On today’s episode of of the podcast, I will discuss marijuana use and how it affects mental health with Daniel Binus, the chief psychiatrist at Beautiful Minds, near Sacramento, California. Also joining us is a third-year medical student, Victoria Agee.

There are a few reasons we believe this is important to talk about. First, as medical professionals, we often see patients who want help with their anxiety, depression, ADD and suicidality. They say they use cannabis, and that they need cannabis, to help calm those symptoms. When we explain the research to them, it still takes them awhile to let go of their habits and embrace other forms of therapy and medication that is a better long-term option.

Also, we head into a time when marijuana is being legalized, there are tons of THC companies that will benefit from suppressing this information and even suppress these studies we will reference here. Hiding this information could be detrimental to society’s mental health. While there are some potential benefits to one component of marijuana (CBD), something I will review in the future (evidence is fairly young in that field), the THC component can be highly damaging to mental health.

Whether or not people are willing to admit it, cannabis is actually highly addictive. One of the symptoms of addiction is intellectualizing reasons for use. Not only does it change the way the brain functions, it changes the way we see and perceive the world. It also changes our visual and spatial abilities. If you’re an architect or use math in your job, it deeply affects those abilities as well. THC stays in your brain a long time—it can be weeks (or even a month) before people get the full function of their brain back and the fog has cleared.

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