Obviously it was ‘pothead science’ without a mechanism etc but it has been a thing anecdotally for at least as long as the medical push has existed.

Therefore marijuana is a cure-all. ;)

Pliny the Elder would be so proud of me.

I think that there are a number of reasons for this. CBD, exploration/play of mental states, and the hundred+ other cannabinoids may all be a factor.

First, cannabis can contain CBD, which has strong, known anti anxiety and anti-psychotic effects. Couldn't a person vulnerable to episodes recognize this effect when enjoying a higher CBD strain, then seek it out again?

It is very unfortunate for these people that prohibition selected for high THC, low CBD strains.

Second, it can be a great benefit to know, from experience, that smoking a herb can bring on near-psychosis. Certainly, some people try to get a handle on their condition by 'playing' with it in this way.

Learning about the physical feelings and clues that go along with the early stages of an episode may help in some way to feel in control, and even learn to recognize and change the course of a budding episode.

Again, it is more than unfortunate that prohibition and propaganda have prevented any real exploration of these possibilities. For thousands of years shamans have played with mental states, and it was seen as not just positive but necessary.

It is too often seen as heresy if you suggest that psychosis doesn't actually need to be treated with hardcore pharmaceuticals, for life. I do believe though that it could - at least sometimes - be better treated as a mental state which can be self-recognized, and integrated.

Third, cannabis contains hundreds of cannabinoids other than THC and CBD. Some of these may have positive effects on all sorts of things related to schizophrenia and psychosis - mood, humour, insight, metabolism, gut health, etc.

Studies which only examine THC and CBD in isolation can only ever understand so much - these interactions may be a lot more complex than we commonly guess.

My argument is wholly secular and realistic. It's summed up as 'exploration/play of mental states', which applies even to your flashing-lights-and-technicolor straw-man.

It doesn't rely on 'hypnotic movements' or 'rhythmic drumming'; or a monomyth, or cultural surroundings, or 'they did it thus it's natural'. Or flashing lights, or wastelands, or ancestral visions, etc.

Perhaps you could read my comment again, with a little more care and a lot less caricature.

This sounds a lot like saying that people with a predisposition to lung cancer are drawn to cigarettes.

We know that cannabis can act as a catalyst for schizophrenia, but we also know that not everyone who is predisposed to schizophrenia develops it 100% of the time after cannabis use. There are degrees of predisposition, and a bunch of other factors that contribute to this.

many of the most common mental health conditions (personality disorders, and schizophrenia) don't appear till the end of adolescence.

If something is flammable, and so predisposed to burning, and you hold a lit match to it, you did cause the fire. You didn't just trigger it.

Similarly someone can be schizophrenic but have an *episode* caused by weed. The weed didn't make them schizophrenic but it did cause an episode to happen.

(Of course, smoking is still bad for you.)

With enough dose anyone can become psychotic on THC.

I don't think it's as absolute as you're saying.

This is a review not a study. It is designed to give you a broad view of current areas of active research. It does not validate any of the research it discusses. It just says “this is what is out there”.

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

I found this (relatively) recently published article reviewing Bleuler's Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias which is the book where he first publishes the terms "Schizophrenia" and "Autism." Though Bleuler was using the words with his colleagues starting a few years earlier. (Cf. Freud-Jung Correspondences, May 1907[0], you can ctrl-f "autism,""schizophrenia," etc.)

[0]https://archive.org/stream/FreudJungLetters/The-Freud-Jung-l...

Other researchers suggest the boundary between autism and schizophrenia is weaker than is commonly supposed. Common diagnostic tests for ASD perform poorly in distinguishing it from schizophrenia; there is heightened prevalence of each condition among those diagnosed with the other; autism started out as a new name for childhood-onset schizophrenia (in fact the word "autistic" was originally coined to describe schizophrenia), and there is still a lot of dispute about what is the difference between autism and childhood-onset schizophrenia (the former is much more common than the later–subclinical hallucinations are common in children, but clinically significant psychotic symptoms are quite rare)

Nobody really knows, not even the experts.

These are all group-level findings, meaning they aren't true for every individual. You can do a study and find that there is a statistically significant difference in mean X between two samples – autistic vs control or schizophrenic vs control. But pretty much always, although there is a statistically significant difference in the mean, the two samples overlap – which is consistent with this being a factor which only explains some of the cases.

