Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

For what's it worth for an N=1 study I watched a relative's young family fall apart because of cannabis induced psychosis. They had two young kids, husband was smoking pot recreationally (not sure how long he was doing that) but at some point he started hearing aliens talking to him from the cracks in the wall. Naturally you can't just keep doing all the regular life and family stuff when you have more pressing issues like visitors from out of space in the walls talking about attacking earth.

I am not saying anyone should or should not use these substances, but that was enough of a lesson for me to know never to touch that stuff.

View on HN

So I'm sorry that happened to your friend...

But also let's remember that there are tens of million Americans using weed products (legally in many states) who are having a great time with it. Which is why we need large-scale studies like this, and why any individual anecdote shouldn't offset a large study.

Whether or not cannabis makes psychosis more likely isn't proven, but your N=1 study illustrates how bad it often is. People should know that psychosis isn't just having some weird ideas, but often destroys lives and families.

There is no established causal link between the two. Cannabis is so ubiquitous that it is often the case that people with underlying psychiatric problems find it calms them and then blame cannabis for it if they get worse, because that's saving face in a twisted way.

Link is not the same as "it causes it".

Good point, you may very well be right. But seeing how that tragedy unfolded was enough to convince me at least to never consider it, just in case there is a causal effect.

In my subjective experience cannabis does tend to nudge some part of the brain into edit mode. What happens afterwords depends on the person.

For me it upended a lot of my alignment with the contemporary consensus morality. Before marijuana I had a sense that the morality wasn’t actually well foundationed, or at least it was equivalent to a religion in that respect, but my mind seemed to avoid thinking about it too much. With marijuana my mind freely went there, and I think a lot of my prior beliefs about the world and social systems ended up being altered.

I haven’t ended up with any diagnosed conditions, but it is inconvenient to have beliefs that are quite different from the societal default, even though in my case I do believe that my way of seeing morality is significantly more accurate on a technical basis than the consensus view. And I suspect this wouldn’t have happened without any marijuana.

I can definitely see how someone with a less analytically oriented mindset could end up going off in weird directions and writing that as a legitimate belief while in edit mode.

We definitely need studies to properly characterize what exactly this edit mode is, but I am not too skeptical about there being some kind of causal link between marijuana and going off the rails mentally, in some individuals and in some environmental conditions.

Bear in mind that majority of people with diagnosed Schizophrenia tend to smoke cigarettes / tobacco. But this is never raised the same way as cannabis is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com