contributed some knowledge; instead, all they did was waste everyone's time by contributing yet another meaningless highly-confounded piece of research to add to the pile of other equally useless correlates on SCZ/marijuana, a pile which did not need increasing. What a waste.
I'll save everyone a click: yes, this is a case of 'correlation != causation'.
The authors (whose freshman stats classes were presumably as good as yours) were evidently well aware of this distinction - which is why they took the trouble to say 'association' rather than 'causation' in the title.
No, my pedantry is not misplaced. Let me again repeat: we know the correlate is confounded. This isn't a hypothetical. It is a known fact established from many different methods triangulating the same result: the naive SCZ/marijuana correlation is confounded, and quite substantially so. Their entire analysis is predicated on an assumption which is substantially false. And I agree they know what they're doing, which is why it makes me so angry to read their paper and I am criticizing them personally and not simply raising a technical point: they know they are peddling bullshit, and at best, they want to believe, and at worst, they are cynically manufacturing scary media-friendly results they know will be cited more than the results they should have published, 'the SCZ/marijuana relationship was attenuated by over half when we ran the standard within-family analysis on the population register like we should have, yet again demonstrating how confounded it is and how hard it will be to infer any causality, sad to say for those looking for a quick hit of scary controversy and reason to ban marijuana'.
The authors themselves cover up and ignore the many past results demonstrating confounding, fail to do better when they so easily could have, and then have the sheer unmitigated chutzpah, the incredible gal, to just say "assuming causality" right in the abstract to immediately start advertising huge inflammatory claims like "one-fifth of cases of schizophrenia among young males might be prevented by averting CUD." (again, from the abstract, and repeated throughout). Yes, and 'assuming the moon is made of cheese', we could save a ton on moon base supplies and might avert one-fifth of moon base costs by mining the cheese... But I don't advise going to the media about your exciting new research about how NASA could trim its budgets.
I don't blame the people reporting on this for getting it wrong, when the authors spin it so hard that a CD would explode.
Okay then - I agree with you that wording in the article seems rather shifty on this point. Like the way they start off in the title using neutral language, but then throughout the article they do seem to be spinning in such a way that it seems they want the reader to feel that in fact the relation is (or "may be") mostly causative. And that, for not addressing the elephant in the room (the correlative confound) overall the article can be said to be somewhat disappointing.
What I'm not so sure about is to what extent we can, starting from that -- make inferences about the authors' broader motives, or to speak of their "gall" and how unmitigated it was. And frankly, I don't particularly care.
Not that you shouldn't care, though. But if you want to criticize them "personally", perhaps a letter to the original journal would do the trick? Or at least get it it of your system? Because I kind of doubt they're taking the trouble to dig into the fine print of this thread, or to otherwise allow their morning coffee ritual to be upended by this withering analysis of yours.
I wonder if this is the norm of scientific research nowadays. I mean, not the top 20% of useful researches but the bottom 80% that do not turn out to be useful immediately. We have too many scientists hungry for publications and citations so they can get funding and make a living, which means they have an incentive that distracts them from actual research.
How is 'negative consequences' defined? I think its interesting that young males experience it more than young females, but it does make me wonder if 'negative consequences' is a boundary defined by society that these young males are choosing to ignore and thereby self selecting into another hazily defined illness.
Oh that's interesting. I thought the linked review study was what they were referencing. Why would they reference a study as the basis for the entire article without linking to it? .-.
This really seems like bad journalism for the sake of clickbait.
It feels like I see this a lot more recently and not just with science articles. Someone will write an entire article about a subject and never provide enough information for anyone to reach any informed opinion about it at all.
It might be an article about a controversial statement someone made, but they'll never quote or link to what was actually said and instead only talk about the drama surrounding it. When the article is about the text of a proposed law, the law is rarely linked to and is often not even named. It feels like I see way more links to random people's tweets from news sources than links to actual sources. I guess commentary gets more clicks than content, but I the content is what actually matters and is usually what I'm interested in.
> "people who continue to use despite negative consequences ... continue to suffer negative consequences."
That's an inaccurate paraphrase. What they're saying is that people who continue to use despite negative consequences are more likely to suffer this particular negative consequence. Not as strong a statement as the headline, perhaps, but also not as weak as your misparaphrase.
Indeed. Shameful level of journalism. Every time I see reporting relating to health science I expect this and it is generally the case, it is so disappointing.
There's a really interesting line of research that suggests Schizophrenia is a spectrum, rather than a binary. Lots of people have personality traits that are similar to schizophrenics or have genetic risk factors for the condition. Some of those people develop the full disorder, and some don't.
There's evidence that the reason for the split is that psychosis is itself damaging. Once someone has a psychotic episode, they are much likelier to have more. But the earlier a psychotic episode is interrupted, by anti-psychotics or therapy, the better outcomes are. So the implication is that many people have some degree of vulnerability to schizophrenia, and only those who have psychotic breaks develop the full condition.
That's a possible causal explanation for a link between marijuana and schizophrenia. Someone who's got some vulnerability to psychosis, but wouldn't otherwise have developed schizophrenia, might be pushed over the edge by heavy drug use. This jives also with anecdotal reports of people who've had really terrible reactions to other psychedelics.
There's a fascinating account by a psychologist who's also schizophrenic. He didn't have his first psychotic break until he was 33, far later than average. He talks about the personality traits of schizophrenics, how he noticed something was off and got early therapy, and how he credits that with delaying a psychotic break and improving his outcomes.
Psychosis can do a lot of damage. I had a 4-month-long psychotic break that eventually led to me being diagnosed bipolar.
It several years to recover from but I think some of the damage is permanent. I feel like I've lost a lot of memory function but I can't remember what things were like before. And it's difficult to separate that out from medication side-effects at this point.
What I do know is caffeine gives me panic attacks now (even decaf coffee is too much) and I can't function well enough to hold a job without medication.
I had an approx 2 month long psychotic episode (its hard to note when it ended as, at least in my case, it kinda winds down so its not binary). Regarding memory, there's MS, autism, and schizophrenia in my family, and I've become older (the episode is now 10+ years ago). There are certain coffee blends which I really dislike, but I can still drink coffee, though not in the evening (insomnia).
During pregnancy (common), but continuing after birth of our first child (rare?), my wife no longer could handle with coffee with caffeine. She tried, but no it does not work.
I'm skipping on alcohol however, I quit that, it makes me too damn tired. Even one dosage has that effect. I cannot stand it anymore. And its not that I dislike the effect. On the contrary, though I limited usage before. Furthermore, I'm prone to addiction/obsessive behavior, it runs in the family somewhat (as part of hyperfocus of autism, I suspect). Nowadays, I can feel a bonbon with alcohol, or tiramisu with alcohol. I really ought to say no to such, too.
Long story short I cannot summarize all of this but I do have a remaining question: I'm curious how you're dealing with alcohol usage.
I don’t drink alcohol anymore because it mixes badly with my medication.
A single, tiny sip of scotch hits me fast. I immediately start feeling depressed and irritable. Even a couple sips of 2% beer has a noticeable effect for half an hour. It’s incredibly unpleasant.
It’s no great loss because I didn’t drink much before. I do miss scotch though.
Yeah, similar (Fluoxetine, which greatly helps me against irritability), but even before medication I was sensitive to it (though I'd like to think I was best dealing with it around age of 20-25?). I tried dealing with it by taking small sips, but even one glass of beer in an evening is too strong, and moreover: it costs a me a couple of hours of sleep. So the day after, I'm wasted. On Saturday morning I do sports, so I couldn't use that, so it would end up drinking approx once a week on Saturday evening. But it would waste a large part of my Sunday.
