> If you take it and you feel your anxiety is lessened, that's the greatest proof you can ask for.

This mistake has been made many time throughout history. Cocaine was originally believed to be a viable treatment for depression. Opioids and amphetamines too. You take them and you feel good for a while, which was mistakenly equated with treating depression.

Many drugs will make you feel good temporarily by blocking certain feelings or tricking your brain into feeling good. This is not the same as treating a condition.

You can think of actual treatments as working closer to the source to reduce the problem, not temporarily overriding it with a powerful drug-induced sensation.

Duration of effect matters when it comes to successful treatments.

If we take your position and apply reductio ad absurdum, we could say that cocaine is a highly effective treatment for anxiety, although of course we know that in the not-so-long run it has the opposite effect.

I think the problem is that, at least in my experience, you end up with more anxiety once the initial high wears off. Paranoia is an extremely common side effect of Marijuana, and so are nightmares with prolonged use. And once you kinda get into a routine with it, you have a hard time quitting, because your overall anxiety is raised, and you need it just to get back to a normal functioning level. My guess is that this is due to the effects that THC has on blocking your REM sleep. Without the proper REM sleep, it seems pretty common to be anxious and foggy-brained.

There’s a difference between intoxication and treating the chemical imbalance behind depression or anxiety. For one thing, treatments for anxiety only target the anxiety: they don’t impair the person the way that weed or alcohol does. (They can have other side effects, of course.)

Drugs for anxiety treatment do wear off, but not the same way that weed or alcohol does: something like Celexa takes a few weeks to build up in the system, and don’t lose effect 12-24 hours later if you miss a dose. I’m not sure how long you’d have to stop before it loses efficacy entirely.

I’m not Nancy Reagan, though: I would not advise people to self-medicate with booze or pot if they’re suffering from depression or anxiety, but I’m not going to preach at anybody who is doing so and thinks it’s working for them. I will say that I’ve seen that end badly, though. I can think of three people I’m close to who’ve tried it and have had problems with addiction: all of them are now sober and (I believe) on regular antidepressants.

Psychiatric treatments return a person to a baseline that can be managed with therapy or healthy coping mechanisms.

Chasing a high is not a treatment, it merely defers the problem. As tolerance to the high builds, patients lose the therapeutic value but have gained crippling dependency and addiction.

Doing ten shots of tequila is a 100% scientifically proven cure for social anxiety then. If you take it and your anxiety lessens, that's the greatest proof you can ask for! Let's just completely ignore the crippling morning hangover and liver damage