Category: Drugs and voices

CBC documentary lights up pot/Schizophrenia links

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This review is of a documentary on the links with Marijuana and Hearning voices.

See the whole review on the Winnepeg Free Press website

“There’s a new, more sinister concern about cannabis. According to some scientists, it may be directly linked to mental illness, including schizophrenia, in young pot smokers.

The Downside of High
The Nature of Things
CBC

CBC’s The Nature of Things takes an unsettling look at the new evidence tonight in The Downside of High (8 p.m., CBC), an hour-long documentary written and directed by Bruce Mohun and narrated by series host David Suzuki.

The Downside of High is a particularly effective examination of its subject because it straddles the line between cold, hard scientific information and up-close human experience. As an entry point to the discussion, the film’s makers introduce us to three young British Columbians whose lives were sent careening sideways after they started experimenting with pot.

Each first tried smoking marijuana in the usual peer-group environment; each quickly got hooked on getting high; each soon developed deeply delusional behaviour — hearing voices, extreme paranoia, fear and panic — that ultimately landed them in hospital psychiatric wards for extended stays.

And each, along with the doctors who have helped them in the slow effort to rebuild their lives, is convinced that their mental illnesses were triggered by marijuana use.

That’s where the scientists come in.

The Downside of High examines the work of several researchers who have studied the link between pot and schizophrenia, beginning with a groundbreaking 1987 Swedish study that followed 50,000 young army recruits for more than 15 years and concluded that those who used marijuana during their teen years were six times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia during the next decade and a half of their lives.

Dutch researcher Dr. Jim Van Os included this study as he prepared a comprehensive overview of all the available data on the topic; his admittedly more conservative conclusion is still cause for concern.

“We found that cannabis use nearly doubles the risk of developing future psychotic states,” he explains, “be it isolated psychotic symptoms or clinical psychotic disorders, like schizophrenia.”

Van Os’s research also concluded that teens who begin using marijuana before the age of 15 may be four times as likely to develop schizophrenia.

Part of the problem, according to The Downside of High, is the fact pot growers — including the “B.C. Bud” purveyors who call Canada’s West Coast home — continue to develop new breeds of weed that are exponentially more potent than the “harmless” pot that fuelled 1960s and ’70s counterculture.

In addition to containing much higher levels of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), marijuana’s active (and sometimes psychosis-producing) agent, new strains of pot also contain much less CBD (cannabidiol), which is thought to protect pot users against the drug’s psychosis-inducing properties.

Van Os and other scientists have also found evidence that there’s a genetic link that makes some people much more likely to suffer marijuana-induced mental illness; some of the most current research is aimed at developing an accurate test that might allow parents to learn whether their teenagers are part of the high-risk group when it comes to pot and mental-health problems.”

There has been a lot of evidence also collected in NZ and Australia of a smilar nature.  So if hearing voices, stopping marijuana use may help them to abate.

Nz Young Among World’s highest users of cannabis-NZ Herald- Sat October 17

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This was in the NZ Herald today, note cannabis is known to cause psychotic episodes.

Lancet study includes long list of health risks for the world’s 166 million cannabis smokers.

Young people in New Zealand are among the world’s biggest users of cannabis. Nearly 4 percent of adults globally use the drug, though it raises many health concerns according to a paper published in the Lancet yesterday.

It cited figures from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, which estimated that in 2006 there were 166 million users of cannabis aged from 15-64 0r 3.9 percent of the world’s population  in this age category. The drug is the most used among young people in rich countries, led by New Zealand, Australia and the US, followed bu Europe, but appears to be becoming popular on a global scale, with use rising in low and middle income countries it said.

The study by Australia professors Wayne Hall and Louisa Degenhardt, is an overview of published research into cannabis use and impacts.

Hall and Degenhardt say that as a problem for public health, cannabis is “probably modest” compared with the burden from alcohol, tobacco and other illegal drugs.Even so, cannabis has a long list of suspected adverse health effects they warn.

They include the risk of dependence, car accidents,impaired breathing, damaged cardiovascular healtg, psychotic episodes and educational failure among teens who smoke the drug regularly. Around 9 percent of people who ever use cannabis become dependent on it, says the paper. By comparison, the risk of addiction for nicotine is 32 percent, 23 percent for heroin, 17 percent for cocaine and 15 percent for alcohol.

   “Acute adverse effects of cannabis use include anxiety and panic in naive( first time) users, and a probable increased risk of accidents if users drive while intoxicated” it says…

…Another area of concern is so-called “skunk”- extremely potent cannabis from plants selected to have higher levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the drugs active ingredient. Level’s of THC found in seized cannabis have risen in the past two decades, says the study. ” A hugh THC content can increase anxiety, depression and psychotic symptoms if regular users do not titrate(measure out) their dose.