First person that I read about also having a problem with coffee and even with decaf. For me it started inducing anxiety like effects and gives me insomnia now if I accidentally eat a tiramisu or something containing a bit of it. Haven’t found anything that one can get an acquired caffeine sensitivity, but I guess there is not much research. I didn’t have an episode, but it did start during some more mentally challenging times.
> What I do know is caffeine gives me panic attacks now (even decaf coffee is too much)
Coffee makes me jittery, but green tea gives me focused attention. I just don't enjoy the taste of green tea that much, so I drink coffee and take L-theanine (extract of green tea) pills to calm me down a bit.
L-theanine seems to be pretty good for a lot of people. :)
My experiment with it went pretty badly as it took out my mood stabilizer. (Oops.) That took me for a wild ride for the next 3 weeks after I stopped it.
After I mentioned this to my psychiatrist, she was rather insistent about not self-medicating. This included vitamins. A great number of things interact poorly with my medication mix. (e.i. Magnesium can interfere with absorption.)
At this point, I treat anything available over the counter the same way I treat prescription medications. I do research and clear anything potentially psychoactive with my psychiatrist. I do use natural things like melatonin. I just need to make sure are safe to take.
> Once someone has a psychotic episode, they are much likelier to have more.
An anecdotal observation of this in media is when comedian Owen Benjamin took a "Stars of Death" edible on the Joey Diaz podcast. It was argued that this was the point his big break with reality occurred (delusions and conspiracy seen everywhere).
Another interesting observation is that THC seems to intensify the effect of amphetamines like Adderall. With the increase in ADHD and the presumable fix of amphetamine style drugs like Adderall common marijuana usage could intensify the amphetamine high massively which can exacerbate delusions and psychosis even further. Owen himself was known to use Adderall before shows to maintain focus. Quite an interesting area of research.
Plus that combo gives guaranteed insomnia. The user wakes up from whatever sleep they did get, takes the speed again, and it's like nothing happened. This continued loss of sleep compounds over time and can contribute to psychosis.
For some with ADHD, stimulants can have a neutral or positive effect on sleep. I know I can have the best, calmest naps after I've taken Vyvanse. Therefore, I wouldn't say "guaranteed" insomnia.
Once it wears off though, my sleep's not great. At least it's no worse than it was before starting medication, I've just never been able to sleep well.
>For some with ADHD, stimulants can have a neutral or positive effect on sleep. I know I can have the best, calmest naps after I've taken Vyvanse. Therefore, I wouldn't say "guaranteed" insomnia.
You're talking about half the the drug combo in question, I'm not sure that's a useful anecdote. As I said to others, I would not recommend adding weed to your vyvance though, unless you are interested in personally experiencing the topic of this thread.
It doesn't work with MPH... amphetamines only. It's best to be at least in the same family of drugs when talking about interactions like that. I would strongly recommend not switching to adderall to try though.
Any info on that? They're both CNS stimulants, both phenylethylamines, why would THC affect them so differently?
But you're right that the narcissism of small differences is often made manifest in chemistry.
Just wanted to say though, if someone is getting a "high" from Adderall or Ritalin, they're not taking it medicinally, and that's the problem with these discussions, it's very easy to conflate prescribed use with abuse, which ignores the fact that recreational dosages are far higher than medicinal.
> There's a really interesting line of research that suggests Schizophrenia is a spectrum, rather than a binary.
I don't think it was ever considered binary. Rather, previously the variance was explained in terms of discrete subtypes and comorbidities. I guess now the field is moving toward a model that is more fluid and away from a rigid ontology, at least to the extent the ontology deigned to reflect distinct pathogeneses.
I'm tempted to believe that there's an improved appreciation that progression isn't inevitable, and can be halted with management. But whatever assumptions the literature made on that score (and I'm not familiar with the literature), I'd bet most patient clinicians have always appreciated this. Understanding the why's and how's was always and still remains the problem.
This is easily the best link I’ve clicked on HN in a long time, thank you.
In the context of medication and schizophrenia, the authors take is interesting:
“The message is do not only change what is inside your head but that which your head is inside of…
Recognizing the causes of the crisis as having been multifactorial made me also recognize that all ameliorative efforts had to be multilevel, impinging on everything from brain biochemistry to self-concept and social scenario.”
> Schizophrenia is a spectrum, rather than a binary.
Spectrum is not the opposite of binary. You probably mean gradient, from your context.
This is more than just a pedantic observation. Autism spectrum disorder is often misconstrued by the general public as a gradient, which is not accurate.
> Autism spectrum disorder is often misconstrued by the general public as a gradient, which is not accurate.
If one accepts the dimensional model of psychiatric diagnosis, then almost all psychiatric disorders are "gradients" – ASD included. If you are calling the dimensional model "not accurate", I disagree
I think the biggest thing where the general public misconstrues things is with "autism"="spectrum". The DSM-5 contains both the autism spectrum and the schizophrenia spectrum, although the former is conceptualised as a single disorder, the latter as a family of related disorders. There is also a brief mention of the concept of the "obsessive-compulsive spectrum", although that concept did not make it into the main body of the text. In the research literature, you'll find heaps more "spectrums" proposed – for example, the "disruptive behaviour disorder spectrum" (composed of ADHD, oppositional-defiant disorder, conduct disorder and antisocial personality disorder) and the "bipolar spectrum" (bipolar I, bipolar II, cyclothymia – some add other conditions such as disruptive mood dysregulation disorder)
There is a high correlation between intelligence and mental illness. For example, John Nash also had paranoid schizophrenia. The way your mind encodes information seems to be correlated with perceptual disturbances.
Maybe they won't ever experience the same set of qualia humans do, but I don't think it's out of the question to say they won't have their own set of qualia that are just as inscrutable to humans as ours are to them.
I really recommend people interested in Schizophrenia to read the book “Hidden Valley Road”. I saw it recommended in a HN comment previously.
The book follows an American family who gave birth to 12 children, 6 of whom were later diagnosed with schizophrenia in their teens.
It’s interesting because the book gives lots of insight into the historical to modern research on the condition. In the past psychologists thought schizophrenia was caused by the environment and/or bad childhood. But most of the research right now is pointing towards a genetic cause.
I can't speak to its validity, but the way it was explained to me from a neuroscientist a few years ago is that the general hypothesis now is that some people have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia and that predisposition sort of lies dormant until triggered. That would explain how both could be true: it could be genetic and triggered by environment/trauma.
There are enough cases of identical twins where one twin gets it and the other doesn't that we are certain it can't just be genetic. We are also certain that genes matter. We even know roughly which genes and that many of the variants that increase the risk are de novo mutations. We don't know much more than that, though.
My grandmother’s twin sister developed schizophrenia, while my grandmother did not (though she did eventually suffer from Alzheimer’s). I have a moderately elevated genetic risk, and it’s something I do keep in mind. I believe her sister developed schizophrenia shortly after the 2 were separated from each other when my grandmother left for college, which is interesting timing.
> There are enough cases of identical twins where one twin gets it and the other doesn't that we are certain it can't just be genetic.
Strictly logically speaking, this is consistent with it being genetic + random chance (where the odds are determined only by your genes) - meaning no identifiable environmental factors. Not saying it is (nor would I know).
I would not be surprised if the "dormant until triggered" explanation is true for most conditions.
This seems to be pretty compelling observations for various disorders like Alzheimer's, various autoimmune conditions, etc. being caused or exacerbated by previous infections.
It was the case for me. I apparently have the genes for a semi-rare autoimmune condition (Guttate Psoriasis) that was triggered after a bout of some kind of viral illness. Typically, step throat is the trigger for many with the disorder, but that was not the case for me.
> That would explain how both could be true: it could be genetic and triggered by environment/trauma.
With siblings it is likely both generics and environment are similar.
In terms of trauma and episode triggering events, imagine the stress of living with a large family where several are schizophrenic.
