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Comment by SolaceQuantum | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that the indications of schizophrenia being associated with weed is ascribing a causative effect to a correlation. Weed doesn’t increase your chances of schizophrenia unless you already had something that would tilt you in that direction in the first place, from my experience. I would say I do agree that schizophrenia probably needs to be broken up; it was merely a collection of symptoms to begin with that couldn’t be explained by other means. Now we have explanations.

I am curious how this may affect schzioaffective, schizoid, and schizotypal disorders. That they’re not mentioned st all in this article is rather disappointing.

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Schizophrenia also has a huge correlation with smoking tobacco cigarettes too but that doesn't mean cigarettes cause schizophrenia.

The text does a decent job of not saying smoking weed causes psychosis:

"Compared with non-cannabis users, the daily use of high-potency, skunk-like cannabis is associated with a fivefold increase in the odds of someone developing psychosis."

But the photo caption below a picture of someone smoking weed explicitly states (not supported by a study; how could one possible do a double blind test on cannabis in the current regulatory environment) a causative effect:

"Smoking skunk every day increases your odds of developing a psychotic disorder fivefold"

Given how carefully written that aspect of the actual article text was, I'm assuming that the photo + caption was added later on by someone else who was more interested in clickbait than differentiation between cause and correlation (or didn't understand the difference in the first place). Journalism is dead, rabble rabble.

Or just not aware of the difference. Not everyone helping with layouts is evil and just wants clickbait. They're just not always experts on the field.

Indeed. Also keep in mind, that though someone might realize, on an abstract level, that ”correlation is not causation”, they might not be used to actively looking for that distinction in text. Everyday discussions tend to be more fluid and inexact.

> skunk-like cannabis

Why don't they just go with the "sticky icky"

There exists cannabis psychosis. Naturally, more psychosis will exacerbate a psychotic illness. It usually brings it on earlier and heavier in severity i.e typically schizophrenia presents later but cannabis usage in adolescents seems to trigger it.

The same is true for amphetamine. Interestingly, amphetamine has been hypothesised as a chemical model for schizophrenia. Amphetamine psychosis is extremely similar to the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. In fact, many of the treatments used for psychotic illnesses repress dopamine activity in certain receptors (the newer ones, the typical antipsychotics, are less 'targeted' than newer ones leading to Parkinsonian side effects).

> There exists cannabis psychosis.

As far as I can tell, this is not generally accepted as true. At best, there is a statistical association between cannabis use in children/young adults and the later development of psychoses. As we all know, "correlation is not causation" - it may well be that those who are more likely to develop psychosis are also more likely to use cannabis and other psychoactive substances to excess.

> Weed doesn’t increase your chances of schizophrenia unless you already had something that would tilt you in that direction in the first place, from my experience

I really wish people on both sides of this argument would stop pushing what they think and just look at some evidence.

The interplay between cannabis, tobacco, medication, and psychosis is incredibly complex. We can't yet say there's no causative effects of cannabis, because it's hard to remove confounding factors.

For example: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/substance-m...

I suspect there's some vague "psychosis level" that spikes and decays exponentially when you use weed, lsd, etc. And then people with schizophrenia find these drugs near age 20 just as the level is rising naturally. So it looks like LSD triggered it but there's no real interaction besides adding the two curves.

I was diagnosed schizoid because I was a smartass and said I could "hear things that others couldn't".

I sincerely hope that it took more than just this one sentence for a real doctor to diagnose you as schizoid.

Mistakes can be made quite easily—doctors are only human. For example, once I was diagnosed with “mild scoliosis”, in part because I was slouching heavily when the doctor came in to the exam room for my physical—I was shy about having my shirt off and thought slouching made me look cool and aloof. I was wrong, and as it turned out, so was he.

Doctors only know what you tell them.

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