> It seems the ECS system is the principal driving mechanism behind both conditions.

Claims like that ("the principal driving mechanism behind psychiatric diagnosis X is biological difference Y") have been made many times before, and few of them have gone anywhere. I'd be surprised if this one turns out differently.

Both autism and schizophrenia are bundles of different conditions which we've grouped together on the basis of nothing more than overlapping systems. Two people can both have "autism", yet at a biological level they've got two completely different things. The same applies for two people with "schizophrenia". This is why a number of researchers have been arguing that diagnosis-centric research is a dead-end.

I wouldn't be surprised if ECS system issues (or any other system in the brain) turn out to be the cause of some cases of autism and some cases of schizophrenia; but there will be other cases of both in which it isn't the "principal driving mechanism" at all.

Now, clearly, mainstream psychology disassociated these terms sometime in the 60s, when the goal with autism diagnoses was moreso to find and identify "abnormal" children (Hans Asperger famously used Autism diagnoses to euthanize children, that's who "Asperger's Syndrome" is named after!), and Schizophrenia gained its own separate classification. But its interesting to note that there was a time when social disaffection in general was considered a single set of disorders.

Asperger was assigned to identify autistic children for exterminatiom, but mafe the case that certain ones were useful to the Reich, which is why “Asperger’s Syndrome” became the name for the manifestation of autism that was seen as a leader impairmemt.

He did successfully argue that some more intelligent children should be spared, on the grounds they had unique skills which could be valuable to the regime. However, less intelligent children, he was happy to refer to be murdered (in most cases without the knowledge or consent of their parents). He wasn't evil in the way in which many devout Nazis were, just in the more banal way of the many who collaborated in the regime's crimes out of personal self-interest, or through coming to believe its propaganda.

For all of Asperger's sins, he was too humble to actually name a disorder after himself – he called his disorder "autistic psychopathy". Lorna Wing renamed it after him, because the word "psychopath" had become very stigmatised, and Asperger was using it in an older and broader sense than current discussions of "psychopathy", which is prone to confuse the uneducated layperson. Wing was actually one of the people trying to defend Asperger–before her death, she wasn't aware of the further historical research published on this topic after she died, and who knows whether she would have revised her position if she'd lived to see that–it is understandable she'd want to defend one of the major decisions of her career–and she was (at best) dimly aware of this aspect of Asperger's history when she made that decision

I will admit to myself sometimes using "Aspergian" in describing some of my own personality traits, not because I necessarily agree with the term, but simply because it is a useful shorthand which my listener is likely to understand, and as much as I'd love to dump all these details and more on them, it risks overwhelming their time, attention and comprehension

On the other hand, Autism Spectrum Disorder basically doesn't exist, it was designed specifically to cover as many possible definitions of Autism such that nearly anyone, under the right circumstances, could be labeled as Autistic and be given expensive treatment, and I think there is something dangerous in people self-identifying with this label as it only feeds into the larger psychiatry-industrial complex. It's similar to depression--some people legit can't get out of bed in the morning, but the drugs we use to treat it are handed out like candy, are not approved to be used for the terms that they are, and don't even perform better than a placebo.

The problem isn't that some people are "neurodivergent" and others aren't, and neurodivergent people shouldn't be ashamed and should embrace their label. The problem is that everyone is neurodivergent--everyone is "perverse," as Freud famously elucidates in his theory--its just that those who are labeled as "other" under the system get exploited, and everyone else, for fear of the same fate, hide all their psychological proclivities from everyone except from their most intimate acquaintances. And there are some who are lucky enough to avoid both fates, but they are rare among the ruling class, and the commonality of ostensible abnormal psychology among the working class is considered a "problem" to be solved by endless mental health facilities, treatment programs, etc. meanwhile the real pains of being a working class American forces many into addiction, and what they are offered can do nothing much to alleviate the underlying problems which led them there (often times problems, as in the case of the opioid crisis, generated by the very corporate structure which also drives people to treatment for their addiction).

I learned about all what you discuss because I wanted to find a genealogy of "Autism" as a why of critiquing it as a medical category. But I don't know, as I said there is definitely some constellation of symptoms and ways of treating them that would fall under an Autism diagnoses, its just that how such a diagnoses came to exist was not through some pure empirical scientific process but a historical, social process that can't be disassociated from the other socio-economic realities.