Interestingly, schizophrenia is really rare in accounts before the 1800s. It appears to be a modern disease, which would make it seem like it would be environmental.
Another interesting thing about schizophrenia is it's much more common in cities, even after controlling for drug use and ethnicity[1]. Which again makes it seem like something that was rare in the past.
Schizophrenia didn't exist as a concept until the early 20th century. There were various attempts to categories and label insanity in the late 19th, but before then people were either "mad", "not mad", or "occasionally mad" - perhaps with some sense of being religiously inspired in their madness.
So it's impossible to say if schizophrenia is a modern environmental illness.
FWIW I find it hard to imagine that modern life, even in cities, is more stressful than the life of a peasant in medieval Europe - someone who would be constantly torn between instinct and the threat of eternal agony in hell, and would also be terrorised by the very real threats of war, starvation, plague, and more mundane but still deadly illnesses.
Not that modern homelessness and poverty, workplace aggression and bullying, relationship breakdowns, and the threat of physical violence aren't stressful in their own way.
If there is an environmental component I'd guess it's at least as likely to be chemical as social. But maybe there's some difference in social stress types that everyone has missed.
It's a complex function involving social and environment stressors which effect progression, and social and cultural context which effect manifestation, and there's also feedback between manifestation and progression.
I think it's widely accepted, albeit in a somewhat loose way, that the reason "schizophrenia" was not previously attested is because society explained the behaviors differently and often in less negative terms such that there was less positive feedback that negatively effected progression and manifestation. An archetypal example would be that someone who experienced hallucinations might be understood to be highly spiritual, a mystic, or just quirky. Moreover, people lived in more tightly knit family and social groups, so someone who had trouble taking care of themselves would be more likely to live with or near compassionate family members. And if someone did become a poorly kempt recluse, that didn't by itself turn them into complete social pariahs, so they could more easily have some minimal normative social relations. OTOH, if someone just completely fell apart and died from exposure, or antagonized the wrong person and was killed, the cause wouldn't have been attributed to a mental disease, per se.
And the effect of culture goes even deeper. Hallucinations among those living in modern, western societies tend to be more paranoid and violent; more likely to involve the threat of "the government" or "they" than, say, a beneficent god or playful tree fairy. Or more specifically, as seen in many recent anti-Asian assaults, acting out racial animus received from the culture. The increased negativity in hallucinations and behaviors feeds back into progression directly (more stress from the hallucinations) and indirectly (people are more afraid and wary of you, so you more quickly become separated from supportive social networks).
Possibly a disconnect from nature does something to trigger the condition. Cities are more man-made and artificial than being close to the wilderness. I don't know if that's the correlation, but it seems like you see quite a few more paranoid and hallucination episodes from people in cities than rural areas (if we're taking out drug use).
Genetic cause is often what is claimed of things that are not very well understood at all.
Myopia being one of them for instance. (it's actually often an adaptation process that is actually found to be reversible)
Wrt SZ, not only is it very badly understood but a lot of the symptoms can be attributed to biochemical disorders and that does not necessarily imply a genetic predisposition at all.
Caffeine can induce psychosis, so can THC. For instance, caffeine is an adenosine antagonist, which itself is a dopamine antagonist.
So from a DSM pov, a lot many people can be diagnosed SZ when in fact, the amplitude of the disorder is caused by repeated psychoactive substance abuse.
Even owning a cat (parasites) is thought to be a possible cause for schizophrenia.
Then again, who knows what lies in people heads too?
Perhaps that the thoughts they hear are real and some people just can't process it properly which drive them to do strange things. We discount people's experience but there are so little ways to non-intrusively explore people's internal state.
A true scientist wouldn't discount that possibility too.
> Then again, who knows what lies in people heads too? Perhaps that the thoughts they hear are real and some people just can't process it properly which drive them to do strange things. We discount people's experience but there are so little ways to non-intrusively explore people's internal state. A true scientist wouldn't discount that possibility too.
One of my best friends was schizophrenic and he described the experience as being in the back of the car with someone else driving. A literal observer to his own life. That kind of scared me because I have strong internal dialogues with myself, especially if I'm in conflict over something. He assured me it's nothing like thinking or hearing your own voice; these voices are in fact someone else and the state of your mind makes the experience feel real.
I think it's really like hearing an external sound, it's not something you consciously control. I feel like I heard a hypothesis somewhere that maybe there's something off about what you perceive as your own conscious thoughts. Obviously everything is coming from your own brain, so I would argue they are your own thoughts but we're just talking about the perception of being your own thoughts.
Related to this, some schizophrenics think that thoughts are being placed in their head by something external or that they perceive thoughts from other people. Telepathy is also a common rationalization.
For as long as I can remember I have this thing where I hear sounds, voices and sometimes see things depending on how tired I am. It almost never happens when moving around, it sometimes happen when sitting still and often happens when trying to sleep or wake up in the morning. But always goes away as soon as I move around or start using my brain somehow.
However when consuming THC these symptoms are heightened to something that feels like 50x and they occur even when awake and moving around.
The symptoms are also heightened a little bit when consuming alcohol and especially when trying to sleep.
If I stay up very late it's also a lot more intense when trying to sleep.
I consume a lot of caffeine in general, but I don't think it heightens my symptoms directly. Maybe indirectly it makes me stay up longer depending on when I consume.
That's interesting.
Usually, I would ask if you have ever had difficulties focusing your attention, some ADHD?
How do you grade your visualization? Can you create a scene in your head and control it 100%?
How often do you get a random song stuck in your head?
I think that more people are prone to this than they think but they are simply not aware.
Some people start realizing things when they end up trying some kinds of meditation practice and since they are not in control and somewhat clueless about what's happening internally, for some of them it sends them off the rails (hence the stories we hear about meditation triggering psychosis etc...)
Some people never experience such things as well. For some, it comes later.
Talking to oneself is fine. Feeling external thoughts, emotions and even minor loss of self agency in motor control is something else and I think that some rationalizations could make sense. But the current lack of understanding is leading people to handwave (not every scientist is so handwavy of course).
There is an issue of depersonalization such as seems to be the case with your friend. All these things are really not understood and the nervous system alongside the brain is quite inscrutable for now.
I have issues with attention, such that I easily get distracted when trying to focus on something.
I struggle holding a visual image in my head as it easily deteroitates, it's also very faint. I'm not sure what's normal here but I remember I could do this more easily when using THC, even when the effects start wearing down. It's also easier to do in the morning when I wake up before I start moving.
I feel like I have some song stuck in my head all the time. It's almost always a new song when I wake up from sleep.
I also have somatic tinnitus from what I understand. It's not like the beeping you get in your ear once in a while, it comes more from the center, is very high frequency with many overlapping frequencies and sounds a bit modulated. It also gets louder if I clench my teeth or stretch muscles.
No one is getting (properly) diagnosed with schizophrenia with incidents of drug induced psychosis, which is what you’re describing. Schizophrenia as a diagnosis relies on the presence of both negative and positive symptoms (as defined in the literature). Other people here have talked about the definition and fluidity of schizophrenia, things change but what does not change is schizophrenia is characterised by not only the positive and negative symptoms but also by being a degenerative condition.
As opposed to drug induced psychosis, which is reversible if you remove the aetiological agent.
But by changing the neuro-transmitter balance when treating psychosis with anti-psychotic medication, negative symptoms can also appear.
Depending on who establishes the diagnostic, you can be diagnosed as schizophrenic while you are simply in one of the phase (acute or post) of psychosis.
In general, if you repeatedly suffer from bouts of psychosis, you will get a diagnosis even though the real trigger has not been established.
Also, the presence of negative and/or positive symptoms differs from people to people so even that is not clear-cut.
