If medical marijuana is part of your personal treatment plan for bipolar, you might want to rethink it.
A recent study by the University of Warwick in the UK found that there is a significant link between marijuana use and mania.
“Previously it has been unclear whether cannabis use predates manic episodes,” says Dr. Steven Marwaha, the primary author of the study, which was published in the Journal of Affective Disorders. “We wanted to answer two questions – does cannabis use lead to increased occurrence of mania symptoms or manic episodes in individuals with pre-existing bipolar disorder? But also, does cannabis use increase the risk of onset of mania symptoms in those without pre-existing bipolar disorder?”
They found that smoking weed can potentially cause mania.
Furthermore, investigators at the International Mood Disorders Research Center in Spain discovered that bipolar patients who quit using marijuana do better than their peers who continue using it.
“Our findings indicate that the negative effects of cannabis use on the course of bipolar disorder disappear when patients stop using it: We found that patients who stopped using cannabis during an acute manic/mixed episode had similar clinical and functional outcomes at two years as those who have never used cannabis,” the researchers, led by Ana Gonzales-Pinto, MD, PhD, Division of Psychiatry Research, Santiago Apostol Hospital, Vitoria, Spain, write.
“Our results also showed that patients who continued to use cannabis had worse outcomes than those who either stopped using cannabis or had never used it,” the researchers add.
When I was manic, I was smoking a lot of pot. It intensified the mania, allowing me to stay up all night writing and dancing in my apartment with my iPod blasting. It didn’t calm me down, it picked me up hardcore. And it led to more paranoia. How does marijuana affect you?
