alt Hacker NewsThis is a hard topic to communicate in depression treatment. It's easy to mistake substances that temporarily boost your mood or calm your nerves for effective treatments for an underlying condition.
There was a brief period of time before the opioid prescribing backlash when some fringe psychiatrists were proposing weaker opioids as adjunctive treatments for treatment resistant depression. It's hard to fathom now, but opioids were more casually prescribed a few decades ago. I recall some discussion where one of them said they were seeing good initial results but the effects faded, and then it was hard to get the patients off of the opioids when they were no longer helping. Not surprising to anyone now, but remember there was a period of time where many seemingly forgot about their addictive properties.
I feel like I've seen a weaker version of this in some friends who turned to THC to "treat" their depression: Initial mood boost, followed by dependency, then eventually into a protracted period where they know it's not helping but they don't want to stop because they feel worse when they discontinue. This wasn't helped by the decades of claims that claimed THC was basically free of dependency problems.
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This point of view makes no sense to me.
If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for. All the psychiatric studies are already based on self assessment.
Second, a lot of psychatric treatments are temporary, ending whenever the medication is stopped or wears off so I dont see how this would be any different
Yes. Rather it is the reverse that helps. Exercise is the biggest one, but essentially “pain that will stop” seems to help in general. Ice showers, fasting, new challenging activity, giving up caffeine/alcohol.
All these things suck in the short term, and make you feel more good in the medium term. Maybe because your default becomes “not in so much pain”, rather than “feeling worse than when briefly enhanced by substance X”
Edit: I’m referring more to the “self medication” approach. Please don’t take any of this as medical advice.
Sadly, I have witnessed three of my friends who started THC product to deal with anxiety, developed paranoia. Two of them quit THC and got better but one got way worse and now is in process of divorce. His personality is completely different, he was pretty chill guy but now he is talking way too much, easily distracted, and always worried about macro events.
"This wasn't helped by the decades of claims that claimed THC was basically free of dependency problems."
But did anyone professional made these claims?
I was pretty much told since a child, no physical dependency (unlike alcohol and nicotin) but potentially strong psychological withdraw symptoms.
Isn't the problem with psychological dependency that drugs generate basically a artifical depression, so more drugs are needed to basically feel normal again? Thus saddling a already existing problem with the same on top?
Yeah this has been my experience with THC. I never took it for depression, but it was always a temporary thing. I doesn't treat anything IMHO. its a symptom relief at best.
it works pretty good as a temporary relief from anxiety.
> but remember there was a period of time where many seemingly forgot about their addictive properties.
There was also quite alot of talk about how doctors, by being reticent to prescribe opioids, were inhumanely forcing patients to live in pain, and not being sufficiently deferential to patient autonomy. Moreover, the rhetoric was incorporated into discussions about racist disparities in treatment, given there was some evidence doctors were less likely to prescribe opioids to black patients, suggesting doctors were systematically being cruel. Naturally, the easiest way to dodge those accusations was to simply prescribe opioids as a matter of course. Even in the absence of Purdue Pharma pushing their claims about lack of significant addictive potential, there was already significant pressure to discount the risk of addiction.