For thousands of years, natural plants and elements with psychological effects have treated illnesses. Medicine men mixed healing poultices for their patients from whatever plants they had available.
And at times, what was available was good old-fashioned medical marijuana.
The first recorded use of medical marijuana was in 400 AD, and since then, it’s been used to treat a plethora of ailments from epilepsy to emesis.
Long before controlled peer-reviewed studies and scientific drug trials, people used marijuana to treat illnesses for thousands of years. This suggests that it worked at least some time in ancient medicine; otherwise, why would they keep using it?
Over time, however, the attitudes toward medical marijuana– and in turn, the studies that could be conducted– have changed. It’s hard to run controlled trials of an illicit substance, and government actions had increasingly targeted marijuana since 1942 when lawmakers removed it from the United States Pharmacopoeia.
Soon afterward, marijuana became illegal to possess or use in the United States, and reefer madness around marijuana use grew substantially worldwide.
Does Weed Help With Pain and Mental Health?
Whether it’s illegal or not, there’s plenty of evidence that marijuana can help with some ailments in its various forms.
For example, it’s been shown to cause a 64% decrease in pain. Pain is a symptom of many illnesses, so the implications of these findings are enormous.
Given this, it makes sense that many might use weed to treat mental illnesses. After all, anyone who smokes weed can tell you that it alters your state of mind.
And at the forefront of many people’s minds is the question: can marijuana help people with depression?
An estimated 280 million people globally suffer from depression. It’s also the main symptom of the top three mental illnesses in the United States.
For centuries, depression, which was initially called “melancholia” in Greek texts around the 3rd century BC, has plagued humans across the globe. If marijuana could help those who suffer from depression, that could impact millions of people.
But with modern breakthroughs in antidepressants that can help manage depressive disorders, is medical cannabis used to treat depression?
The answer, it turns out, is complicated.
Can Weed Be Used as an Antidepressant?
It depends on your situation, your diagnosis, and your brain.
Depression in isolation is known as major depressive disorder. It’s also known as clinical depression, and it causes debilitating feelings of sadness that impact a person’s daily life. But depression is also a symptom in other mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders, where depression (the symptom) can alternate with anxiety and/or mania.
Some people experience depression with the change of seasons; this is known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).
Individuals with any mental illnesses may use marijuana to treat their depression, and any of these can result in severe depression, which is precisely what it sounds like– an even more severe form of depression symptoms.
So it’s worth pointing out that “treating depression” isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. What works for a person diagnosed with SAD may not work for a person with bipolar disorder, even if both of them experience depression.
Some people also have more severe episodes of depression, making it potentially more challenging to treat. These factors make the study of cannabis use for depression more nuanced.
But even setting this aside, other things make it difficult to study marijuana and depression.
What Does Science Say?
Some studies of medical marijuana focus on correlations instead of data-proven causation.
Indeed, improvements in a person’s depression can be linked to their marijuana use but don’t indicate causation.
For example, medical marijuana can improve depression in people with chronic pain. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that marijuana use is altering their brain chemistry in a way that affects their depression.
Instead, it may be fixing the chronic pain that is majorly impeding the person’s life, contributing to their depressive symptoms.
Without chronic pain, the person’s life is improved, and this may cause them to become less depressed.
And then there’s the most concerning complicating factor: studies around whether smoking weed causes depression in people who were not depressed.
This is entirely different from whether it can help with existing depression, but it’s an important element of the discussion. It also suggests that marijuana might worsen depression for someone who already has a mental illness.
It’s a chicken-or-egg question: are depressed people smoking more weed, or is smoking more weed causing people to be more depressed?
As we said, depressive symptoms are a key component of the top three mental illnesses experienced globally. This makes marijuana a top contender for self-medication for hundreds of thousands of people, and it’s difficult to untangle the question of which came first.
And finally, marijuana use, of course, can coincide with changes in a person’s life that could cause or contribute to depression on their own, so it’s difficult to control for all of the variables.
Does Weed Cause Depression?
As far as causing depression is concerned, while individual results may vary, a recent study— the largest of its kind– does indicate that weed causes a small increase in depressive disorders. This does conflict with other studies, so the jury is still out on whether this is true.
But even if marijuana is a depressive drug, one thing it is great for is distracting you. It distracts you from things that make you sad.
Plus, according to the same study that reported the increase in depressive disorders, it can reduce pain, nausea, or other physical symptoms that impact a person’s quality of life.
It’s the difference between it being an antidepressant– one that changes the brain chemistry around mood– and one that makes you temporarily distracted from your depression.
According to WebMD, “antidepressants work by balancing chemicals in your brain called neurotransmitters that affect mood and emotions.” If it’s not found to be changing the chemicals that affect mood, it’s not actually an antidepressant.
Can Medicinal Marijuana Treat Depression?
So does weed help with depression? Yes, it can help distract you or remedy other ailments in the moment. But can it actually replace your SSRI? That depends on a lot of factors that are specific to you, your diagnosis, and your brain.
Additionally, more research is needed to confirm a link between marijuana and depression, with a focus on whether cannabis use changes brain chemistry in a way that cures depression.
We hope that anyone suffering from depression will weigh professional medical advice, their knowledge of their own mental health symptoms, and the data around cannabis use and depression to make an informed decision.
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