Cannabis Vs. Psychosis

A team of researchers led by Professor Jim van Os of Maastricht University in the Netherlands began to study the association between cannabis use and incidence and persistence of psychotic symptoms over 10 years. The study shows that there may be a link with psychosis at a very early stage of drug use among young people who previously never experienced such symptoms. They could include paranoid ideas, hallucinations, hearing voices or bizarre behavior.

Cannabis is the most consumed illicit drug worldwide, especially among teens and is sometimes associated with an increased risk of mental illness. However, it is not clear whether the link between cannabis and psychosis is causal, or if it’s because people with psychosis cannabis tend to self-medicate their symptoms. Another point, we could say undefined by the researchers, is whether the psychosis is related to the use of cannabis or not. The study also found that increasing psychotic episodes following cannabis use, rather than vice versa, refuting the theory that the relationship between the two has been nothing more than people prone psychosis of self-medication.

This study makes us think of a previous one, the study from Keele University entitled “assessing the impact of cannabis use on trends in diagnosed schizophrenia in the United Kingdom from 1996 to 2005”. The research showed that even as marijuana use soared among the general populations, “incidence and prevalence of schizophrenia and psychoses were either stable or declining” during this period.

 It is believed that the incident use of cannabis has almost doubled the risk of incident psychotic symptoms later, even after taking into account factors such as age, sex, socioeconomic status, use other drugs and other psychiatric diagnoses. There was no evidence of self-medication effects that psychotic symptoms did not predict later cannabis use. On the other hand, we could say that the use of cannabis in his youth almost doubles the risk of psychotic episodes such as paranoia and hallucinations, as these studies have found.

In conclusion, what this shows is that the increased use of cannabis has not lead to an increase in the rates of the illness, so there can be no causal role for cannabis in the development of serious mental illness. That does not mean, of course, that the unrestricted use by kids is ok, for a whole load of reasons related with developing brains, learning ability and so on.