Anyone here has reversed astigmatism? I've heard a lot about reversing myopia, and while I've seen a some stuff on the netz for astigmatism, I haven't found a good enough resource.
Did the study control for race then if genetics are a cause? ie other studies have shown those of ashkenazi descent are more likely to be schizophrenic.
I hope this isn’t taken the wrong way - id very much like to know if my genetic ancestry made me more or less susceptible to things like schizophrenia.
It could be environmental imprinting on genetics from previous generations. Of the people that I am familiar with that developed schizophrenia, there is often something traumatic in their family's past, and it is not always the previous generation (but may be from 2 or 3 generations previous).
My father was a mental health social worker. He worked with youths, mainly teens. In his experience the vast majority of teens that ended up in his hospital had some drug fueled episode that led to their mental health crisis.
He told me that he didn't think the drugs caused the mental illness but we're often the trigger. That is these kids already had a mental illness that had not started to present symptoms until it was triggered.
My father was not opposed to drug use. He had a history of recreational drug use and many of his life long friends are heavy marijuana users. So I don't think this observation came from an anti drug bias.
I'm very much for individual freedom when it comes to drug use, assuming you aren't hurting others. I think in the push for cannabis legalization, many people have forgotten that cannabis is a psychedelic drug. While it's not the same as LSD or psilocybin, it can definitely change perception and thinking. In 1996 I had a psychotic episode from LSD, and developed generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder. I always had a bit of anxiety, but it exacerbated the problem. Cannabis can trigger a bad panic attack for me, dependent on the strength and strain (probably more likely the different cannabinoids present). Cannabis can also make me very calm and give my mind a kind of "reset" that helps to destress and allows me to reflect on my current anxiety. I firmly believe that psychedelics are triggers and not the cause of mental disorders. As has been commonly said, set and setting are large contributing factors, even for cannabis use.
Very similar experience here. I had a psychotic episode last summer on shrooms, and have since struggled with anxiety. I definitely agree that if you have any pre-existing mental health issues at all, using psychedelics is playing with fire.
> I firmly believe that psychedelics are triggers and not the cause of mental disorders
If a neurotoxic drug such as cannabis causes psychosis in someone who would otherwise never have become psychotic without the drug, then whether you call it a cause or a trigger is quibbling over semantics.
There are many reasons to believe cannabis is neuroprotective. Especially when using safe, high CBD, high cannabinoid varieties; a rather vital distinction.
And it's not semantics, because you can't make the assumption that people would "never have become psychotic without the drug". On a population scale, such an effect would have stood out by now if it had much strength at all.
In my opinion it is neurotoxic, based on studies I have seen (such as this one that we are commenting on) plus my own direct personal experience. Even without the psychoactive components, the smoke is carcinogenic (like tobacco) and toxic to all cells, including neurons. Go take a massive bong hit, then tell me your mind and lungs feel healthy. Cannabis is blatantly toxic filth.
> because you can't make the assumption that people would "never have become psychotic without the drug"
Somehow you are ignoring the entire point of the article/study that we are commenting on.
No, it isn't. It's medicine, and remarkably harmless recreation. It saves many lives, and enhances quality of life for millions of people. It has a smorgasbord of health benefits.
It does have side effects, and drawbacks. It's not a panacea, and it doesn't suit every one. It's not for kids (except when it's medically worth it).
But calling it "blatantly toxic filth" is wildly inflammatory... Which is funny, because cannabis reduces inflammation. With far less toxic effects than most anti-inflammatories.
> you are ignoring the entire point of the article/study that we are commenting on.
I disagree with the methods and conclusion. As do plenty of people here, who have pointed out the flaws with the article and the study, for example, the very serious correlation/causation issues.
To talk about schizophrenia and cannabis without ever mentioning CBD is remarkably dishonest. THC concentration merits a single sideways mention. This is bad science and worse journalism, and it smells like big pharma.
Which wouldn't surprise me at all. Cannabis hurts their profits. Painkiller use goes way down after legalization and decriminalization - as do prescription painkiller deaths.
Most medicine is toxic to some degree. It's all about the cost vs the reward.
I like sugar, salt and caffeine. I consume them to a degree that causes me low lever physical harm. I enjoy them and am happy with the cost. Many cannabis users do the same with cannabis but some seems to think it's a magic cure all. I'm strongly sceptical of such claims.
If you consume it, and it subjectively and objectively harms your mental health and cognitive abilities, then basic common sense and reasoning tells you it is harmful to the brain (neurotoxic).
This is my opinion based on my experience. If you smoked this shit and it gave you an extra 20 IQ point boost, then congratulations.
> All smoke is carcinogenic, because it is smoke.
That's the point. Neurons don't get healthier from carcinogens.
>and it subjectively and objectively harms your mental health and cognitive abilities,
Objectivity is good. So how often do you measure these things, what tools do you use, and what data do you collect? How do you analyze the data?
>then basic common sense and reasoning tells you it is harmful to the brain (neurotoxic).
"Neurotoxic" does not mean "alters your cognition"
"Alters your cognition" does not mean "harmful to the brain"
"Basic common sense" is not a synonym for "science"
>That's the point. Neurons don't get healthier from carcinogens.
There's no evidence to indicate that cannabis is carcinogenic or neurotoxic. In fact, there is evidence to suggest it has neuroprotective effects [0].
The carcinogens come from burning plant matter (or really, burning almost anything). There are many ways to consume cannabis and its derivative products without burning it or inhaling smoke. By your logic, all plant matter is carcinogenic because it's possible to burn it and inhale the smoke. Time to ban trees and vegetables?
> "Basic common sense" is not a synonym for "science".
I explained this was my opinion based on experience multiple times so you're just arguing with a strawman. You are absolutely wasting your time here and completely missed the point.
Try reading the article if you want to see a study showing scientific evidence of the neurotoxicity of weed.
>Try reading the article if you want to see a study showing scientific evidence of the neurotoxicity of weed.
The article doesn't say anything about the neurotoxicity of weed. It doesn't even contain the word "toxic". The study doesn't talk about neurotoxicity or use that word either.
>Objectively worse performance in life and in mentally taxing work.
Very interesting! I'd love to learn more. Please show us the data supporting this assertion.
>Go smoke a massive bong hit then do a calculus exam and compare your score.
I don't smoke, so I took a cannabis edible or vaped some concentrate. My calculus exam score improved. Now what? You still haven't provided any evidence for your claim that cannabis is objectively neurotoxic.
"Objective" is not a synonym for "strongly-held opinion"
> Very interesting! I'd love to learn more. Please show us the data supporting this assertion.
You can't demand a study/citation for someones personal experience. That is absurd. You are being an absolutely illogical clown.
I was talking about my opinion and direct personal experience. I explained this multiple times but you are incapable of understanding this basic concept.
"Objective" means observable and measurable. Are you genuinely so clueless that you believe no one can perceive anything objective about their own performance and abilities and actions in the external world?
Please stop insulting me, thanks. I will ignore your hostility for now.
>You can't demand a study/citation for someones personal experience. That is absurd.
Personal experience is subjective. I am not questioning your subjective experience, because that would indeed be absurd.
What I am questioning is your claim that cannabis is objectively neurotoxic. I am asking you to substantiate your claim about this supposed objective fact.
Where is the evidence? Show us.
>Objective" means observable and measurable.
Correct. Observable AND measurable. Observing is not enough to claim something as an objective fact. Where are your measurements about these observations? Where is the evidence about the "objectively neurotoxic" effects of cannabis?
>Are you genuinely so clueless that you believe no one can perceive anything objective about their own performance and abilities and actions in the external world?
Perception is inherently subjective. Feelings are not facts.
