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.
I mean in general if you drink or do any drugs (caffeine and pre-workout included) before you’re like 18 is probably not going to be good for you.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2845356
I think this is the study. They controlled statistically for a variety of factors that various people in this post are assuming had interactions.
Also, the author’s are from a variety of reputable universities and institutions in California.
Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to measure the strength of associations between adolescent cannabis use and incident psychiatric diagnoses, with adjustments for sex, race and ethnicity, neighborhood deprivation index, insurance type, and time-varying alcohol and other substance use.
Yes yes, ofc they “controlled for”. It’s always the same argument with these studies. And you know it isn’t remotely enough so you appeal to authority by saying “reputable universities and institutions”, as if there hasn’t been literally hundreds of billions put into anti-cannabis research and there’s still only massively vague correlations instead of being able to show a single causation. Unlike with alcohol, which you can clearly demonstrate a sudden onset psychosis from pretty much anyone as long as you’re giving them something above say 8% ABV for a few hours on an empty stomach.
Yet you’ll also be able to find millions of people smoking weed daily without issues. You can’t say that for alcohol. Yet the implication is still one of “we can’t legalise more drugs” as if legalising made people less aware of the risks and less likely to abuse those substances, when we *know" it doesn’t. It actually does the opposite. Prohibition increases abuse and associated risks.
But hey, let’s spend another day arguing about how theres definitely a “link” between cannabis use and mental health disorders, even though not a single person can say what the link is how it forms or why.
Last time I did it I ended up having to read and Google all sorts of “reputable institutions” and once I did find the material, turns out even though they claimed to have controlled for all of those aspects, every single cannabis user was from a lower socioeconomic group than the control groups, which were in areas which were distinctly higher in average socioeconomic class. Then they just claimed that they had “controlled”. They clearly hadn’t. They had done the exact opposite.
Edit and just to make it clear, ofc any substance use has risks. Caffeine moreso than cannabis, for real.
On the other hand… The DSM is a pile of pseudo-scientific dogshit arbitrarily describing symptoms. And this article is trash clickbait intentionally obscuring correlation vs causation.
Cannabis use was more common among: … Youth on Medicaid or living in more deprived neighborhoods
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:
THC acts on CB1 receptors, which are highly expressed in the adolescent brain and play a key role in emotional regulation, motivation, and cognitive development.
However we still don’t have definitive evidence of causation:
Q: Does this study prove cannabis causes mental illness? A: While causation can’t be definitively established, cannabis use was associated with an increased risk of developing psychiatric conditions
correlation =/= 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.
Cox proportional hazards regression models were used to measure the strength of associations between adolescent cannabis use and incident psychiatric diagnoses, with adjustments for sex, race and ethnicity, neighborhood deprivation index, insurance type, and time-varying alcohol and other substance use.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2845356
schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are both heritable conditions
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.
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:
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.
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.
He smoked a bunch of weed until, one day, couldn’t do it any longer because of the panicks.
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.
I believe any clickbait headline that I see.
That’s a reach.
The article says these things are LINKED!!!
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.
prove some weak link between marijuana use and some bad outcome
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.
cannabis use actually has legitimately been strongly correlated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
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.
Even if that’s true, the point is that correlation =/= causation.
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 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.
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.
Removed by mod
Not the news people want to hear. Seems like a pretty large study, too.
I don’t think it should come as any sort of surprise that people who already have an underlying mental health issue would attempt to self-medicate as a teenager.
Yeah I’m sure the “cannabis is completely harmless” crowd will have normal reactions to this
I thought that this is just confirmation of other studies? We knew that it exacerbates underlying mental conditions, especially in those underage.
I don’t think I have met the crowd you refer to.
I thought that this is just confirmation of other studies? We knew that it exacerbates underlying mental conditions, especially in those underage.
It pretty much is, though I think this study is unusual in that it suggests that the effect may be independent of socioeconomic factors.
