Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds • Hacker News Board

Re: Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds

#271

Post by Fnoord » Fri, May 05, 2023, 1:54 PM UTC

kayodelycaon wrote: post #268

Fnoord wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an approx 2 month long psychotic episode (its hard to note when it ended as, at least in my case, it kinda winds down so its not binary). Regarding memory, there's MS, autism, and schizophrenia in my family, and I've become older (the episode is now 10+ years ago). There are certain coffee blends which I really dislike, but I can still drink coffee, though not in the evening (insomnia). During pregnancy (common…

I don’t drink alcohol anymore because it mixes badly with my medication. A single, tiny sip of scotch hits me fast. I immediately start feeling depressed and irritable. Even a couple sips of 2% beer has a noticeable effect for half an hour. It’s incredibly unpleasant. It’s no great loss because I didn’t drink much before. I do miss scotch though.

Yeah, similar (Fluoxetine, which greatly helps me against irritability), but even before medication I was sensitive to it (though I'd like to think I was best dealing with it around age of 20-25?). I tried dealing with it by taking small sips, but even one glass of beer in an evening is too strong, and moreover: it costs a me a couple of hours of sleep. So the day after, I'm wasted. On Saturday morning I do sports, so I couldn't use that, so it would end up drinking approx once a week on Saturday evening. But it would waste a large part of my Sunday.

Re: Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds

#272

Post by kayodelycaon » Fri, May 05, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

naruhodo wrote: post #233

kayodelycaon wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychosis can do a lot of damage. I had a 4-month-long psychotic break that eventually led to me being diagnosed bipolar. It several years to recover from but I think some of the damage is permanent. I feel like I've lost a lot of memory function but I can't remember what things were like before. And it's difficult to separate that out from medication side-effects at this point. What I do know is caffeine gives me pa…

> What I do know is caffeine gives me panic attacks now (even decaf coffee is too much) Coffee makes me jittery, but green tea gives me focused attention. I just don't enjoy the taste of green tea that much, so I drink coffee and take L-theanine (extract of green tea) pills to calm me down a bit.

L-theanine seems to be pretty good for a lot of people. :)

My experiment with it went pretty badly as it took out my mood stabilizer. (Oops.) That took me for a wild ride for the next 3 weeks after I stopped it.

After I mentioned this to my psychiatrist, she was rather insistent about not self-medicating. This included vitamins. A great number of things interact poorly with my medication mix. (e.i. Magnesium can interfere with absorption.)

At this point, I treat anything available over the counter the same way I treat prescription medications. I do research and clear anything potentially psychoactive with my psychiatrist. I do use natural things like melatonin. I just need to make sure are safe to take.

Re: Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds

#273

Post by CP3f6kMA » Fri, May 05, 2023, 4:27 PM UTC

MagicMoonlight wrote: post #183

csomar wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that schizophernia is a predisposed condition. Cannabis can trigger it but not really cause it. (That's at least what I got from talking to a professional). One clue to find out whether you are predisposed is if you have someone in the family (related genetically) who has at-birth mental health issues. Then stay a gazillion miles clear of any drugs.

If you don’t have it and then taking it makes you have it then that is causing it

A trigger requires a gun to actually do anything.

Re: Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds

#274

Post by CapstanRoller » Fri, May 05, 2023, 4:28 PM UTC

Mike_12345 wrote: post #232

CapstanRoller wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and it subjectively and objectively harms your mental health and cognitive abilities, Objectivity is good. So how often do you measure these things, what tools do you use, and what data do you collect? How do you analyze the data? >then basic common sense and reasoning tells you it is harmful to the brain (neurotoxic). "Neurotoxic" does not mean "alters your cognition" "Alters your cognition" does not mean "harmful…

> "Basic common sense" is not a synonym for "science". I explained this was my opinion based on experience multiple times so you're just arguing with a strawman. You are absolutely wasting your time here and completely missed the point. Try reading the article if you want to see a study showing scientific evidence of the neurotoxicity of weed.

>Try reading the article if you want to see a study showing scientific evidence of the neurotoxicity of weed.

The article doesn't say anything about the neurotoxicity of weed. It doesn't even contain the word "toxic". The study doesn't talk about neurotoxicity or use that word either.

Are you commenting on the right article?

Re: Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds

#275

Post by rhinoceraptor » Fri, May 05, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

electrondood wrote: post #180

n=1, in high school I was smoking a lot of weed, and started having what I discovered years later are called "ideas of reference," where you start getting the sense that the people around you are talking about you, but secretly. At face value, there's nothing you can point to as evidence of this, because it all appears to be normal conversation, but there's a secret meaning that only you can hear. You're basically pr…

You may have an MTHFR polymorphism that leads to low folate/B12, those SNPs are correlated with autism, schizophrenia, among other things.

I have the homozygous C677T SNP and recently started taking methyl folate and methylated B12 and noticed I get much better sleep and less brain fog.

Re: Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds

#276

Post by DiscourseFan » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:29 PM UTC

apple34 wrote: post #189

perchard wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is a theory along these lines. something like: the defense against the unconscious is so strong in autism that the person becomes rigid and shut off. the defense against the unconscious is so weak in schizophrenia that the person is overwhelmed with phenomena. but both have something to do with intense unconscious objects.

