Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that generally affects young people between 16 and 30 years of age. It qualifies as a brain disease that may include delusions, loss of personality, agitation, confusion, social withdrawal, psychosis, and odd behavior. People with schizophrenia may sometimes appear as if they have lost touch with reality.

Cannabis and Schizophrenia

The alleged association between cannabis use and the development of schizophrenia originates in the “reefer madness” era and it is considered historically fraught. Since the 1960s and 1970s, people believed that smoking cannabis could trigger psychosis in just about anyone. Nowadays researchers do not claim anything more than that cannabis seems to be able to trigger schizophrenia – but only in people who are predisposed to the disease (i.e. those with family histories of the disorder), and not in healthy individuals.

A recent clinical study from Harvard Medical School, published in 2013, compared families with a history of schizophrenia and those without – and it found little support for marijuana use as a cause of schizophrenia: “The results of the current study suggest that having an increased familial morbid risk for schizophrenia may be the underlying basis for schizophrenia in cannabis users and not cannabis use by itself.”