END

On the Lancet site they also have an article on cannabis and Psychosis B ut you have to be registered to see it.

This website – The Medical Journal of Australia– has some interesting information also on cannabis and psychosis:

”

Cannabis and schizophrenia
  Does cannabis cause schizophrenia? Perhaps the more worrying question is whether cannabis causes chronic psychosis, particularly schizophrenia. The work of Andreasson and others examined this question in a cohort of male Swedish conscripts, followed up through a national psychiatric case register.16 They found that having used cannabis between one and 10 times at conscription increased the relative risk of schizophrenia to 1.3, the risk rising to 6.0 for those who had used cannabis on 50 or more occasions. However, this relative risk was reduced after adjustment for factors which independently contributed to the risk of schizophrenia. While this study provides some of the strongest evidence for a link between cannabis and psychosis, methodological concerns have been raised. These include the temporal gap between self-reported cannabis use at conscription and later schizophrenia, the potential confounding role of other substance use (particularly as amphetamines were a major drug of abuse during the study period), the adequacy of psychological assessment at conscription, and the reliability of self-reported drug use at conscription.3

Nevertheless, the association between cannabis use and schizophrenia is strengthened by studies which demonstrate that cannabis is widely used among people with schizophrenia. A recent study in Newcastle examined substance use in all outpatients with schizophrenia, finding 29.9% of subjects had some use of cannabis in their lifetime, with 7.7% and 28.3% of subjects having lifetime diagnoses of cannabis abuse and dependence, respectively.17 Notably, alcohol was more commonly used than cannabis, while amphetamines were the third most commonly used substance.

Metro Magazines article on Paul Ellis

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The latest Metro magazine September 2009- on sale at present, has an interesting interview with Paul Ellis called “the Night I Killed My Father.” by Donna Chisholm. It talks of his “descent into madness”,  the killing of his father, and his treatment at the Mason Clinic in Auckland. It is a surprisingly honest story. A 7 page feature and well worth the read. 

He does believe that his heavy cannabis use was an attributing factor to his condition.

” At 27, after 10 years of heavy cannabis use, Ellis had his first psychotic episode… ” You don’t just wake up one day and you’re fully blown mad. You become mad, slowly. “I had reached the point where I had pretty much burnt myself out. I’d just finished a relationship so I was going to work and coming home and spending time by myself. I ended up not really having anyone to talk to and it became a  pretty lonely existence. “I had physical symptoms. I was sick, I had diarrhoea. I don’t know if my body was saying “i’ve had enough.” That kind of lifestyle is pretty unhealthy no matter how you look at it. Any addiction that starts to take over your life, starts pretty much to drag it down.”

“I started to notice  most things in my life- relationships with people, my work, my family- all started to become neglected, apart from my addiction. Ans I think that is how addictions go; it takes over. I spent more time by myself with my drugs. I started to notice something wasn’t right with me. There was a change in my thinking. I started to fall into Paranoia.”

[ The Hearing Voices Networks reasearch also shows that stress, trauma, and a lack of general health, or physical neglect such as drug abuse are often present when a person starts hearing voices.]

There  are interview segments with Dr Sandra Simpson from the Mason Clinic talking about his treatment and treatment at the clinic in general. Which highlights the fact that the actual ratio of those with mental illness that commit murder is small.

“Of about 70-80 homicides in New Zealand each year, an average of four are “associated” with mental illness, and only one or two of those are, like Paul Ellis found not guilty by reasons of insanity…”

[ that is a percentage of only 2-3% ]

” The most common misconception about mentally ill killers, says Simpson is that people believe that there is some kind of hair trigger and it’s impossible to predict when they might do something dangerous.” the pattern of risk is usually very readily understood and if you take care and time they can be readily managed. Such people then are at vastly lower risk of reoffending than someone who has done the same thing and is not mentally ill. As a population they are much less risky because the causes of their offending are understandable treatable and monitorable.

Heavy cannabis use is thought to trigger schizophrenia in 5% of the predisposed individuals, says the director general of Mental Health, Dr David Chaplow a former head of the Mason Clinic. The number of schizophrenics who kill is very very tiny.”

It is important that we address the fact that often hearing voices can become so distressful and disorientating that it can sometimes have such consequences. However as pointed out in these figures from the article, it is not very often that it does. The media often portrays “schizophrenics” as crazed killers, so it is good to see a balanced article on a man who did kill, that shows this is not the norm for those that suffer distress from psychosis.