You are welcome to perceive all sorts of things, but that doesn't make these perceptions factual, objective, or even grounded in consensus reality. Some people perceive that the Earth is flat. Does that make Flat Earth an objective fact? Obviously not, because we can disprove these perceptions with concrete replicable measurements using instruments that do not wholly depend on the fallible perceptions of humans.
You keep using the word objective without any evidence, and when questioned about it you deflect by saying it's a subjective observation. Which one is it?
This entire conversation feels crazy-making. What I am trying to explain to you is the scientific method, something most children learn in grade school.
>If I smoke weed, and it causes cognitive impairment such that I am unable to perform certain tasks (such as driving, or my job) or it causes psychosis, then that is an objective observable result.
"Cognitive impairment" is not shorthand for "neurotoxicity"
>Have you ever experienced an extremely bad hangover? Would you say that was obviously neurotoxic or not?
It has already been proven that alcohol kills brain cells. The hangover is caused by the direct effects of ethanol and acetaldehyde (its primary metabolite).
There is no evidence that cannabis kills brain cells. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary.
You are claiming there is evidence of cannabis neurotoxicity, that cannabis kills brain cells. Where is the evidence for that? Despite what you may believe, being stoned is not a type of brain damage.
> Despite what you may believe, being stoned is not a type of brain damage.
Schizophrenia and psychosis in general is not "getting stoned". That outcome strongly indicates neurotoxicity.
Apologies for the harsh confrontational tone in my previous comments.
Here's a point I was trying to make earlier:
The statement: "Led Zeppelin is better than the Beatles" is subjective because it expresses an opinion that is open to interpretation.
The statement: "I have a preference for Led Zeppelin versus the Beatles" is objective, because it is a statement of fact about your personal experience, and is not subject to interpretation or debate. It also doesn't require "data" or cited research.
That's an interesting question. Could someone have a serious mental health disorder that would never manifest without certain triggers.
I'm not qualified to guess but I suspect it would be possible. Then if it's possible the rate that it happens would be important. If it's rare then it might not be important in the discussion of causes of mental health problems.
It has not been proven to be neurotoxic, so I'm not so sure over your reference of semantics. I only consume edibles, as the smoke is too harsh for my lungs. This study does not have a definitive answer as to whether cannabis is actually the cause or trigger for schizophrenia.
This aligns with my anecdata. My (now diagnosed schitzophrenic) brother was always "off" but his first major episode was triggered by magic mushrooms, which nearly ended in his death (he was trying to cut a demon from his stomache with a hunting knife). If drugs are a match, the underlying mental health issues are gasoline.
At least for schizophrenia, the data backs it up. The rates are unbelivebly stable, regardless of drug use (which varies much more per country or over time than the rates of schizophrenia).
I suspect so. My Father was only observing what he saw. He wasn't researching the cause.
The key take away for me was that he was working with young people. I suspect these people may have ended up in mental health care but much later in life.
If this were true you'd expect less of the later in life diagnoses to be drug related. I have no data on that.
That might be what parent is assuming. My view is that (a) they're already mentally ill; and (b) the psychedelic can trigger severe episodes that wouldn't otherwise have happened.
I don't know how cannabis works for people with bipolar. Laing used to interpret all psychotic disorders as the same thing. I'm not sure that's right. It seems to me that the different types of bipolar are suffficiently distinct that it's unsafe to declare them variants of the same condition. And I'm pretty sure they're not on a continuum with schizophrenia.
I don't know; I'm neither a doctor nor a therapist. It's just that a surprising proportion of the people I've known well have turned out to have some kind of psychotic disorder. Perhaps they're attracted to me, or me to them. Either way, perhaps I could be used as a kind of diagnostic sign.
I find that weed's effects just heighten a person's extremes. I become slow, almost indecisively slow on the stuff. It does calm my ADHD slightly, but it also helps me sleep. I also only use the stuff at night, generally an hour or two before bed and after all my needs are taken care of.
It turns my neurotic brother into a short-tempered asshole. He uses the stuff several times daily.
Guess people react differently to a whole variety of substances. Who knew?
Have you looked into ADHD and cannabis? The TLDR from my reading is that it actually improves your focus and lessens symptoms BUT those improvements also come with the downside of getting stoned.
This is not my experience. I find that weed makes my mind wander randomly down all sorts of tracks. Sometimes this can be fun, interesting, and insightful, but it's certainly not a state that helps my already very poor focus.
Mine too. It can be fun, but seldom is. If I'm already focused on a task, I can get a burst of creativity, but sometimes that just opens the rabbit hole and I inevitably fall in.
Example: gaming while stoned. I might get one game of online chess while high that represents my absolute peak level - I've beaten up to 2300+ rated players...the only problem is I'll turn around and loose to someone 400-500 points lower than me in the very next game. While high, my mind wanders like no other.
I already cut my marijuana with 50% CBD, and that's still plenty strong that I only need a single hit to be plenty high.
I can't for the life of me understand why there's a race to the highest imaginable THC percentage, when it so clearly has an adverse effect on the experience.
100% agree. I think that the industry as a whole really optimized for the wrong thing for a very long time. It seems like in legal states, there's been a move towards more balanced strains (or at least, those have a niche in the market), but it seems like everyone was going for 30% THC by weight, and as little CBD as possible.
The "mids" I used to smoke back in my teenage years gave a better (read: more fun and relaxing) high than most of the "dank" weed I've smoked as an adult.
I would wonder what schizophrenia means, as I often joke that some of the insanely potent cannabis for sale at two-shops-on-every-block in Canada is basically recreational schizophrenia. It absolutely affects the quality of peoples reasoning and creates hallucinatory associations and beliefs, if only temporarily. I also feel like the only person who apprecaites how funny it is that a government that legalized smoking unlimited amounts of pot had to pass consequent legislation to fight the propagation of conspiracy theories.
The mental health aspect of this is very serious though. I've seen some real burnout and moreso, social withdrawal. In Canada, we're sounding this all out in real time, and some days the drugs seem like palliative care for an old culture and society whose end is being hastened.
I used to smoke in high school and college and it was great, no negative effects. Then I took maybe a half year break at 21. When I smoked again I would get super anxious and paranoid. To the point where I just needed to go lay in bed and wait it out. I thought I smoked too much or it was stronger than what I was used to. Took it a bit easier the next time. Same thing. I stuck to methylone, ketamine, methoxetamine, 2C-E, and a little LSD after that. I was fine with all of those. Then one night I'm hanging out with some people I barely know, I had a little methylone and ketamine in me, took a puff or 2 of weed. Full blown psychosis for the next 12+ hours. I was convinced they were cops and I locked myself in the bathroom all night. I didn't touch weed or much of anything for a couple years after that. Fast forward to 2013, I'm living in Tacoma, weed was just legalized, I take a hit and I'm good, take another one and full blown anxiety attack and paranoia. Ok maybe edibles are ok, so I ate some edibles a few months later, not so bad, pretty chill. Over the years since then I've tried smoking, vaping, and eating THC and it usually leads to paranoia and anxiety. Not always though, it's like I'm just really sensitive to it and it's really easy to overdo it. I've found that the newer edibles that are from hemp extract and are only like 5mg THC are excellent. I drink a seltzer and I'm just chill and having a good time. 2 seltzers and I can feel the anxiety start to come on, but I'm still good. This whole time I've just been trying to chase that feeling it used to give me in high school.
I spent several years in my early 20s as a daily smoker, but at some point in the last few years, I crossed some sort of line, and I seemingly can't smoke at all anymore without winding up anxious as hell. Ultimately this led to me just totally giving the stuff up, which isn't the worst outcome. I still miss certain aspects of it, but after consistently having bad experiences for a while, it seems that I'm just better off without it.
I don't really drink either, so my vices now are limited to vaping and a very occasional small dose of mushrooms.