He criticises the "autism spectrum" saying that it "is a convention that changes over time and belongs more to the history of science than neurobiology" (a rather scathing remark but put it in an understated way)

On the other hand, he insists that "prototypical autism" should be retained as a real target of scientific investigation, and he proposes that our failure to discover its causes (despite immense research funding into the project) is largely due to going astray by broadening its definition (through the "autism spectrum") to the point that it is approaching meaninglessness

For a different viewpoint, see Lynn Waterhouse et al – https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40489-016-0085-x – who argue the whole category of "autism" (whether a broad "autism spectrum" or a narrow "prototypical autism") is a dead-end, and researchers ought to abandon it and look for new concepts to replace it with. In her book, she proposes (as a temporary measure) replacing "autism" with phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment – which unlike "autism"/"ASD", are only defined in terms of deficits in the social communication domain, but allows those deficits to coexist with deficits in other domains (repetitive behaviours, restricted interests, impulsivity, attention deficits, dyspraxia, dyslexia, epilepsy, intellectual disability, etc)

And then there's Sami Timimi et al's book "The Myth of Autism" which, as well as criticising the science of "autism" (as Waterhouse and, to a lesser degree, Mottron do), goes beyond that to criticising it as a cultural construct, arguing that the harm it causes outweighs its benefits

> The problem isn't that some people are "neurodivergent" and others aren't, and neurodivergent people shouldn't be ashamed and should embrace their label. The problem is that everyone is neurodivergent

To quote Timimi, "We are all (humanity) simply neurodiverse" – https://www.madinamerica.com/2018/04/the-scientism-of-autism...

Just sounds like they've been diagnosing by symptom because they didn't know the actual etiology. Once it's known shouldn't they just change the diagnosis to be the new, more specific condition? Seems like diagnosis is still the goal?

Well, we don't know the aetiology (in most cases), so while restructuring diagnosis on the basis of aetiology is defensible as a long-term goal, we are nowhere being able to achieve that yet. The argument is, designing research around the current symptom-focused diagnostic categories is blocking progress in research. Two people with the same diagnostic label may have completely different aetiologies, two people with the same aetiology may have completely different labels, two people with the same aetiology one of them may have a label and the other may have none – the same underlying brain dysfunction may manifest with very different symptoms in different individuals, depending on its interaction with other biological factors, and their social environment. If we want to understand "what's really going on", it can be better to put everyone in the same sample (both diagnosed with various diagnoses and undiagnosed), then look for patterns in that big sample. I think this paper is a great example of doing that, with the help of machine learning – https://www.nature.com/articles/s41398-019-0631-2 – but it needs replication.

Do you know of any literature I can read about the mechanisms behind this?

I have autism. Tho I didn't know it back then. I've had multiple minor psychoses from using marihuana recreationally. I know they're minor (with one on the mediocre side) because I've also had a longer episode likely related to stress. Oh, and marihuana was decriminalized back then. From my perspective, the last thing I need, is THC, and your post hasn't convinced me otherwise.

Also, take note of the headline. It mentions men. So for about 50% of society, its unknown. Actually, the reach is even lower, as they looked into men aged 21-30.

Honestly, if I compare marihuana to psilocybin I'd say the latter is more predictable. But either way, it all has to be standardized. Recreational usage of marihuana is not, and this is problematic, even though it is decriminalized here (and has been for many decades here). The fact people cannot buy psilo's anymore here shivers me in that regard; they either grow their own (not standardized) or have to resort to things like truffles.

Nice guy, probably on the spectrum, started smoking weed to help him chill out in social situations. Turned into a heavy user.

Few years later he ended up hospitalized due to psychosis, ended up on schizophrenia meds. Spend 2 years working a shit job medicated up to his eyeballs, smoking weed regularly.

He met a girl after I wanna say ~2 years and got off the weed... and didn't have a lick of psychosis. Eventually got off the meds, working a job just fine, does a lot of mountain biking. Can't say what he's doing now but when me and the ex split he'd basically turned his life around, and it was mostly due to getting lots of exercise and cutting out the marijuana.

Delusions of persecution are the most common form of schizophrenia. But drug users are indeed persecuted. Perhaps has no effect, but I could imagine it to be relevant if you constantly have to hide your usage. It certainly is not helpful.