Adolescents who use cannabis could face a significantly higher risk of developing serious psychiatric disorders by young adulthood, according to a large new study published today in JAMA Health Forum. The longitudinal study followed 463,396 adolescents ages 13 to 17 through age 26 and found that past-year cannabis use during adolescence was associated with a significantly higher risk of incident psychotic (doubled), bipolar (doubled), depressive and anxiety disorders.
The study analyzed electronic health record data from routine pediatric visits between 2016 and 2023. Cannabis use preceded psychiatric diagnoses by an average of 1.7 to 2.3 years. The study’s longitudinal design strengthens evidence that adolescent cannabis exposure is a potential risk factor for developing mental illness.
Unlike many prior studies, the research examined any self-reported past-year cannabis use, with universal screening of teens during standard pediatric care, rather than focusing only on heavy use or cannabis use disorder.
The study also found that cannabis use was more common among adolescents enrolled in Medicaid and those living in more socioeconomically deprived neighborhoods, raising concerns that expanding cannabis commercialization could exacerbate existing mental health disparities.
Regular reminder that correlation =/= causation. Living a more stressful life due to poverty makes both mental illness and adolescent cannabis use more common.
That said there is a credible biological pathway to cannabis use having a causal role:
However we still don’t have definitive evidence of causation:
Yeah 100%. That’s why the grifters at this rag say “linked”. It’s sufficiently, pseudo-scientifically vague. That’s what they’re going for.
Additionally, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are both heritable conditions, and if a parent or grandparent has one of these diagnoses, the family is significantly more likely to also be experiencing poverty or other adverse events, which in turn makes it more likely that the predisposed child will develop the inherited condition.
The author’s used statistical control methods for socioeconomic factors.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2845356
Also fake news.
Again correlation (assumed) does not make causation. There is literally no gene for these symptoms.
Schizophrena is a multi-allelic gene disorder, multiple genes contribute. There is not one schizophrenia gene, but there is a clear genetic component.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3433970/
You’re just going around saying “correlation doesn’t equal causation” to everything regardless of context. Feel free to expound.
No, there definitely isn’t “a gene” for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, just like there isn’t “a gene” for hair or eye color, two other traits that are highly heritable.
Here’s just one source for you on this, and there are many more if you care to take a look:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5445022/
You cannot discuss marijuana risks on the internet without triggering pot users.
Since legalization, the landscape of pediatrics has changed in Canada to address THC-related disorders. And we have a whole new class of risk in adults from cannabis use disorder.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37766508/
The internet will not accept this, and keep the lie alive that cannabis is not addictive. No, we have not seen friends burn out on pot and remove themselves from life.
“cannabis is not addictive”
true.
edit - “friends burn out on pot and remove themselves from life” - this is an impressively far reach. wow
Oh sheesh. It runs in families. They’re saying growing up with a schizophrenic parent exposes you to stress that makes you more likely to indulge in pot. Their point stands.
I used to smoke a lot of weed in high school and after for a bit. One day, the panic set in. It wasn’t always, but the frequency definitely increased slowly, until eventually the risk of having a panic sesh became too much for me to be able to enjoy smoking.
Kind of unrelated and in the middle of all this, I remember talking to my old man, and he had lived a similar life to the one I was, at the time, currently leaving. He smoked a bunch of weed until, one day, couldn’t do it any longer because of the panicks.
So I definitely anecodotally agree with the ineritableness, and I certainly agree and am an example of the idea that cannabis can bring out symptoms similar to schizophrenic episodes. And they are so far from my norm that I really can’t attribute it to anything but the pots.
I’ve always felt that mental disorders can be like a switch, you flip it and it turns on, kinda. And the flipping can be the result of something external, life events, trauma, and drug and alcohol use. I had a friend who I smoked with often as a kid who eventually kinda disappeared into a world of mental issues, and I wonder if it would’ve been the same had he not smoked.
But the weed he smoked was 10X less potent.
That is exactly what I was wondering.