I wish I could read the study but it is paywalled. The author of this article calls it "a new study of almost 7 million health records" but really it's a review of 20 other studies. So I wonder how they came up that number.
Also, it doesn't make much sense to me to draw correlations between "high potency" cannabis and these outcomes. The potency of the cannabis shouldn't matter nearly as much as the amount of total THC consumed within a single session or whatever, right? I would think it's just harder to consume a ton of THC when the potency is lower.
edit:
The commenter lisasays has found and linked the actual study the article is based off of. Apparently it just wasn't linked in the article.
This is purely anecdotal, but it reminds me of the recent mental health revelation by Kevin Smith. He was baked all day, every day for 15 years, but quit cold turkey after checking himself into a facility for a month.
I thought his discussion about it was interesting. Clearly there was other stuff going on, but he apparently felt his cannabis use was enough of a contributing factor that he decided to stop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBvc7Ny4iUk
Interesting. My dad developed schizophrenia in his twenties and had been smoking a lot of marijuana. I have always wondered if the smoking triggers something in him. I will always wonder.
I’m curious how we could ever reasonably parse cause and effect here? I think it’s possible smoking a lot of marijuana triggers something in certain people that causes schizophrenia but I also think it’s possible that people in the early stages of schizophrenia might seek out marijuana as a way of self-soothing. Or maybe it could even be a bit of both?
FTA: "For example, in Denmark, the incidence of schizophrenia steadily increased from 2000 to 2012 (Kühl, Laursen, Thorup, & Nordentoft, Reference Kühl, Laursen, Thorup and Nordentoft2016), and the schizophrenia population attributable risk fraction (PARF) for CUD increased three- to fourfold over the past two decades, parallel to increases in THC concentration (Hjorthøj, Posselt, & Nordentoft, Reference Hjorthøj, Posselt and Nordentoft2021). The increased THC content may thus, along a potential increase in the prevalence of CUD, be a main driver of the population-level increase in PARF between CUD and schizophrenia."
The explanation "increased THC content causes more schizophrenia" is clearly more plausible than "more schizophrenia causes increased THC content".
For a bit of anecdata, I have anxiety, and sometimes THC can exacerbate the condition (but usually helps to lower my anxiety, which is one of the reasons I still use it). If I feel anxiety coming on, I will often take a CBD gummy to help "level" out the effects of the THC. The potency of cannabis, and the "norm" of commercialization delivering greater highs, has definitely effected my anxiety. In the 1990s, when THC levels were lower, I never had anxiety from cannabis use.
In 2000 Denmark was spending 2496$ yearly per capita on healthcare, in 2012 it was 6004$(taking inflation into account: 2496$ in 2000 was 3,327.91$ in 2012)
Maybe they just got better at detecting it?
Your reasoning is akin to saying that it's likely that vaccines cause autism because of some overlapping charts, correlation is not causation.
It could, though there is some work I believe on certain receptors which THC also happens to increase the activation of activating latent schizophrenia.
This confirms the widespread anecdotes online, where so and so's friend smoked way too much and had a mental break(more rarely, the sufferer speaks for themselves).
I'm glad to see research on this, but I hope it doesn't spawn another wave of reflexive & unthinking anti-drug legislation.
n=1, in high school I was smoking a lot of weed, and started having what I discovered years later are called "ideas of reference," where you start getting the sense that the people around you are talking about you, but secretly. At face value, there's nothing you can point to as evidence of this, because it all appears to be normal conversation, but there's a secret meaning that only you can hear. You're basically projecting your unconscious onto random stimuli, like the conversations of bystanders.
If you start believing that this is reality, then it becomes "delusions of reference."
I later learned this can be related to low folate or B12, and suspect that was also a cause.
Interestingly enough, I'm also fairly confident I'm autistic.
I like the idea of capping THC potency (delta-9), what we have now isn't what we the general public aimed to legalize this is just competition keeping up with consumer demand
the consequences should fall on the vendors and growers on a licensing perspective, just like alcohol or food vending
I think more important than that is capping the THC/CBD ratio. The first time I took an edible it was pure THC, and even at 15mg it almost gave me a panic attack. For a long time I was baffled that anyone could actually enjoy marijuana, until I tried something with three times as much CBD as THC, and then I got the same enjoyable experience as others seem to. Which makes sense: biologically, THC is the psychosis agonist and CBD is the modulating antipsychotic. I have high confidence that it's the widespread use of THC-without-CBD strains that's driving most of the psychosis risk.
15mg is pretty high (LOL) to start. I take edibles daily, mostly as a sleep aid but occasionally recreationally, and have been at it for a couple years, and my tolerance has crept up a bit in that time (damnit), and I'm a big dude, and still, 15mg is like the top of what I ever take. 15mg gets me really high. 8-12mg is where I try to stay most of the time, and that used to be ~5mg.
You don't have to eat the whole edible. The higher-dose ones are a lot cheaper per mg, and I just split 'em.
[EDIT] Oh but you are correct that ones with more of the other compounds from MJ can have very different effects. I never, ever get giggly on straight THC gummies (mostly just tired) but will on some full-spectrum (that is, that went through a process that focused on extracting more than just THC) gummies or vapes. That's the stuff I stick to if I'm aiming for recreational use—for sleepy time, straight THC is fine, though I have found that full spectrum indica extracts can have a better effect on that front at lower THC doses (but availability's spotty and they're more expensive, so I don't usually bother to track down the Good Stuff)
The full spectrum definitely gives entirely different effects. The first time I took an edible, I split a 75mg gummy with a friend, and had a great time out in the woods. The second time, I took 15mg of almost pure THC gummies, and felt like I was going to have a complete meltdown (while still being out in nature, similar environment with the same friend).
Huh? They never said that, just warned that the THC/CBD ratio is important to avoid schizophrenia or other psychiatric conditions (which is scientifically backed btw.)
Both times I tried edibles I had a horrible time, the second time I locked myself in the toilet for 2 hours. I had an overwhelming, pure sense of (impending) doom not based on any expressable thought.
When smoking normally, it‘s easier to stop when things become overwhelming.
Agreed, it's surprising to me that I've met many people who claim that edibles are terrible/terrifying. They often don't know how much they took and if they do it's usually way too much for the first time.
I suspect it's a combination of bad design (a single gummy being >=10mg) and the fact that most people just don't read and comprehend the labels.
the labels exacerbate the bad design, switching between grams and ounces throughout, with THC content being in mg, and the product itself needing to be broken up to the actual serving size of half a gummy
Many people's experience with edibles - especially if it was before legalization - is from homemade stuff, where both the amounts and their distribution throughout the food can be very imprecise.
That’s a good point. Though most of the people I’ve talked to about edibles are young people in California. So I suspect their experiences have been with legal edibles bought at dispensaries.
I will actually rip a 5mg THC gummy in half, and then divide the half into thirds and take a third over time. This has helped to reduce my anxiety significantly. If I start to feel anxiety, I will actually eat a pure CBD gummy to counteract some of the effects of a THC strain that causes me anxiety.
I would counter that by pointing out that if your aim is to achieve a certain degree of bioavailability of TCH, you'd have to smoke a larger quantity of a lower-potency product, thus exposing yourself to more of the combustion by-products than necessary.
I agree with you, but I think the bigger thing is that people do not understand that edibles affect people far differently than smoking does. Not just the effects, but the way the body metabolizes the substance. That information should really be more available, especially as cannabis legalization increases. Too many heavy smokers end up taking edibles and having a horrible time because they thought they needed a high amount of edibles to match their smoking habits.
With high-potency strains you can't titrate effectively. "One puff" is a highly variable amount and you can't take 1.3 puffs. Not to mention that there's a minimum amount you have to put in a bowl, and if you don't smoke it, it gets stale and unpleasant. It's like having 85% ABV wine and pouring it into a wine glass and then what? Just take 1.3 sips and pour it back into the bottle?
