Drugs and Alcohol (young people)
Drugs and mental health
Cannabis and mental health
Here, young people talk about their experiences of substance (drugs) misuse and mental health problems. When watching the videos below please bear in mind that the direct relationship between individual drugs and specific symptoms is not known.Research shows that mental illness can develop in people who have misused substances such as alcohol, stimulants (e.g. ecstasy, cocaine) and depressants (e.g. cannabis), but it’s unclear whether drugs and alcohol cause mental illness themselves. For example, someone with an undiagnosed mental health problem might use drugs and alcohol to relieve their symptoms, but a substance misuse problem may develop from that. Research also suggests that the use of more than one substance or ‘polydrug use’ may be related to mental health problems.
If you’ve got an emotional or mental health problem it is not a good idea to use substances such as (non-prescribed) drugs and alcohol. Young people we spoke to who’d smoked lots of cannabis to cope with traumatic life events, realise now that it didn’t help at all. All cannabis did was to temporarily block the emotions, which would come back when the effects wore off. Looking back, Chloe thinks it would have been better to try to sort out the emotions she felt after her father died, without the influence of weed or any other drugs.
Chloe smoked cannabis every day from the age of 12 to 16 and thinks it made her emotional problems worse.
A year after Joe started smoking cannabis regularly, he started to experience paranoia.
Peter thinks that it's difficult to prove either way if cannabis causes schizophrenia.
Alex received treatment for anxiety in his teens and felt very paranoid, on one occasion, after a few puffs on a joint. He avoids using cannabis now.
Tara thinks that cannabis and personal problems contributed to her depression and self-harm. She thinks cannabis can be a dangerous drug.
Craig has experimented with quite a few illegal drugs but thinks his paranoia is mostly due to smoking cannabis.
Research suggests that using two or more substances or ‘polydrug use’ is connected with mental health problems. As well as cannabis, some young people (like Craig, above) experimented with other street drugs like ecstasy/MDMA, cocaine and ketamine.
For some young people, the use of a stronger form of cannabis (skunk) and the regular mixing of illegal drugs over a long period of time seems to have resulted in a longer lasting mental health problem. Harry used to smoke cannabis and mix illegal substances regularly over a period of years. His mental health got progressively worse and he was eventually diagnosed with cannabis-induced psychosis. Sam was a long-term, heavy user of skunk, crack cocaine, acid, ecstasy, ketamine and other drugs. His mental health declined quite rapidly but he continued to use weed, drink alcohol and take ‘other pills’. He described himself as having been someone with no emotions, no feelings and just being exhausted to the point of hardly being able to function.
Some synthetic drugs called synthetic cannabinoids act like cannabis but are more potent than natural cannabis. For more information about the effects and risks of synthetic cannabinoids see the Frank website.
Harry was diagnosed with cannabis-induced psychosis and put on medication. At times he felt so bad that he thought about suicide.
I was feeling like I couldn’t cope with being like talking to people I mean I’d walk along a corridor like in halls and say if there was someone walking towards you or towards me I mean, normally it would just be okay there’s a person walking towards me I’d say, smile or be hello if I knew them or like just stop and chat if I knew them like a bit better and that’ll be it, but in that state of mind I was as they were getting closer and closer to me I’d be dreading the conversation that I was about to have with them and I’d think please don’t talk to me, please don’t talk to me and going from like so sociable like always being like really like involved in like sort of going out and chatting and meeting new people to suddenly like not be able to communicate almost forgetting how to talk to people and being so nervous. I’d, like still so paranoid and just like all this built up, built up, built up and then like I say my mind was just racing constantly like thoughts flying around like daming thoughts about myself or sort of thinking like what have I done and that’s the only point in my life where I thought “Okay this is it, you’ve completely done it, you’ve completely ruined yourself like what have you done” and like and this was like quite sad to say like why, this was the only time I actually thought about like sort of, sort of topping myself and it had like got to that stage where I was like I can’t live the rest of my life like this, this I can’t actually like go through the rest of my life and I can’t see a way out of it.
Sam was on antidepressants but continued using skunk and other drugs. (Played by an actor)
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