People aged 14 to 20 are more often being diagnosed with psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia, compared with those born earlier, a large Ontario study examining 30 years of data suggests.
To conduct the study, published in Monday’s issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ), researchers looked at health administrative data from more than 12 million Ontario residents born between 1960 and 2009 to look for cases of a psychotic disorder.
In the Ontario study, those diagnosed with psychotic disorders not linked to mood disorders, such as schizophrenia, were more likely to be male, live in low-income neighbourhoods, be a long-standing resident of Canada and have received care for mental health disorders and substance use.
Why isn’t known. Myran and his co-authors suggest several possible reasons for the increases: older parental age, socioeconomic- and migration-associated stress and an increase in some negative childhood experiences like abuse in more recent decades.
Myran said there likely isn’t a single explanation, but he called substance use — including cannabis, stimulants, hallucinogens and synthetic drugs — a leading possibility contributing to the rising rates over 20 years.
The dude was on CBC this morning, saying that youth’s initial psychotic episodes correlate heavily with cannabis use.
Could be linked to extended living under a corrupt conservative government, too. Constantly being told to ignore evidence, a sense of learned helplessness, and rising corporate authoritarianism could lead to psychotic symptoms. It would also lead to an increased desure to escape the stresses reality through cannabis.
On a less facetious note, did diagnostic criteria change?
100% was on my way to say that it’s likely cannabis.
Cannabis is interesting in that it’s very harmful in youth, less so in adulthood. I suppose the same could be said about alcohol but a better social analogue for weed and teens is cigarettes.
Most kids who explore drinking might do it occasionally, on weekends, etc.
Lots of kids vaping weed are using it daily, if not all the time.
We are making it too convenient and discrete to consume nicotine and cannabis. I say this as a cannabis vaper myself. I would welcome with both arms a ban on vapes, not due to the content but the ease and invisibility of use.
i heard it turns a mental switch in people with, suddenly making them develop psychosis, or enhance an underlying schizophrenia disease.
I would qualify that with ‘disposable’ vapes vs all vapes.
Our federal gov’t fucked up everything by deciding to ban rebuildable tank atomizers (RTAs) and drip atomizers (RDAs) based on the fact that they cannot be childproofed and that 1 toddler in America died in the early '00s.
Instead they allowed cheap disposables to corner the market, not only inundating our landfills with millions of disposables leaching toxins but also putting the material cost of vaping within reach of teens.
I’ve vaped for over 11 years now and I did it to stop smoking cigarettes. My box mods used to cost between $100 - $200 and last about 7-8 yrs. Juice, cotton, etc used to cost $40-50 per month.
Now box mods are gone and teens are vaping at astonomical rates … all because of politicians utter stupidity at disseminating the (imo) weak and incomplete info provided by (so-called) experts.
I’m still extremely bitter.
Me too. My DNA250 is on its way out and there’s none left in Canada (that I can find anyway). Plus American prices for them are crazy rn. :/
Maybe we could make a community for crowd sourcing a solution.
I think vape shops just stopped ordering them because all the tanks they use are illegal.
Why bring in mods when you are out of RTAs or RTDs?
Without seeing the actual study, I reserve the right to think that this “scientist” published bullshit data and is full of bias.
The link to the study is here.
The study does not take drug use into account, although it says it does, none of those results are published in the study or the supplemental index materials. This study is not well done, and as someone with a PhD in neuroscience, I would have given it a thumbs down if I had gotten to peer review it based on how drugs are talked about in the study vs no published results on that topic. One positive thing I will say is that Canada’s single payer system makes for a large population to conduct studies, and the findings indicating that people are being diagnosed earlier are crystal clear. What they don’t talk about is the rate at which people seek out medical help for mental health issues. One confounding thing about culture is that availing oneself of psychological help was often viewed as shameful or as a weakness among the boomer and older generations, it’s likely that fewer boomers sought out help or possibly waited until they were older with more sever symptoms before getting help and a diagnosis. It’s a complex issue with lots of confounding factors.