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The holidays are over, the lights have come down and the presents are gone. The sugar plum fairies are shivering out on the stoop, suffering from withdrawal symptoms after the insulin spike. This morning you clutched your coat to your neck and remembered we’re about to enter another tumultuous election year. You’re deep into the Winter Blues. Can weed pull you out, or will it just make everything worse?
Links between marijuana and depression clearly exist, but it’s not as simple as claiming that the drug is a cause or a cure. A correlation is there, but the nature of that correlation is fuzzy.
Case in point: A study published in September in PLOS ONE found that cannabis and tobacco users are more likely to suffer from depression and anxiety than non-users. Cannabis users were especially prone to be afflicted, according to the researchers. Participants who used both drugs were more likely to report suffering from depression or anxiety than those who used tobacco only and those who used neither. The study found that co-users were almost twice as likely to have these mental disorders as non-users.
Last May, a Columbia University study published in JAMA Open Network found that teens who use cannabis recreationally are two to four times as likely to have psychiatric disorders such as depression, compared to non-users.
A brand-new report in the Cureus Journal of Medical Sciences followed a case study in which a patient was admitted to an emergency ward following a suicide attempt. According to the study, the patient was subjected to urine tests and the results were “unremarkable except for positive urine marijuana (THC).”
After six days in the ward, the patient was discharged.
“With the cessation of cannabis over six days of hospitalization,” wrote the study’s authors, “her mental status slowly improved toward baseline.”
But do these studies actually indicate that weed causes depression? According to mental health expert Dr. Daniel Hall-Flavin, a staffer at the Mayo Clinic, the relationship might actually be reversed. On the Mayo Clinic website, Hall-Flavin writes that it’s just as likely that patients suffering from depression might be more likely to seek out cannabis than those who don’t.
He also suggests the possibility that other elements are at work behind the scenes that contribute to both mental illness and cannabis use.
“It’s likely that the genetic, environmental or other factors that trigger depression also lead to marijuana use,” he wrote.
And when it comes to mood disorders, there are a lot of moving parts to consider when looking for causes. In the Cureus case, for example, the patient’s mood certainly improved while she was at the hospital and away from weed, but as the study notes, she had also suffered the loss of her one-week-old son six months earlier and a close aunt only weeks before. What made the researchers so sure that her marijuana use was a driving factor in her suicide attempt?
The correlation is just not clear, but it seems like a really great leap to claim that weed either causes or cures depression. And if it seems to help, there’s no burning piece of evidence that indicates you should toss out your pipe just yet.