Do you have a source for these claims? Would be super interested in reading more on this.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3080676/

I found this (relatively) recently published article reviewing Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias which is the book where he first publishes the terms "Schizophrenia" and "Autism." Though Bleuler was using the words with his colleagues starting a few years earlier. (Cf. Freud-Jung Correspondences, May 1907[0], you can ctrl-f "autism,""schizophrenia," etc.)

[0]https://archive.org/stream/FreudJungLetters/The-Freud-Jung-l...

Re: Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds

#277

Post by Mike_12345 » Fri, May 05, 2023, 6:34 PM UTC

CapstanRoller wrote: post #236

Mike_12345 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where is the objectivity? Objectively worse performance in life and in mentally taxing work. It really isn't that complicated. Go smoke a massive bong hit then do a calculus exam and compare your score.

You're talking in circles. >Objectively worse performance in life and in mentally taxing work. Very interesting! I'd love to learn more. Please show us the data supporting this assertion. >Go smoke a massive bong hit then do a calculus exam and compare your score. I don't smoke, so I took a cannabis edible or vaped some concentrate. My calculus exam score improved. Now what? You still haven't provided any evidence fo…

> Very interesting! I'd love to learn more. Please show us the data supporting this assertion.

You can't demand a study/citation for someones personal experience. That is absurd. You are being an absolutely illogical clown.

I was talking about my opinion and direct personal experience. I explained this multiple times but you are incapable of understanding this basic concept.

"Objective" means observable and measurable. Are you genuinely so clueless that you believe no one can perceive anything objective about their own performance and abilities and actions in the external world?

Re: Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds

#278

Post by gwern » Fri, May 05, 2023, 7:30 PM UTC

lisasays wrote: post #230

gwern wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll save everyone a click: yes, this is a case of 'correlation != causation'. We know extremely well, for a fact, that at least a good chunk of the SCZ/marijuana use relationship is confounded/reverse causation. The authors do little to improve over the known-wrong simple correlation strategy. This is especially lame when they have access to the Danish population registry with its rich metadata and very large _n_, a…

I'll save everyone a click: yes, this is a case of 'correlation != causation'. The authors (whose freshman stats classes were presumably as good as yours) were evidently well aware of this distinction - which is why they took the trouble to say 'association' rather than 'causation' in the title. So the pedantry here seems rather misplaced.

No, my pedantry is not misplaced. Let me again repeat: we know the correlate is confounded. This isn't a hypothetical. It is a known fact established from many different methods triangulating the same result: the naive SCZ/marijuana correlation is confounded, and quite substantially so. Their entire analysis is predicated on an assumption which is substantially false. And I agree they know what they're doing, which is why it makes me so angry to read their paper and I am criticizing them personally and not simply raising a technical point: they know they are peddling bullshit, and at best, they want to believe, and at worst, they are cynically manufacturing scary media-friendly results they know will be cited more than the results they should have published, 'the SCZ/marijuana relationship was attenuated by over half when we ran the standard within-family analysis on the population register like we should have, yet again demonstrating how confounded it is and how hard it will be to infer any causality, sad to say for those looking for a quick hit of scary controversy and reason to ban marijuana'.

The authors themselves cover up and ignore the many past results demonstrating confounding, fail to do better when they so easily could have, and then have the sheer unmitigated chutzpah, the incredible gal, to just say "assuming causality" right in the abstract to immediately start advertising huge inflammatory claims like "one-fifth of cases of schizophrenia among young males might be prevented by averting CUD." (again, from the abstract, and repeated throughout). Yes, and 'assuming the moon is made of cheese', we could save a ton on moon base supplies and might avert one-fifth of moon base costs by mining the cheese... But I don't advise going to the media about your exciting new research about how NASA could trim its budgets.

I don't blame the people reporting on this for getting it wrong, when the authors spin it so hard that a CD would explode.

Re: Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds

#279

Post by Mike_12345 » Fri, May 05, 2023, 7:48 PM UTC

progmetaldev wrote: post #266

Mike_12345 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I firmly believe that psychedelics are triggers and not the cause of mental disorders If a neurotoxic drug such as cannabis causes psychosis in someone who would otherwise never have become psychotic without the drug, then whether you call it a cause or a trigger is quibbling over semantics.

It has not been proven to be neurotoxic, so I'm not so sure over your reference of semantics. I only consume edibles, as the smoke is too harsh for my lungs. This study does not have a definitive answer as to whether cannabis is actually the cause or trigger for schizophrenia.

Go to Google Scholar and search for "neurotoxicity of cannabis"

You can find studies showing that even pure THC is neurotoxic. It depends on dosage and frequency.

Re: Heavy marijuana use increases schizophrenia in men, study finds

#280

Post by titulinfrye » Fri, May 05, 2023, 10:02 PM UTC

Mike_12345 wrote: post #155

progmetaldev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very much for individual freedom when it comes to drug use, assuming you aren't hurting others. I think in the push for cannabis legalization, many people have forgotten that cannabis is a psychedelic drug. While it's not the same as LSD or psilocybin, it can definitely change perception and thinking. In 1996 I had a psychotic episode from LSD, and developed generalized anxiety disorder and panic disorder. I alwa…

> I firmly believe that psychedelics are triggers and not the cause of mental disorders If a neurotoxic drug such as cannabis causes psychosis in someone who would otherwise never have become psychotic without the drug, then whether you call it a cause or a trigger is quibbling over semantics.

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