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262 points Anon84 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.306s | source
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suzzer99 ◴[] No.44408657[source]
I've lost one of my best friends to what I think is schizophrenia. We don't know because she's cut off all contact with friends and family and refuses to see a doctor. It's definitely psychosis. She thinks she's in some kind of Truman show that she calls "the game". Since none of her friends or family are willing to admit to it, then we must be in on it.

We don't know her full family medical history because her dad was adopted. I do know that she was "microdosing" and macro-dosing hallucinogens for years. Mostly acid and shrooms as far as I know. She followed the band Phish around with a group of friends. I can't imagine most of those shows were sober.

We've also seen a few incidents of paranoia when she was under the influence of drugs/alcohol going back decades. So it feels like this was always there in some form, but maybe the estrogen was holding it back before menopause hit. I read an article about women who get schizophrenia after menopause that suggested this could be the case.

Anyway, whenever I see wellness healers and the like extolling the virtues of psilocybin, I want to point out that there could be a downside. We don't know that all of her hallucinogen use over the years contributed to this. But it's certainly a possibility.

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andai ◴[] No.44412432[source]
Cannabis is also a potent psychedelic, and its association with psychosis is well established.

(Not to condemn psychedelics, I just think the pendulum has swung a bit too far in the "it's totally harmless" direction.)

Could you elaborate on The Game? What did she say about this?

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1. mike_hearn ◴[] No.44415270[source]
> Cannabis is also a potent psychedelic, and its association with psychosis is well established.

It's really fascinating to read this, because Alex Berenson has been beating this drum for a while now and he claims the psychosis risk has been downplayed or even denied. It's easy to find evidence supporting his take because if you just search Google for [cannabis legalization psychosis] you get a big pile of papers like this one:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36696111

"Abstract: Psychosis is a hypothesized consequence of cannabis use. Legalization of cannabis could therefore be associated with an increase in rates of health care utilization for psychosis [...] states with legalization policies experienced no statistically significant increase in rates of psychosis-related diagnoses"

That's from 2023. So apparently it's not that well established? Or if it's well established, there's a lot of researchers denying it.