Last week, I posted, Marijuana for Bipolar: Treatment or Self-Medication?, which took its lead from MerelyMe’s piece on marijuana for treating anxiety. This post is a response to your responses to my response to MerelyMe. Gotta love these conversations ...
Tabby spoke for virtually all of us in stating:
I’m not for pot over psych meds nor psych meds over pot. There is abuse of anything good or harmful. Yet for many, if something helps them ... whether that be pot, Seroquel, Klonopin, eating certain foods, or SAM-e, then why seriously knock it?
MerelyMe added:
Is the use of marijuana addictive or harmful to some? Perhaps. Yet one can say this about some of the pharma products people use on a daily basis. In some cases there may be benefits of medicinal marijuana for certain patients and this is where more research is necessary.
If I am interpreting Tabby and MerelyMe and others correctly, we should be judging marijuana by the same standard we judge prescription meds, namely any substance we take into our body: 1) may be extremely beneficial 2) may help somewhat 3) may be problematic 4) may be extremely dangerous 5) may have no effect.
As Lenny notes: “I have yet to come across any medication that works the same for everyone, so it's probably the same for marijuana.”
Denny adds the twist that when he was young, “it would ease my mood imbalance and give my brain a rest from constantly turning.” Now that he is older, “it makes me feel like I am going out of my mind at an accelerated speed.”
I think we’re all on the same page with this. Our meds hold out the promise of leading rewarding lives, but they often fall short, there are complications, and for many they are a complete disaster. “Pill roulette” is the game we all find ourselves playing, often involving years of heartbreak and frustration. Eventually, we hit upon something that we can live with, but rarely to our complete satisfaction. Then, no sooner do we seem to be doing okay than something changes in the brain and back to another round of pill roulette we go.
How could medical marijuana be worse than that? Indeed, I strongly urge you to read Robert Whitaker’s 2010 “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” which makes a very strong case that our meds make us worse, rather than better. I gave the book considerable play on my personal blog, Knowledge is Necessity, and look forward to giving it the treatment it deserves in the near future, here on HealthCentral.
One of the startling points that Whitaker raises is that continued antipsychotic use may, in certain cases, result in psychosis. There is support for “supersensitivity psychosis” in the scientific literature, though you won’t see this on any warning labels. Far less novel is Whitaker’s point that antidepressants raise a high level of mania risk in those living with bipolar - a point brought home many times here on HealthCentral.