Though the authors do admit that there may be a bidirectional link at play, which is quite interesting, and relatively novel, off the top of my head. You’re at higher risk for schizophrenia or psychosis if you use marijuana, but you’re also more likely to use marijuana if you’re at higher risk for schizophrenia or psychosis. A lot of prior studies established the links individually, but didn’t combine them.
I don’t think I have met the crowd you refer to.
There are a few dotted throughout this thread, laying the blame on other things than the hasis.
But where is the study? Maybe this is my bad but I couldn’t actually find the paper that explains the methodology, nor could I find in which journal this is published and if this got peer reviewed?
I think it’s the blue word that says “Study .” below the link.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama-health-forum/fullarticle/2845356
Ah yeah thank you! Im used to stuff like SSRN where you can’t miss the link
Yes. Children should not use harder/recreational drugs
Ehhhhh…I see some kids in public that make me think “Damn I wish this kid were zoned out on drugs…”
But nope. He’s just screaming, and throwing food. Being a real brat! I swear, I hate getting dragged to kids 18 year old birthday parties at Chuck-E-Cheese.
kid
18
Anything younger than 25 is a kid. If I had grey hair before you were born, you’re a kid.
Bet
Wtf
Jesus Christ, so many ignorant people in this thread trying to question the scientific data with nothing but their own fee-fees about the politics of cannabis legality and capitalism. So much for this being a science forum.
So much for this being a science forum.
This clickbait article is a pseudo-scientific joke just from the headline alone. And people are upvoting it. smh.
More anecdata of my own here … but I’ve observed that a good number “pro-science” people abandon the science when it ceases to suit their politics.
Says the guy pumping the puritanical anti drug works they commission? Your words are wise, if one had shit for brains and was born yesterday.
Study of age 13-17yo kids, but the thumbnail is of a 7 year old rip master, who’s monster bong loads are phatter than all those teens.
You made me think that it would be an absolute cosmic joke if we discovered that the effects of cannabis on children under 13 were, paradoxically, incredibly positive. Imagine all the privileged parents being like : “I’m making sure he’s vaping THC all day, I want him to have opportunities!”
Did the study account for confounding variables like … capitalism?
They did. One of the variables they statistically controlled for in the study is the “neighbourhood deprivation index”, which represents socio-economic living factors.
They wouldn’t be in this research position if they accounted for capitalism.
Same probably goes for the downvoters. People are mad that you brought up root causes. The pharma shilling has been internalized.
Much easier to blame the individuals for their choices than to look at the system abusing them.
This just confirms what psychiatrists already knew for a long time. Cannabis use accentuates the probability of mental illnesses.
Nobody knows this. You’re just another person here conflating correlation with causation.
How many people will say this same nonsense? How many will upvote?
More specifically, for someone who has a genetic predisposition to developing schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, cannabis use will make it more likely that you yourself will develop that condition. If you have someone in your family with schizophrenia or bipolar, you would do well to avoid cannabis use, especially as a teenager or young adult.
This is yet again pseudo-science based on the false belief that (presumed) correlation is the same as causation.
I’m not understanding your argument. What about this is correlation and not causation? The body of literature indicating cannabis negatively impacts the mental health of people prone to developing psychosis is pretty extensive, and this is measured against other people who are prone to developing psychosis but who do not use cannabis
Thank you for making this remark, this is not new information.
Thank you.
Maybe someone can tell if this is peer reviewed and if this is actually published in a reputable journal and also what’s the agenda of the institutes funding this.
Lot to ask I guess but I have 0 clue about this field and don’t really know how seriously I should take this
It’s the journal of the American Medical Association, it’s a peer reviewed journal and it’s as reputable as scientific journals come. the author affiliations are listed at the top of the article if you click the dropdown:
There’s a real link between cannabis use and some mental illnesses, this isn’t the first paper to make that connection. What that connection is and whether cannabis use among children is causing mental illness is still AFAIK an open question. There are, according to my psychiatrist, conflicting data on whether cannabis makes depression worse or better. It seems to help for me, so I continue to use it with their supervision and advice, but I also know people who quit cannabis and felt better as a result, so I think if you use it and have one of these illnesses, it’s worth running your own trials to determine whether it’s helping or hurting.
