Sounds like therapy would be very useful then. If you’re having to self-medicate to maintain sanity, the substances are only a crutch. Speaking from personal experience.
1) Cost: $120 of cannabis every month is cheaper than a therapist and more effective than 1 session
2) Some issues are perspective: where your perspective needs to be changed and it's making your life worse but not a DSM-5 diagnosis leaving a majority of therapists/psychologists without tools to treat
2.1) The amount of therapy needed to sus out that point of view thats hurting you is way more expensive.
3) Forced release valve: it forces you to not care and be apathetic at the end of the day. In my case, doing 10-12 hour days and feel yourself wanting to push for longer is also a very unhealthy feeling. I'm not in a position to slow down or the start-up fails/loses investors. I don't need it to relax at the end of the day, where I'm not smoking now as a test. Regardless, I do notice being burnt out faster now without it.
If what you seek is a healthier emotional and psychological outlook, substituting cannabis for therapy is self-sabotage. There are other ways to gain the "release valve" that don't involve smoking weed.
No there's set work books that many therapist agree on, but I'm talking about situations where your GAD is now at a state that isn't obstructive in your day-to-day life. You're doing the work still yet still feel less than or unhappy. There isn't more diagnoses for just feeling unfulfilled in life, depression is too harsh a term for it since your functional(which is core to most diagnosis is how much it changes your day to day). So that's when it comes to the therapists 'talk therapy' skill and how much time and money you have to throw at it
>this is a very short-sighted view. Therapy is not about finding a diagnosis, it is about finding perspective.
Yes, however, finding the therapist that can do that for you is exponentially harder. Since they have to understand you and your situation, and that comes with time and their personal insight on it. So at that point you have to then find someone that has faced similar issues or has specialized in helping people through them. If you're a minority, finding that insight is even more costly, so you have to choose talk therapy with someone that doesn't get it but is trying or pay the premium for the person that does.
For instance, I'm trans passing as a woman that's public about being trans. It's just inherently stressful navigating business environments, since I can get a mix of sexism and/or vailed transphobia. There isn't some magical answer my therapist has for me other than mediation and working through accepting myself and the situation. That involves re-diving into the stressful situation mentally to accept it, which is just more work and stress.
Examples: - Knowing that people are speaking down to me irl, more so than when I was an unqualified student. - Having people completely change their responses/personality around me when they find out I'm trans - Intense Anxiety not about day-to-day activities/interactions anymore but dealing with any authority figures in cases like crossing the border means TSA shouldn't but could force me to strip naked to prove I'm male
Therapy isn't going to help me de-stress from these, it would give me work to make those less stressful later by working through why it stresses me. For which I've been given the tools already to do so
> There are other ways to gain the "release valve" that don't involve smoking weed.
Yea, I know I'm not smoking right now, and I'm doing the others already do a 45m - 1 hour work out daily, 30 minutes mediation, I work while I eat and get 7-8 hours of sleep work 10-12 hours. It is still the most effective way to relax in 20 minutes for me, and I'm probably going back to it as a way to end my day in another month once I'm done the 3-month test abstaining from it. What else can I do in maybe the hour or two I have left in the day that is clinically shown to reduce stress...
> substituting cannabis for therapy is self-sabotage
It's not substitution it's in conjunction when I can afford it, otherwise I do the homework that I got from therapy. Which like I mentioned before is more work and stress, which isn't relaxing at all. Weed helps me keep up with the work and not let it add to work stress too, I have been noticing I'm falling behind on my homework in that sense.
A lot of things can be a crutch, but cannabis provides meaningful relief for many.
Hell, you could say the same thing to someone who enjoys a small dessert every night. Or a bath. So long as they’d feel sad to not have it, they are then avoiding a problem, right?
Or… humans just really enjoy having diverse things to do, and all find different balances of what those things are. And THC suits very well to certain brain physiologies much like a bubble bath does for others.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32956517/
I could similarly link to about 10 pretty scary studies for caffeine, especially effect on brain structure and sleep quality.
Or should we do sugar?
The dose makes the poison for anything, it's not clear THC isn't beneficial at a lower dose. It's medically prescribed for cancer pain relief, and for a segment of people its anxiolytic effects are incredible.
I'm not even apart of this debate, and now I am curious. Do you mind sharing what you have found?
Cannabis (THC) has properties that (in some, not all and sometimes the reverse) reduce anxiety however, from what I've seen and experienced, cannabis is by in large used to self-medicate instead of seek real treatment.
