Personal Story of Medical Marijuana Use, Age 41, White Male, NW Arkansas
First medical diagnosis: Major Depression / Double Depression January 2000
I have now identified past episodes of double depression with chronic depression starting in High School. I also have social phobias. Concentrated unfamiliar and unfriendly people energy can cause me to have a panic attack.
I am presently taking 300mg/day of Effexor. The medication does help with the depression and with the social phobia but it is not a cure all. The side effects for me are reduced sexual drive and sexual dysfunction, greatly increased cravings for simple carbohydrates and weird, intense and sometimes disturbing dreams. It is also rather expensive at $140/month.
Marijuana has a quick and in most cases a very position effect on my mood and social phobias. The main negative seems to be related to its illegal status and the paranoia that causes. The other challenge with using marijuana as a medication is to control myself to a limited medical dose. A have noticed that very small dose will elevate my mood without me being spacey or having problems with short term memory loss.
A quarter ounce used this way should last me almost two months. I like to use a water pipe. The cost has been around $35. The main problem is finding some to purchase. It would also be nice if I could select the variety of marijuana that was best for helping with depression.
I started out as a recreational cannabis user. Looking back I can now see that I have, without really knowing what I was doing, both self-medicated with marijuana and used it for the fun of it. Unfortunately I mostly used a recreational dose which can cause problems when trying to function in normal society. I would from time to time feel bad about this and struggle with getting off pot. I can now see that I was trying to self-medicate and to feel badly about this was unfounded. At this point I would like to try using marijuana as my anti-depressant and this time use it in a controlled manner. This is not to say that I will not use it for recreation for time to time only that I want to separate the two and see if I can maybe get away from a possible dependence on pharmaceutical anti-depressions.
I am a college graduate who has been successfully self-employed for several years. I am married and my wife is a master level social worker. We own a house with a few acres of land.
I never was able to restrict myself to limited medical dose.
After almost a year on Effexor I got to the point that I could no longer handle the side effects. When it came time to refill my prescription I decided not to and quit cold turkey. I stayed stoned for the next two weeks and this really helped me make the transition. As long as I stayed stoned I was okay but when I was not the depression hit hard. If you have never been so depressed that suicide makes sense it may be hard to understand what this is like.
I have been and sometimes still do get into a mindset where the urge to commit suicide seems to push into my mind from an outside source. During this period I did experiment with making marijuana cookies. I found that this worked much better. The dose would kick in more slowly and would hold out much longer. The other advantage is that you can be much more discrete about it.
For me some of the side effects of using pot to control depression were undesirable. This hit home one day while at the local natural foods co-op when I was buying bulk maple syrup and it was flowing rather slowly into my jar and I decided that I might as well get a few things while the jar was filling. I forgot about the maple syrup long enough that by the time I got back the jar had long been filled and maple syrup was flowing all over the place. This and the danger of unpleasant legal issues helped me decide to go see another doctor. This time my diagnosis was changed to bipolar spectrum.
This is an atypical form a bipolar disorder where the person cycles between depression and a dysphoric form of hypomania. You also suffer from a condition that is sort of like an electrical storm in the mind. I was first put on Lamictal, a drug used mostly to treat epilepsy, which did a great job of stopping the "storm in my mind". Once the "storms" were under control I realized that I had lived with them since childhood. The Lamictal did not however help with the depression and so my doctor added Wellbutrin.
This has worked well for me for the last year and a half with basically no negative side effects. I do however still have a nervous tic which started when I was taking the Effexor. It is not a big deal and only happens right when I get into bed at night but even so this causes me some concern. With the medication I am now taking I do not smoke pot because it lowers my mood and puts me into an unpleasant mind-set. I really have no desire to since I feel so good most of the time.
Marijuana did help me through some really rough times and without it I likely would have committed suicide. It seems to me that pot needs to be the first medication a person gets when they fall into a deep depression especially if suicide is an issue. This would get the person out of their depression quickly and would allow time to find the best long-term meds. It is real sad for me to hear how teens that are suddenly taken off pot after daily use all to often commit suicide. I believe that if someone with undiagnosed depression is using pot to self medicate they are at a high risk of suicide if they are taken off pot suddenly and the underlying depression is not addressed.