There’s a real link
Yes, it’s called a correlation and, even if it exists, it’s not the same as causation.
I can’t believe how many people don’t understand this in a supposed science comm.
I am aware. If I may refer you to the very next sentence:
What that connection is and whether cannabis use among children is causing mental illness is still AFAIK an open question.
Thanks a lot, this is what I’ve been wondering. I know that there’s a link and that cannabis can trigger e.g. psychoses especially if there’s a genetic predisposition, but this is extremely tricky data to work with and to draw inferences from.
They do mention the bidirectional nature and I think that’s where it becomes really hard to model. If you would properly try to isolate the cannabis effect you’d need to identify a cohort of individuals similar to those that got diagnosed and that have (self-reportedly) not consumed cannabis as a control group and then compare these two groups to their overarching population and then determine if the mean difference (if there’s any) is statistically significant.
Here you could argue that this is what they’ve already been doing and I may have a flaw in my thinking, but I think there’s just some control variable missing.
Of course if we knew how to describe such population this would be an easy exercise, but since all we know is that the population is teenagers living in the same area, along with some other demographic metadata this is a limitation that I‘m not sure can be overcome so I don’t blame the authors of the study.
I think that the connection is there in some way or another is an interesting finding and probably a good reason to try and stop teenagers from smoking weed. Personally it also helps me against depression but also I‘m not 14 anymore.
wait hold up. i know one of those authors. they’re a hack. i certainly hope they were not the one processing or analyzing the numbers.
Hit the “article information” link and lots of that is spelled out there
It’s not. They disclose the conflict of interest and source of funding part but that doesn’t tell me who the funding sources are and what’s their agenda? I only have this question because I read the article information.
Also this doesn’t tell me anything about journal ranking, I don’t even know if this is a proper journal, let alone if it’s peer reviewed. If you drop a link to the Lancet it’s cool I know it, I’m still not going to abandon my critical thinking but I will give the benefit of the doubt.
It’s not so much that I necessarily think their findings are implausible or anything, it’s just that I want to discuss science in a scientific way in a science community, and those are normal things to ask.
I don’t care because you don’t care. I’m not interested in hearing all your thoughts on this subject when you can’t be bothered to research on your own.
Anecdotally speaking, this has been my experience as well. I would even go so far as to say the kids I know who smoked the most (or had that reputation) are the ones with the most/worst psychiatric issues as adults.
I have nothing against cannabis use and I do not judge people who use it, but I think parents who are too accepting / forgiving of their teenagers’ use are doing them a disservice. Additionally, when I was a teen, kids were smoking actual, real weed. These days, kids are vaping and using what are essentially poorly tested/understood pharmaceuticals. I won’t claim to be an expert in the topic, but I certainly think there’s ample reason to be concerned about the effects of these things.
Counterpoint: I’m fuckin’ chillin dude.
Amen to that. Had a downstairs neighbor that goes to a dispensary all the time and uses vapes. Tried some and it did fuck-all for me, other than give me a headache and make me feel queasy.
Shit’s not right. I’ve got a tin with 40+ year old beans and at some point in the spring am going to see if I can germinate some of it and see what grows and if it’s better.
NGL, what there is that I’ve tried in the past decade isn’t impressive.
Quick release high and even quicker come down. What happened to the easy rise and long, slow return that gave you a lift for an entire afternoon?
Were living in basically the golden age of Cannabis. Just because some poor products are popular among certain populations doesn’t mean that it’s all crap. You can find literally any kind of seed you could ever imagine now.
feeling good is illegal. nothing psychotic about that
Only people with the souls of warlocks get panic attacks or psychotic breaks when smoking weed.
Those of pure soul smoke without issues forever.
(people never saw the meme I guess)
OMG don’t say anything bad about our magic plant that cures everything and is so amazing and has no side effects and is amazing and I love I it and duuuuuuuude
