Did I experience a SZ onset?

Unusual Beliefs
1

Hello, new to the forum. SZ has been a huge part of my life since I have several immediate family members who suffer from it. My mom, 3 brothers and my sister all have diagnosed SZ.

To put my experience in a nut shell, I had pelvic surgery last year. Ever since then my chronic migraines have become daily and have forced me to stop working. This has inevitably lead to the most severe depression and anxiety I’ve ever experienced and have recently come to realize that I’m even starting to dissociate, something that’s never happened to me before. I went to my GP with these concerns and they doubled my fluoxetine.

So last week I had a bad migraine and had recently gotten my medical marijuana card to help the migraine attacks. I have no history of using pot, it’s been only about 3 weeks since I started. Usually I have the same effect from it, I feel relaxed and sleepy and I’m usually asleep in about 15 minutes. But one night the high hit me really, really hard and I had to immediately lay down because my head started feeling really weird…

What I felt afterwards felt very real and I can’t stop thinking about it. This intense heat started pulsing and radiating from the base of my head and suddenly the back of my skull felt hollow. This hollow space was vibrating which I could both hear and feel. It was high pitched and making my head hurt more. Then I started to hear indistinct talking, music, and laughing. Once I hear a man say “ha ha” so loud that it startled me These sounds were completely independent of external sounds and my own thinking. Almost like this hollow space in the back of my head was put there for the soul purpose of harboring this strange communication. I was frightened, but kept telling myself that maybe it was just the high, though nothing like that has happened before or since. I felt like if I went to the ER they would just blame it on the pot. I was wide awake with all of this happening for over 3 hours. When I woke up in the morning I was fine, but am now experiencing audible hallucinations in the presence of white noise (ceiling fans, AC kicking on, etc).

I told my sister who has SZ about it. She said I was chipped as a baby and that they had activated me, and that I was in no way to try and communicate with them or I could end up hearing them all the time like she does. Of course i would normally think that this was totally insane, but after my experience i completely believe her. I really think that maybe there is a chip in my brain. It was soooooo real, how could it just be a hallucination?

So now I don’t know what to think, I don’t know what happened or if it is something I should even worry about. But it was so damn real that I can’t dismiss it, so now I’m wondering if my belief that this was real is like a delusion? I have no idea. I’m so confused. All I know for sure is that what I felt seemed 100% real. It was like having my eyes opened to another dimension or something. Like I had an “awakening”.

Any insight one can offer is appreciated. I don’t know if I should see a psychiatrist, but I don’t want to be put on meds if the experience really was real.

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Smoking weed can trigger sz. If you have it in the family I would be very wary of smoking the stuff. I am a bit worried how you said you believed your sister too, you dont really have anything in your brain because there is no such thing. If you find what yourself believing in things with no evidence and that would be considered highly unrealistic by most people then you might have cause for concern. If I were you I would cut the weed out and go for more traditional methods of pain relief, and if you do start hearing things or believing in things after that then I would say you would have to talk to a doctor about it.

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As far as I know heavy pot use can help trigger off sz. I guess if you’re susceptible to it then you’ll have to be careful. Was it strong weed you picked up? Weed can be very potent these days, much more than what it was back in the 60’s…

If you have been selected to have these experiences then the only way out of it is to see a professional. You have insight into the condition, and this is valuable. Don’t lose that.

Just remember, these experiences however special have no value in the real world, which is why we all take medication. I still hold my beliefs, and they’re unique, but I am no longer acting out like a crazed religious fanatic.

Acceptance that nobody wants to listen is hard, but necessary to continue living and not get lost in your own mind forever.

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alternate dimension…? Maybe

I’m sick of ppl blaming sz on pot. I’ve smoked pot for many years when young. And it never did anything bad to me. I haven’t smoked in bout 10 years.

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There has actually been research into this. It is not like people are just making it up to make weed sound bad.

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Yet, welcome to schizophrenia.com !

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I’ve probably said this a dozen times, but if you look at the actual research that has been done on this, and not just segments of under-controlled epidemiological studies, you will see that the research suggests weed can hasten sz onset a little bit but not really cause sz at all.

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I got sick from weed…maybe if I never did that stuff I would have gotten sick later on (a few years or something later) and my psychosis wouldn’t have been that bad. Maybe I would have been higher functioning.

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Those are a bunch of really long inferences based on an entirely contrafactual situation, though.

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You right that you have to be predisposed to the illness. When I smoked weed I was just doing the same thing as all my friends. But the fact that it can actually trigger the illness is true. I could have gone my whole life and never had positive symptoms. Smoking weed with sz in the family is a very bad idea.

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It’s not, though. The research suggests you would have gotten it anyway. There is no convincing argument about how weed supposedly causes sz. Rates of schizophrenia do not follow changes in use of cannabis, and there is genetic evidence linking both the use of cannabis and the predisposition towards sz to the same genes (that is, they are most likely not causally connected, but both caused by similar things).

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Google it. Theres loads of articles out there.


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Dude. You think a quick Google search refutes my argument? I’ve read lots of articles about this. I am currently in the field that studies this. I don’t even have to look at those articles to know that they are entirely correlational and prove nothing. Correlation does not equal causation. Get back to me when you can give me an actual argument as to why weed causes sz, despite the fact that we have found genetic third variables that appear capable of explaining both risks (and thus all the correlations between sz and cannabis), and despite the fact that the actual prevalence of sz, and not just whether people with sz smoke more weed, does not appear to be correlated with weed at all.

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I am not going to argue Treebeard, you never give up. Smoking weed can trigger sz and smoking pot while 3 members of your family have it is a terrible idea. Not sure why you dismiss those numbers for nothing but anyway. I think it is a terrible idea.

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For nothing? Oh come on! :roll_eyes: I guess your unwillingness to actually listen to what I’m saying here is made up for by your stubbornness.

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Where’s your evidence? Sounds like appeal to authority.

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It’s really annoying to have to find the references every time people ask about this, but I totally understand that you’re skeptical. As I’ve said before, it is possible that cannabis causes sz, but the relationship would have to be of relatively minor importance, given what I’ve already claimed here in this thread.

If cannabis does, in fact, cause psychotic illness, then one would expect that the prevalence of psychotic illness would Increase In parallel to the greatly Increased use of the “causative” substance In the Western world. This is clearly not the case, as there are reports both of Increases and decreases In the prevalence of schizophrenia15-18 in the Western world, with no clear evidence of a significantly Increased prevalence that would be expected If the use of a causative substance Increased 10-fold.

The results of the current study suggest that having an increased familial morbid risk for schizophrenia may be the underlying basis for schizophrenia in cannabis users and not cannabis use by itself.

This is a highly political issue, so you will find many people who are overstating how strong the evidence in favor of this supposed link is. But these two problems would have to be explained for the hypothesis about the causal link to deserve to be taken seriously. The fact remains that we are not seeing any real-world evidence of this supposedly large causal connection, and we already have plausible alternative explanations for it.

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@anon98459728 that amounts to plain misinformation, which is why I removed it. If people want to see the conclusions to the articles I linked to, they are in the links. Don’t provide your own that are in stark opposition to what is actually being claimed by the researchers.

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It says there are higher rates of sz in people that smoke cannabis…

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They are explaining why that does not have to mean it causes sz, and providing the evidence for this. Everyone knows there is a correlation.