Pack a smaller bowl. This really isn't difficult. You can VERY easily modulate how much plant matter you put into the bowl and even with very high test strains, you can easily take a smaller puff and wait longer between lighting up. This isn't hard.
At the amounts I'm talking about, with the heavier strains, you can't pack a smaller bowl. What am I supposed to do, pick out a little crumb and put it in there? It won't even be a deterministic amount. That's exactly the problem I'm referring to.
i think we've already approached an asymptote on thc in modern cannabis at like 30% max. people are instead moving towards ingesting concentrates (dabbing) pure/live extracts or rosins.
you say "likely lead to a competitive race" as though that hasn't already been going on for the last decade or more. it's happening now, and has been happening for a long time. it makes sense for everyone to produce a higher yielding plant. it's more efficient, less biomass waste, less physical footprint required, etc.
a lot of medical cannabis patients require very high doses of THC. if you are a caregiver who can only grow X crops per year, legally, you want them to produce as much as possible. this sort of regulation is just bonkers. let people live. let the experiment play out. stop regulating out of fear.
The equivalent to your example would be gummies with added caffeine content to counteract the sleepy effects, which was the same reason 4loko did it. The Everclear example still stands.
There's increasing demand for less potent cannabis. Low THC CBD flower and high CBD percentage flower is kind of secondary but you're right that for the most part customer demand is for stronger flower.
What we have now isn't what we the general public aimed to legalize
I don't think the general public knows (or cares) much about potency, actually.
Also, they were plenty aware that legalization wouldn't stop a certain segment of the population from harming themselves through overconsumption, no matter what was done to try to convince them otherwise.
>I don't think the general public knows (or cares) much about potency, actually.
Disagree. I think recreational cannabis users are well aware of potency. Here in Canada, all cannabis products have the THC/CBD content on the label, and our shops offer strengths across the spectrum, according to preferences.
Admittedly, some users will get "the strongest available", but the people I know have specific preferences. Having this information available to consumers is one of the best things about regulating the trade.
Ordinary marijuana is measured fractions of an ounce or in grams. A half gram in a bowl, which is a lot, contains many doses. I've never heard of this heavy marijuana, but it should be easy enough to identify and avoid.
Bloomberg's headline very different vs the actual conclusion of the study: "Young males might be particularly susceptible to the effects of cannabis on schizophrenia. At a population level, assuming causality, one-fifth of cases of schizophrenia among young males might be prevented by averting CUD. Results highlight the importance of early detection and treatment of CUD and policy decisions regarding cannabis use and access, particularly for 16–25-year-olds."
A socio-positivistic statistical study that involves a molecular substance-human interaction is already epistemically imprecise and type-theoretically invalid. You would want a molecular-human statistical study, even for just one person to obtain more precise objective data. Throw the experimental design out and try a responsively appropriate approach for the subject matter, I would advise.
That's the funny and uninhibited stance on the applied side of science. The subject is discussed only as matter, abstracting it from values such as culture, life and history, and its effects on pure matter and the human body - again a perception of matter. There is no meaning, culture or context in it.
It's just ridiculous.
The sad thing is, when man has countless problems, serious unresolved problems - let's just say Cancer - why this kind of research?
The basic logic is control, demeaning and desertification.
The human-thing relationship cannot be explained only at the atomic level.
The coffee you drink with a person changes according to the person and gains a place in your world of meaning, you may not forget what you talked for years.
On a substance level, yes, a panic attack as you drink - presumably - some kind of excitement?
The reaction and meaning of a machine-like body and brain to the substance it consumes just to do more work?!
I could not adopt the limitless and meaningless scientific approach, I could not find an enlightening side?!
Is science real?
Science is not a one off definitive answer to things. We need to study things, restudy things and replicate results. So yes, a repeat study on something studied before can very much be news, if it replicates the previous results then it's often even good news.
If anyone wants a technical reason, (as best as I understand), this could very well be a very straightforward consequence of THC sensitizing the D2 receptor, which so far at least has been shown to happen in some parts of the brain (https://www.nature.com/articles/npp201291), as best as I understand.
D2 is the primary receptor that many antipsychotics (especially the newer ones) target -- the first generation by completely blocking it, the third by partially agonizing it -- I.E., partially causing it to activate. However, third generation anitpsychotics activate it at a much lower value than dopamine itself would, so you potentially get fewer of the catastrophic side effects than you would from something like haloperidol or risperidone. However all three generations end up balancing out in the end to where they're actually not too terribly far apart in terms of side effects for the benefit provided, if I understand correctly, third generation antipsychotics like Abilify (aripiprazole) do hold an edge here.
D2 is one of the the receptors used for psychotomimetic models of the brain -- stimulating it tends to bring forward both the positive and negative effects of schizophrenia if I remember correctly. Another psychotomimetic pathway is NMDA antagonism, which makes sense as glutamate is implicated in schizophrenia.
What is interesting is that D2 agonists can help trigger latent schizophrenia, which exists genetically and often becomes obvious in the forefront by the late teens and early twenties. Marijuana use before the brain fully develops also has permanent effects on this brain in the same time range (not saying they're necessarily related). Schizophrenia does have some very clear structural causes -- for example, pyramidal neurons in some parts of the brain, if I remember correctly, are inverted to route information to lower layers in certain parts than higher ones. These are the neurons that collate and process many-to-one inputs->outputs.
One of the interesting things about schizophrenia is that it results (if I recall correctly) in _lower_ brain entropy on the whole, which is not what one might expect with an information routing issue. This means that one might not reap the benefits of having excess information flow, since not only is there noise being added to the system, the confidence of the outputs of the system are increased.
Many people who are schizophrenic tend to have a flat affect and are asocial, and will often have a tendency to safely pull away from society and keep to themselves, for example. They also have a lower tendency to become violent. This partially means, for example, that counterintuitively, that people who are schizophrenic, at least (and I would assume this applies as well to those who have schizophrenic tendencies) tend to have a lower violent crime rate as well. There are outliers, for example in homeless camps intercity, that can make schizophrenics seem more violent, though I would blame this on the human tendency of us valuing long tail events over uneventful ones for determining important information (something absolutely necessary for raw survival in a generally oftentimes cruel and unforgiving world -- society or no. It is unfortunately a useful bias to have).
All in all, this is a very interesting (if very tough, hard, and sad at times, to be quite frank!) topic, and does bear much of our interest and empathy. Please be sure to ground yourself in the science of it all, and I encourage you to keep pursuing knowledge about this subject matter. There is not necessarily much new under the sun, and a lot of these studies are not anything surprising, shocking, or novel, but instead confirmation of certain hypotheses or theories that have been running in the community for quite a while. Of course, we don't know for sure if this what this is -- this is one person who is not in the medical community's take on it (albeit with a fair bit of personal interest and investment in the topic), and someone who is a skilled researcher particular to the subject matter area might give you a different and/or better view on it.
Source for interest in this case is that I am very much interested in psychopharmacology, and it's been an, er, rather involved hobby of mine for a while in terms of the amount of papers and such that I've read on the matter (I also took a graduate class in it for funsies online through the Harvard extension school. I can recommend that experience -- it's not that hard to get into, and you get some _quality_ course material, guest speakers from around the field (!!!!), and lectures).
Feel free to let me know if you have any questions! Much love!!!! <3 :)))) :'D <3
You will note that this study is very specific with its claims : 21-30, male, (only?) addicted / high potency.
Which is a surprise to me, as I thought that it was already "known" (while they say it's a first specifically for schizophrenia(!?)), and without these 3 specifics.
Cannabis might be bad for your health, but the most significant consequences of cannabis use are getting arrested and losing your job.
