Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

sciencedaily.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 244 posts

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#151

Post by tombert »

econ wrote: post #98

Not entirely on topic: If pot is illegal people will grow extremely potent variaties. If it's normal you get very tasty variaties that give a mild buzz even if you smoke pure joints all day. It's like comparing a casual light beer with the 90% moonshine or 45% bathtub gin sold during prohibition.

We can acknowledge that weed might be bad for people while also acknowledging that it probably shouldn't be illegal. There's no contradiction.

I think alcohol is bad for people but I don't think it should be illegal. I also think weed is probably bad for people but probably shouldn't be illegal.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#152

Post by andoando »

thesmtsolver2 wrote: post #117
andoando wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a lot of psychatric treatments are just that. Treatment for ADHD for example is giving ampethamines (which btw are chemically no different than a low dose of meth), which have a duration of 3-6 hours and its back to worse than baseline after the effect has worn off.

Just like how Hydrogen peroxide is chemically no different than a low dose of dihydrogen monoxide?

No not just like it, because the only difference with methampathemines is that the added meth group makes it able to cross the blood barrier much quicker, hence why I said its equivalent to a lose dose of meth. The chemical/biological response on the body and brain are very similar, the difference is in potency

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#153

Post by andoando »

dns_snek wrote: post #125
andoando wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a lot of psychatric treatments are just that. Treatment for ADHD for example is giving ampethamines (which btw are chemically no different than a low dose of meth), which have a duration of 3-6 hours and its back to worse than baseline after the effect has worn off.

That's a terrible oversimplification. Stimulant treatments for ADHD are not supposed to produce pronounced mood-enhancing effects. Stimulant treatment has been shown to be effective indefinitely in majority of people without increasing the dosage over time. These days formulations like lisdexamfetamine and extended release methylphenidate are preferred because they have all-day efficacy with typical duration of actio…

extended release are just two doses of the drug where half the beads are delayed by ~4 hours. How is that different from taking two edibles a day and claiming full day efficacy?

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#154

Post by Aurornis »

SecretDreams wrote: post #109
Aurornis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Lancet has been around for 200 years. It publishes weekly. It's a highly regarded journal, but it doesn't mean 100% of the papers published are perfect. If you're trying to dismiss a study because it was published in The Lancet then that's not a convincing line of reasoning to anyone who understands the scientific publishing landscape.

> anyone who understands the scientific publishing landscape. Anyone genuinely familiar with the scientific publishing process probably holds the most skepticism around publications. I could probably get ANYTHING published if I wrote it well enough. IMO, publications are mostly useful if you're already a bit of an SME in the field so that you can parse snake oil from gold. Certain publishers and institutions also hol…

> Anyone genuinely familiar with the scientific publishing process probably holds the most skepticism around publications

Healthy skepticism is a good idea

The silly notion that being published means it should be dismissed or that we should assume the opposite is true is not healthy though.

> The above view is independent of the current article. But it's embarrassing to see people praise the heck out of publications in 2026 in a vacuum. Reeks of young PhD student vibes.

I was responding to a comment above mine that said this journal was untrustworthy because of a single news bite they recalled.

I specifically said that not everything published in a journal is true!

Your condescending “young PhD student vibes” attempt at an insult is rich considering you didn’t even try to acknowledge what I actually said or the context in which I was delivering it.

Discussing anything science and research related on HN is such a slog because so many commenters are in such a rush to deliver some contrarian smug take that they’re not even reading what’s written.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#155

Post by XorNot »

themafia wrote: post #75
Kon5ole wrote: post #66

American media has really been shockingly pro weed/cannabis for the past 20 or so years. Really astounding to witness considering the well known downsides to human health and cognitive function. Main characters smoke weed as a cool disobedience, in sitcoms even. Wonder what is behind it, from my perspective it's quite remarkable.

People were smoking weed even when it was socially unacceptable and illegal. Then they were going to jail for a decade or more because of it. This simply did not make any sense. I believe most of this is a backlash effect. Weed was the worst thing ever. Weed is the best thing ever. Eventually weed will be in the same category as coffee.

I'd be real happy if we landed on "edibles" and not smoking though.