And it gets even more complex, because suppose you have these mental conditions - your threshold for taking medicine and / or drugs is probably lower.
So right now there’s still a good chance causation can be inverse.
That said, very important to take these studies seriously. No one should care about being right, it will always be about getting it right.
Classic case of using cannabis as a scapegoat in a random study to “prove” how harmful it is. Tale as old as time.
Pot users defending their lifestyle, Tale as old as time.
“I don’t like the result of this study so its random and wrong.”
Lol. Lmao even. What was that about tales as old as time?
“I believe any clickbait headline that I see. The article says these things are LINKED!!!”
lmao.
That’s a reach.
You spelled scientific study incorrectly.
There has been many, many, many decades of attempts, since the 1920s, at deeply flawed studies to prove some weak link between marijuana use and some bad outcome. Of course, it’s quickly found out that it was using rats, or some other small animal using fucked-up dosage:mass ratios, or the sample size was 20, or they were using the (literally) rotted garbage that was the government-grown marijuana stash, or it was funded by some DARE group, or funded by the nicotine industry, or the alcohol industry, or they didn’t prove causation, or they forgot to factor mental health, or social class, or racial factors, or a thousand other obvious problems.
I’m not going to go around and say cannibus doesn’t have its problems. But, given the track record of obviously flawed studies that land on this forum, and even more so with cannibus research, I’ll default to a position of extreme skeptism until proven otherwise.
Cool, maybe that’s true.
But ancient history isn’t relevant and doesn’t change the fact that cannabis use actually has legitimately been strongly correlated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
But it is proven that cannabis use causes bad outcomes. If used while the brain is developing, it causes learning problems. While smoking is not the only method to use the drug, it is the most common. Any type of smoke entering the lungs causes bad outcomes, and cannabis smoke contains orders of magnitude more tar than tobacco smoke. It is proven that it causes CHS in chronic/daily users. Addiction is a bad outcome. Memory problems are a bad outcome. These are all proven to be caused by cannabis use.
Even if that’s true, the point is that correlation =/= causation. WOOOSH!!!
When people like you attempt to blame w33d, that’s pseudo-science probably not even based on real science.
And again it’s a tale as old as prohibition.
So, your claim is that there is a not a system of complex endo cannabinoids mediating signaling in the brain, which have been defined to affect learning and memory for 50 years. And, that it is “crazy” to think that ingesting large amounts of a foreign cannabinoid, not native to this system, does not affect the human brain?
Yep, that’s why I typed “correlated” instead of “causes”.
I lean toward that interpretation but am open to being wrong.
I work in mental health and was surprised by the amount of people in the field who believe marijuana is part of the problem, not just a symptom of it.
Any “high”, from alcohol, pot, asphyxia, oxygen, etc., is neural dsyfunction.
The police roadside sobriety test is identical to a clinical ataxia test.
I’ve been in mental health institutions and it’s amazing how many people will blame drugs in order to completely ignore the deep life/social problems that people face.
That’s basically the whole point of the mental health industry. They turn social problems into druggable, profitable, “medical” problems - while also undermining any movements for social progress.
As someone that came out of a CSA victim position, most everyone I knew that was using in High School - the girls most of all - were dealing with similar issues.
Whether it was low-key sexual assault - being groped, or pressured to “put out” or even family friends or relatives, (in my own case it was “Uncle Touchy” in 1978, when I was 13… He was 34, hairy, chicken-chested and gross and thought he was God’s Gift to women…) in the late 70’s / early 80’s there was a lot of sexual abuse that was part of the landscape for girls “growing up”.
Much of it came out of the social norms of the time - the fallout of the “swinging” 70’s where it was all about sex. 24/7 sex, preferrably with 14 year olds, as that was the age in which the consensus was that there was something wrong with you if your cherry hadn’t been popped… Just a dreadful era, honestly.
The pot use was to numb the pain and forget what they’d gone through. I chose not to forget… and got stoned anyhow.
This is precisely the kind of situation that is re-entrenched by blaming the problem on weed.
That’s the real danger of pseudo-scientific articles like this.
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