alternative medicince

[cujo446]

I have personally had a psychiatrist tell me that smoking small quantities of marijuana could help my bipolar disorder and anxiety disorder.  Is this true and if so how can it help other than giving a person a good appetite?  What about interractions with rx meds?

[goobers666]

hey cujo,
I was really good about taking my meds on a regular basis but lately\, not so much.  but I have been a pot smoker for a couple years. when on medication it doesnt seem to have any negative interactions for me, i feel super duper relaxed. completely balanced but ive noticed that when im not taking medication its hard to decipher the amount of smoking that would be beneficial. it does still produce those physical effects, that warm calming feeling for a minute but then it easily raises my anxiety and fear and paranoia, bad. I dont think its helpful for bipolar, anxiety, depression if your not using medication because its too hard to figure how much is too much...it'll just make you panic and paranoid and fidgety and freak out. at least for me. Just be careful if you havent been taking your meds.

[morbidlyeuphoric]

I've had the same experience as goobers...on meds it doesn't have negative side effects (except for headaches for me when it wears off) but off meds anxiety and paranoia was way high. I would be up for days because of it. So I would just keep that in mind. I really don't know why I replied. I basically said the exact same thing. Oh well...

[ILADVOCATE]

I have no idea where that psychiatrist got his ideas from. I am very familiar with natural remedies taking several under clinical supervision for tardive dyskinesia and also a compound (glycine) in Phase II FDA study for schizophrenia (in my case schizoaffective disorder) under strict clinical supervision and some of them I started after I did online research which I printed out and brought to my providers and they did further research from clinical sites and approved. The usage of medical marijuana is generally for nausea from chemotherapy. It can and will make the symptoms of bipolar worse. I've known people whom that happened to. The "study" links on Wikipedia stated two people who said it made them feel better. That is by no means a clinical study which must be controlled and large scale and the results objective not subjective. I would not follow through on that advice as I've seen people I know who it hastened the onset of schizophrenia and induced paranoia in people with bipolar and there is much evidence to support that. It will also interact with prescription medications and make them less effective.

[morbidlyeuphoric]

I think it depends on the person, the quantity and the medication they are on. However, I do not recommend using it regardless if it makes people feel better or not. In the long run it's just not a good idea.

[corlenbelspar]

Well all I can say is I have Schizophrenia and I only smoked it a few times in my life and I decided never to smoke it again when last time I did I only took one hit and I ended up seeing a hall way but looked again and it was actually a brick wall and then I started going back and forth in time until it eventually caught up and time froze.  I must of been sitting there drooling while I was staring when time froze.  The other two guys I smoked it with didn't even believe me at first when I told them this happened and they weren't having anything happen like this at all which leads me to believe marijuana exacerbates mental illness.

[morbidlyeuphoric]

Holy begeezers, I would have flipped out. How did you deal with that?

[corlenbelspar]

All I was really able to do was sit there and stare.  There was also some music that was playing in my head that had bizarre instruments and timing that I don't think could possibly be transcribed.

[adel_ezz]

I never smoked marijuana neither saw it or seen its colour nor it exists in my country.

To be sarcastic (excuse me, i apologize a-priori) i believe it helps in bipolar very well not only that but in all sorts of illness whether kidneys, heart, liver, you name it. WHY, because when you smoke it, you probably don't remember that you are ill for start; simply you forgot it along with everything else.

When you take your BP meds you can submit an exam, but can you take marijuana and enter an exam. Had this been effective it would have been published somewhere. I never read something of this sort. The pdoc who recommended it, he surely was under marijuana himself when he advised it, I envy him he must have a very pleasant personality, i bet he mentioned nice jokes to you too

[morbidlyeuphoric]

Sorry you had to go through that. Sounds rather terrible. I've never experienced anything like that, so I can't even imagine what it would be like. It seems like you would freak out, but you were only able to sit there, so who knows how I would react.

[jst4shanell]

I'm BP1 and I hallucinate horribly when I eat or smoke marijuana

[corlenbelspar]

It didn't really scare me or anything, it just was uncomfortable or something along those lines.  I'm used to things like that anyway because I can hallucinate on my own and see monsters or people who aren't there or nonsensical objects like blobs of color floating through the air.  You can read through my journal entries and learn about it if you're curious because I keep track of it all there along with other things so I can have an idea of how frequently it's happening.

[Alex_X_18]

I do believe it can help someone who is manic or going through heavy anxiety,...
for me it just makes me feel all warm and sleepy and heavy then I kinda wanna go to bed
But then again it depends on the individual user reallly.
sometimes me and my manager would smoke at work and sometimes I would smoke after work to help me get to sleep most of the time it worked but there were some instances where marijuanna made me really paranoid... when I was by myself I heard the door shut next door and thought someone was comming to take my vaporiser,....
Thats why my mom doesn't smoke anymore either is because she said it made her paranoid as well. Some people trip out when they start smoking it normally happens to me when I'm around other people all the sudden I feel like they are gonna judge me or wheatever. If you smoke wayyyyyy to much however, thats when you start getting really paranoid like this one time I swear everything looked funny like the people sitting at the table around me wherer being controled like puppets on a string and their movements where all mechanical (felt really starange for the next fourty minutes or so) then it just wore off