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Asked by jorrito98 to Jack, Jon, Tom, Yalda on 18 Mar 2013.
Question: What is the relationship between Cannabis and Schizophrenia?
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Tom Branson answered on 18 Mar 2013:
It has been seen that some people who take a lot of cannabis, can develop mental problems. Schizophrenia is one of these problems. Other side effects include paranoia, getting hungry, anxiety, sleepy. But it does help to relax some people and is sometimes used by in hospital to relax people. As with most drugs it has a different effect on different people and if taken too much will definitely cause you harm.
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Yalda Javadi answered on 18 Mar 2013:
Basically cannabis can create short-term schizophrenia-like symtoms to people that have no mental problems. But these effects will wear off. With long-term use however cannabis users can develop psychosis, which is when someone’s mind behaves differently. They can think weird thoughts and not know the difference with what’s real and what’s not.
What’s interesting though is that people that already have schizophrenia and start to take cannabis have higher levels of brain function than people with schizophrenia that didn’t take cannabis, which suggests that is you already have schizophrenia, cannabis doesn’t affect your brain in the same way than if you don’t.
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Jon Marles-Wright answered on 18 Mar 2013:
The scientific evidence for a link between cannabis and schizophrenia is actually not very solid as far as I can work out. I think there might be some links between heavy cannabis use and people at-risk of developing schizophrenia, but we don’t know the biology behind how this might work.
Both cannabis and schizophrenia can affect a set of proteins in the brain called endocannabinoid receptors, but there doesn’t appear to be a link between how these affect them.
Saying that, heavy use of strong varieties can cause symptoms that might look like schizophrenia, including paranoia, depression and mood swings. This can be a serious issue in young people, as their brains are still developing and they are more susceptible to the potential negative effects.
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Jack Heal answered on 19 Mar 2013:
There is a link between cannabis and schizophrenia: if I had 1000 people who smoked cannabis a lot, and 1000 people who didn’t smoke cannabis, I would expect more people in the first group to have schizophrenia.
That doesn’t mean that cannabis causes schizophrenia though. Schizophrenia is thought to be mostly a genetic condition: it turns out that the people in the first group were more likely to develop schizophrenia anyway, because of their genes! It seems that cannabis may “tip people over the edge” but isn’t enough to cause schizophrenia on its own.
This is all quite vague though, and not completely understood. It’s a really interesting question, and more work needs to be done!
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