Just about all drugs would benefit from people doing the unobtrusively.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#156

Post by charles_f »

zug_zug wrote: post #146
charles_f wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond the semantics, this is what the meta analysis(1) actually says in the abstract > There were insufficient data to meta-analyse studies of ADHD, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tobacco use disorder. There was an absence of RCT evidence for the treatment of depression. Meta-analysis revealed higher odds of all-cause adverse events (OR 1·75, 95% CI 1·25 to 2·46) among those using cannabis vers…

It sounds to me like you didn't understand the paper at all, or are worse willfully misrepresenting. The paper says "insufficient data" for helpfulness for most positive categories (but leans more positive than negative just doesn't reach 95% confidence), but also insufficient data on most negative categories. It finds 5 conditions it's helpful for, and 3 it hurts for.

I'm directly quoting the portion of the abstract related to anxiety and depression, tell me how that's misrepresenting?

> There was an absence of RCT evidence for the treatment of depression.

> Meta-analysis revealed higher odds of all-cause adverse events (OR 1·75, 95% CI 1·25 to 2·46) among those using cannabis versus control group

And my point was that the paper talks about absence of data about efficacy on treatment so arguing on helping vs. curing in interpreting it is moot.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#157

Post by lll-o-lll »

Aurornis wrote: post #12

This is a hard topic to communicate in depression treatment. It's easy to mistake substances that temporarily boost your mood or calm your nerves for effective treatments for an underlying condition. There was a brief period of time before the opioid prescribing backlash when some fringe psychiatrists were proposing weaker opioids as adjunctive treatments for treatment resistant depression. It's hard to fathom now, b…

Yes. Rather it is the reverse that helps. Exercise is the biggest one, but essentially “pain that will stop” seems to help in general. Ice showers, fasting, new challenging activity, giving up caffeine/alcohol.

All these things suck in the short term, and make you feel more good in the medium term. Maybe because your default becomes “not in so much pain”, rather than “feeling worse than when briefly enhanced by substance X”

Edit: I’m referring more to the “self medication” approach. Please don’t take any of this as medical advice.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#158

Post by XorNot »

mjmsmith wrote: post #124
ecshafer wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the 1960s and the emergence of the New Left, and the introduction of the Frankfurt School and 60s post modernism into academia, there has been a widespread belief amongst a large segment of the population that everything traditional is wrong. A social stigma is merely ignorance, that which is seen as bad is actually good, traditions are wrong. All of these things need to be overturned for the enlightenment. Sin…

Students in the 90s had also lived their entire lives under the counter-productive and utterly racist War on Drugs. That might have colored their attitude more than the leftist indoctrination bogeyman.

The college indoctrination boogieman exists because it is coincidentally the first time in their lives a lot of people live away from their parents fulltime.

How much your opinions change once you're not in that environment can be amazing to both yourself and to the people who think they understand you because you were financially dependent on them.

New ideas or diversity or whatever: living by yourself 24/7 is a huge liberator of thought.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#159

Post by Aurornis »

zug_zug wrote: post #142
Aurornis wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire science is based on the patients self reported feelings or the psychatrists feeling of how someone else is feeling. This study is showing that THC, CBD, blends, or cannabis do not improve self-reported feelings over the long term. You can use pedantry and wordplay all you want, but no matter how we look at this study it does not show positive effects. > What you're saying is something else, that drugs ca…

>> This study is showing that THC, CBD, blends, or cannabis do not improve self-reported feelings over the long term. Just to clarify, the study is not saying that. The study is saying "there isn't conclusive evidence at this point, but it leans more toward helping than hurting on many categories". Please read the paper if in doubt.

> Please read the paper if in doubt.

I did. I don’t know if you did, though, because the categories that they said there might be some signal were secondary topics like insomnia, not depression PTSD and anxiety.

I mean, it’s literally in the title. It’s covered again in the abstract.

Re: Study finds no evidence cannabis helps anxiety, depression, or PTSD

#160

Post by j45 »

dns_snek wrote: post #122
j45 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to learn more about how this is the case (both assertions). Mind sharing? Neuroscience seems to be coming through with more and more understanding using technologies like fMRI and others the past 5-10 years. There is definitely some understanding there.

Amen are definitely fraudsters. Russell Barkley talks about this topic in this video: https://youtu.be/R_HCw-QePaA?t=900 The short version, as I understand is, is that brain scans show differences at the population level but not on the individual level. Amen claim to both diagnose ADHD through brain scans (which is already impossible) and also diagnose various "subtypes" of ADHD like "Limbic ADD" which have no scient…

Thanks I’ll check out the video.

I didn’t think their clinics only worked on ADHD.

Other types of imaging like fMRI are being used successfully by others as well for things like TBI, so I won’t jump to ruling out all types imaging.

Is it true that psychiatry doesn’t prescribe off imaging but symptom clusters?

Post reply on HN