While the "marijuana causes schizophrenia" hype is statistically exaggerated (and the opposite causality may actually be the case), it's still a good reminder to perhaps avoid or severely restrict usage if you have a family history of the condition.
I love weed (smoking some right now) and feel that I strongly benefit from having it in my diet, but I have a lot of respect for people who remove it to their own improvement.
To this day i've never felt anything as extremely horrifying, and I also now know what it feels like to resign yourself to death. Incidentally, for months afterward, heavy drinking resulted in word salad. Once I drank too much at a club and tried to walk out of south beach, because aliens had taken over the island. There might have been other substances involved but I don't remember.
I've never done a study of my own experiments with pot, but generally speaking if I took it by itself, I was fine, with the usually documented side-effects. Other times i've tried marijuana (typically with alcohol) i've ended up like others have mentioned: misinterpreting behavior or intentions of others in potentially bad ways. Luckily by that point I was aware that my mind would simply make shit up when I was on drugs, so I would just hide myself until the effects wore off.
Don't do drugs, kids.
Someone else mentioned bipolar disorder, and it's interesting to note that schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders, and bipolar disorders share a similar relationship to dopamine, and so the primary method of action of many anti-psychotic medications is to block dopamine reuptake.
Also interesting is that things like alcohol withdrawal, amphetamines, and marijuana deplete dopamine while tobacco, heroin, and cocaine stimulate its production.
Here's a general article on it: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC368179/
Good catch.
I'm no doctor, psychiatrist, or psychologist, but I think his diagnosis is probably closer to "psychosis not otherwise specified".
However, he did mention that he is still taking the anti-psychotic medication, which can indeed inhibit the effects of schizophrenia for a long period of time. If he stops taking the medication and encounters psychotic symptoms again, then it probably is schizophrenia or similar.
"Schizophrenia" is a weird term and diagnosis, because it's probably many different diseases. I'd guess that most of these mental illnesses are symptom profiles related to dozens of different physical maladies. The symptoms were clearly psychotic (not all mania is psychotic, and hypomania rarely is, unless you include the benign religiosity) but I don't know (having experienced neither psychosis nor schizophrenia) if it's of the same character as what people with chronic schizophrenia experience.
The use (abuse) of substances is widespread among large swaths of the majority of mental illnesses. Associating the use of marijuana specifically with schizophrenia is absurd-- schizophrenics also abuse alcohol, does that mean wine causes schizophrenia?
I speak not only as a person with a mental health disorder (bipolar) but a member of a family with several actual schizophrenics.
Correlation is not causation. Downvote as you will.
> Associating the use of marijuana specifically with schizophrenia is absurd
It's not absurd. There's strong correlation between people who have a psychotic illness and previous cannabis use.
There are several different things people say about psychotic illness and cannabis.
i) smoking cannabis causes psychotic illnesses even in people with no underlying illness
ii) cannabis causes psychotic illness in people who already have a previously unseen underlying illness
iii) cannabis triggers episodes of illness in people who we know to have a psychotic illness
iv) cannabis has no effect either way
v) cannabis has high correlation because people are self medicating
vi) cannabis is protective
If you have a family history of psychotic illness it's probably a good idea to be cautious with drugs. That's not a controversial statement and it's intensely frustrating when people ignore any possibility of harm from cannabis. (The illegality of cannabis, and the ethics of research involving people with such a severe mental illness, mean that the research is not very good.)
(Also, if you're on certain meds you should stop smoking because the hydrocarbons in smoke interact with the meds).
http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/cg178
> Offer people with psychosis or schizophrenia who smoke help to stop smoking, even if previous attempts have been unsuccessful. Be aware of the potential significant impact of reducing cigarette smoking on the metabolism of other drugs, particularly clozapine and olanzapine.
(Just for the record, I'm not a marijuana user.)
Letting people know that there is that strong correlation and suggesting that they be cautious, especially if they have a family history of mental illness, is totally different from vaccine-FUD which is nonsense.