As long as that's a risk, and as long as people use health concerns as an excuse to take away other people's freedom, we can't have an honest conversation about it.
this joke isn't accurate though. its just a meme. getting way to high can you paranoid in other ways. which i guess is like schizophrenia. ime if your the type thats constantly scared of the police itll just turn into other paranoias. "are they talking about me" "why are they looking at me" etc..
Did you see the article on HN a few days ago about how legal marijuana purchases in the US fell from 2021 to 2022? There was a fair bit of debate around why exactly that was but I personally do think that what you mentioned is a part of it.
Article says "In addition to the persisting illicit market and plummeting wholesale prices, extreme delays in local licensing have been cited as a cause for the decline." The article is also about revenue only, so I dunno.
The hypothetical comparison like a decade ago was the number of users before legalization vs the number of users after. Every study I can find showed a sharp increase in usage in states that legalized it. If usage actually fell in '22, I doubt it came anywhere close to reversing the trend since legalization.
In the Peruvian Amazon, tobacco is considered to be a medicine. They use a stronger type of tobacco called "mapacho" which is pure, no additives. A regular brand cigarette contain about 10% additives (mainly sugars but also a lot of chemicals no one has ever heard of).
And since mapacho is so strong you can get the effects without even inhaling the smoke, which is healthier for the lungs.
Mapachos are used to clean out bad energies and keep bad spirits away.
Here's a Scott Alexander post that looks at the link between nicotine and Schizophrenia. The research seems to indicate the nicotine reduces the incidence of schizophrenia, rather than smoking triggering schizophrenia. Smokers are less likely to develop schizophrenia, and mentally ill people probably end up smoking because it helps their symptoms
Study is probably crap. An association between cannabis use and schizophrenia says nothing about which way the arrow of causation flows. It could very well be that cannabis use causes schizophrenia, or it could be that people feeling early signs of schizophrenia are more likely to use cannabis. There is no way to tell from this kind of study. Science is hard.
I disagree that because something is generic and oft-repeated, that it is shallow or cannot teach.
> You could in fact replace "cannabis" and "schizoprehnia" with "foo" and "bar" and you'd have a template for a shallow dismissal of published studies.
Indeed, replacing with foo and bar would be valid, and the fact that this is the case, i.e. that correlation is not evidence of causation in general, remains a deep and important statement about reality. It is particularly important to correct this when the headline is direct misinformation about what the study found. Do you think code snippets using foo/bar as placeholders are shallow or uninformative? There is a good reason they are often used in programming discussions: to demonstrate that whatever is being shown applies in general.
Science is hard, and that's why science rarely gives black-and-white answers. This study is not the one final word on the matter. But that doesn't mean it's not still useful.
Science is done based on the evidence that is found, and this counts as some evidence. Does it answer every question? Of course not. Does it help improve our understanding of the occurrence of it? Yes.
Correlation is not causation, but where there's smoke, there's often a fire—as these findings continue to be validated (and there have been other studies that find similar links), it becomes more and more relevant to understand why there is such a correlation—to find a causal mechanism, if it exists, or to confirm that it's just spurious correlation.
Actually, as the replication crises shows, most smoke from papers either isn't real / doesn't point to a fire. So that maybe is a flawed line of reasoning. Correlation (if the research is done carefully to avoid intentional or unintentional p-hacking, and free of fraud) can point to maybe do a follow-up study (or do lots of different kinds of studies to do a good meta analysis that can try to establish causation) but the replication crisis indicates the good studies are swamped by the meaningless ones.
I have read that Schizophrenics tend toward heavy smoking as well. Given that, it makes sense that they might try smoking something a bit more potent, though I'm not sure it would have the effect they're looking for.
I read the article looking for evidence of causation and didn't see it, so it could be either way. Maybe the actual study was more clear on this point.
This isn't news. The link between schizophrenia and cannabis use was known in mental health world before it was ever made illegal. The legalization crowd wouldn't promote that. The news is the problem is increasing and a 3 in 10 chance of males becoming schizophrenic is a reason to avoid it. Now I wonder what the correlation of cannabis use to active shooter incidents is?
>what the correlation of cannabis use to active shooter incidents is?
Holy reefer madness! I'd bet it's probably a lot lower than the correlation between alcohol and drunk fights, murders and spousal abuse. Yet society seems to be perfectly willing to tolerate it.
> Now I wonder what the correlation of cannabis use to active shooter incidents is?
Uh, is it even reasonable to try and find these correlations? We could probably say that the vast majority of mass shootings were conducted by somebody who had previously used ibuprofen or drank alcohol. Is that meaningful or even useful information?
Betting that was supposed to read "made legal" but the point is clear, the link is very well known both to the medical world and culturally at large. The question of mass shootings and cannabis is interesting, it doesn't seem as likely that someone, even experiencing serious paranoid schizophrenia would go out into the world shooting (instead of barricading themselves), but then I haven't seen statistics for the use of amphetamines or opioids or alcohol by shooters either.
I'm guessing that this statistic wouldn't be very helpful or interesting. Even if the number is 100%, they all drink water and eat food too.
A more interesting statistic would be rate of 1st-3rd degree murders committed on different drugs, and/or what percentage of cannabis users commit violent crimes in general.
Sure, correlation is not causation at all, though notably 99.999% of water drinking food eaters don't commit mass murder. My knee-jerk assumption is that stoners are not as likely to rush around committing violent crimes as drunks or people on meth, but maybe that's over-optimistic.
I believe the question has always been causation or correlation. Do people with schizophrenia use marijuana to self medicate or does marijuana cause schizophrenia. Apparently from this study it’s the later.
It can’t and won’t cause any disease? I’m on the side of MJ as medicine and for recreational use, but we really should pretend that because something is an ancient medicine that it’s somehow incapable of causing harm.
Ingesting excessive amount of anything can cause harm. It's easier to die from water overconsumption or random allergic reaction than MJ. Spreading fear, misinformation or promoting prohibition is not humane. MJ is overall safer than alcohol.
I think it's less useful to compare marijuana to something that can literally be classified as a poison (albeit a legal and socially acceptable one) and more useful to determine the boundaries of "when is it safe to use this substance?"
We're coming out of the era of "marijuana bad. marijuana addictive. gateway drug. gives you cancer. makes you kill your parents." etc etc and moving into actually trying to figure out general guidelines for when it's good/bad. I don't think trying to determine these boundaries is fear or misinformation necessarily. I think it certainly can be weaponized in either direction, but for people looking to determine if it's right for them, this is useful information.
And you're saying overconsumption is bad...can you define this? Just in this thread, there was someone who started their journey with it on a 15mg edible. That's insanely high for a beginner but maybe they read somewhere it was fine, or they had a psychonaut friend misguide them, or they just jumped right in with no frame of reference at all. The point is, if people are doing shit like that, it makes sense for there to be more of a general awareness of "here are the bad things that can happen."
I mostly agree with you. Overconsumption of MJ will cause falling to sleep, compared to death from overconsumption of water. MJ is not a cause of any physical or mental disease, despite claims from some purportedly scientific narratives; though it may make some previously hidden things more visible and possibly easier to fix. MJ is like a spice of spices or qualified tourism, certain knowledge, cultural context and practice is of utmost importance to get the most positive effects. Overall, handling MJ properly is easier, less dangerous and causes less problems than driving a car; while given some time, allows for healing of many ailments. Dealing with overconsumption / advice - start small in a safe context, like with mostly everything, oftentimes less is more. Want to learn to swim? - postpone the English Channel for a local pond. Practice shows, that overconsumption of MJ is mostly self correcting. I don't believe anyone should be excluded from the gift of MJ.
I suppose Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome does not count? I love the plant probably more than most, but like most things -- it has it's good parts and it's parts.
