Can marijuana cause depression in teenagers? – 5/31/2023 – Balance and Health

The global attitude towards Cannabis is changing, moving more towards exploring its potential medicinal uses and towards legalizing it.

Eight countries, including Canada, Uruguay, Mexico and Thailand, and 22 US states have legalized recreational marijuana. About 50 countries have legalized it for medicinal use. Many others are pushing their laws in this direction.

But, like tobacco and alcohol, legalization does not mean that the drug is not harmful.

Marijuana is one of the most used substances among teenagers worldwide. In the US, more than 2.5 million teens use marijuana casually, according to researchers at Columbia University in New York, and marijuana use among youth has increased in recent decades.

That is why the trend towards legalization and medicinal use has raised alarms, mainly about the potential risks to the health of adolescents.

A developing brain

Although it is difficult to say when adolescence ends, it is clear that it is a period that is accompanied by many biological changes, including changes in the brain.

These changes make it even more difficult to understand how marijuana can affect teenagers’ minds.

The brain is developing until the mid-20s, according to the US National Institute of Mental Health.

During this period, there is a great development and adjustment in areas of the brain related to handling emotions, coping with stress, rewards and motivation, decision making, thinking before acting, impulse control and reasoning, for example. There is also an increase in white matter and a decrease in gray matter during adolescence, which makes different regions of the brain communicate more quickly and efficiently.

It’s a tough time for teenagers. Not only do their bodies undergo drastic changes, but they also face issues such as identity, peer pressure, high grades, and family dynamics.

All of these changes and pressures can make teens more likely to have mental health issues like anxiety and depression, and may lead them to use substances like marijuana to cope, according to the Mental Health Services and Child Abuse Administration. US Substances. The problem is that marijuana use can also worsen long-term mental health conditions.

As the brain is developing at this stage, it is also particularly vulnerable to substances such as alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and other drugs that act on it. These substances have been shown to alter or delay some of the developments that commonly occur during adolescence, according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

In the case of Cannabis, there is evidence that it modifies the brain of teenagers.

The Evidence on Cannabis and Depression

Marijuana use has been associated with difficulties with thinking and problem solving, memory and learning, and with reduced coordination and concentration, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It remains unclear whether these problems persist after stopping cannabis use.

Research has also shown associations between marijuana use and mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. People who use cannabis are also more likely to have psychotic episodes.

One study, published in Jama, the Journal of the American Medical Association, earlier this month, looked at teens who occasionally used cannabis in the past 12 months through the responses of nearly 70,000 teens to the 2019 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. .

What was found is that, compared to non-users, those who used marijuana but did not meet the criteria for dependence reported two to four times more mental health problems, such as depression, suicidal thoughts, slower thinking and difficulty of concentration.

This suggests that there is an association between marijuana use and mental health problems, but it is not possible to say that there is a cause and effect relationship.

Another recent study published in Jama Psychiatry found that marijuana use in teenagers was also associated with an increased risk of developing depression and suicidal thoughts later in life.

However, a 2022 study published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology showed that teens who used marijuana were no more likely to develop mental health issues, such as depression or anxiety, compared to adults who also used cannabis.

Only marijuana-addicted teens had worse mental health.

Is marijuana the cause?

Correlation does not equal causation, and as in the case of the chicken and the egg, it is difficult to say whether cannabis use in adolescents is the cause of the increased association with depression and other mental health problems, or whether adolescents with these problems are more likely to use marijuana.

A 2020 study published in Frontiers in Psychiatry reviewed the evidence on cannabis and the adolescent brain and concluded that, because of the way many of the available studies, so-called cross-sectional studies, were designed, we don’t know much about the nature of the relationship between use of marijuana and mental health.

Cross-sectional studies look at different groups of people at a specific point in time. The goal is to gather information on a given topic by collecting data from a diverse group of individuals all at once. Then researchers analyze the data and try to find patterns or relationships, but they can’t establish what causes what.

The Frontiers of Psychology study also emphasized that it’s possible that both cannabis use and mental health problems could be caused by something else, such as teens’ susceptibility to stress and anxiety.

In short, more research is still needed to assess whether marijuana can cause mental health problems in teenagers.