Life is tough, it’s not hard to understand that a substance that has the above effects with less side effects than most popular drugs could be enjoyed responsibly.
Now I’m confused; who is it again who’s making the low-effort generalizations?
I'm not here to diagnose or mentor people with potential health issues but I thought it might be meaningful to post a small comment about how I thought the exact same way once and how it turned out I wasn't actually helping myself but sabotaging myself.
If the OP is curious enough about addressing their mental health issues, that's on them but I'd rather at least post something that might spur some thought instead of play into the "weed is inherently good and causes no issues" hivemind that is incredibly prevent on the internet (and on HN) today.
Caffeine as found in a big mug of drip is pretty intense if you don't have a tolerance to it. You really learn to appreciate that by doing something like this.
I know many frequent cannabis users. Most of them could use a month or two off to stop orbiting weed.
Lots of people say this. I'll even say it right now. If you need caffeine to function, you should probably talk to a doctor.
Drinking coffee every day does not mean it's a crutch. If it becomes a crutch, you should talk to a mental health professional.
There's no need to get upset because someone recommends you talk to a doctor.
We're talking about degrees. If someone I knew could not function without coffee, yes, I would suggest they talk to a doctor.
I don't know why this is controversial. Vices are great. I have plenty myself. But it's not good to have a dependency on anything...
To my mind, resolving a mental health issue is a bit like resolving a technical issue like a slow-loading web page. Similar looking problems can be caused by a lot of different things in the toolchain. Just in my case alone, I have identified causes in the spiritual, physical, psychological, and lifestyle domains. As in, I know certain things cause the problem because I can trigger it via those methods, and ameliorate it by avoiding certain things or embracing certain strategies!
I think if you have a problem with a cause that is well-addressed by therapy, it will work very well for you. That doesn't invalidate that other people have other problems in other areas addressed by other strategies.
If you hang out around people talking about mental health issues, you will hear some really weird stories. Like, I'll tell you one about me: the final lingering symptom of the depression was suicidal ideation. It was more or less of a problem for me for about ten years -- more or less once a week I'd wake up thinking, "I hate my life, I want to die". You know what finally put it to bed, dead and gone, really truly doesn't bother me anymore? Tactical firearms training. I kid you not.
Buuuuuuuuut it's not really a path I'd recommend to anyone else. ;)
Medicating mental health issues -- either under professional supervision or not -- is a huge hot button issue for some people. It can be a lifesaver and it can be a life destroyer and people have really strong experiences with it and strong opinions about it. I think the whole discussion is emotionally magnified precisely because insanity is so horrible and people need there to be solutions that work. Desperation and trauma are an environment that breed superstition and excessive faith, and make thoughtful inquiry and understanding difficult. That's not evil - it's just human. Nasty problems are hard to think about clearly.
It sure is a funny space, though, because there seem to be so many solutions that work for some people. Some people are able to solve seemingly intractable mental health problems with diet - Jordan Peterson is a famous case, for example, of someone who approached a terrible anxiety problem with a very exotic diet and found it effective. You can find a lot of less famous cases of that. And the recreational drug side of it has some remarkable stories, too. Some that seem miraculous and amazing, and some that seem like people haven't really gotten a handle on what's going on.
I'd say "let people try stuff", but I don't even think that's the right approach. As you say, a substance may be a crutch for a specific person, which doesn't rule out the possibility that it's a cure for another, but which on the other hand doesn't rule out the possibility that someone who thinks it's a cure for them is wrong. I think it's good to tell each other about the pitfalls we know of and to try to improve our understanding. Sometimes people think they've gotten things right, and they're really wrong. Then again, sometimes extraordinary things are right. And on the third hand, perhaps you're one of those weird cases that really won't respond unless you eliminate broccoli from your diet or have a priest pray for you or go on a guided meditation with the right guide or become a decent marksman with pistols. Perhaps you need something weird and you haven't found it yet, and maybe you never will, and a crutch that lets you live your life in the mean time is very important.
I guess all I'm trying to say is this whole thing is a big, complicated, messy problem. I certainly have my own fears and bad experiences in the domain, and I do try to let people know about the dangers I wish I'd known of. In fact, I mostly agree with you - long term medication of mental health issues is very scary for me, and I'd have a hard time not wanting to check up on someone who was doing it and make sure they were sure sure that this was a good idea, just because so often it turns out not to be. But I also think in this space, you have to give people a lot of room to do what works for them. Sometimes it's really weird stuff.