# Can marijuana cause this? Help!



## emichiganf (Jul 12, 2016)

Hi, so I I'm a teen. I use to be a heavy weed smoker and always had a good time!! but during the last few months it changed. One of the times I would overthink my high and scare my self that I would never feel normal again. And then one of last times (which I regret , this is probably what altered what I'm going through), I passed out because I was having a panic attack and was too high. A few weeks after that day my life changed, I feel different , sometimes I feel completly depressed and scared. Other days I just feel weird, like life doesn't make sense, I don't know how to explain it. Some days I feel fine. I'm so confsued because my whole life I have never had anything like this happen. Does anyone know if that bad time on weed could of did this? Will it go away? If I get help will it go away? Is this normal? I'm scared to tell my parents because they will think that my depression is just a drug withdrawals.... Help!


----------



## TimMis (Mar 21, 2016)

Yes it can.

Read this, and afterward stay away from this site forever.

Imagine you are in traffic, talking to a friend, in a class, or even tripping and suddenly everything seems strange. You feel like you are having an out of body experience, you cannot feel your body, you look at your hands and you think they are of another person. You look at yourself in the third person it is like you are not you, you are watching yourself from a distance. You feel like you are an actor inside a play and life is a play. Would you think this is cool? then you are a FUCKING idiot. This is not a spiritual epiphany that you are going through. It may sound that you are becoming more spiritual and detached but this is all because of your tired mind and there is a neurological explanation for that where the part of your brain which is responsible for emotions is not working properly which causes detachment. For some it can be a sensation for few minutes but for others it is something chronic. It will remain there for months, years, and sometimes a lifetime. It is called depersonalization and derealization disorder. What is described above is just an innocent and brief introduction for this phenomena.

You are living your life normally. you wake up, brush your teeth, have your coffee and leave the house then come back at night and sleep.Then, you wake up the next day and you have no idea what the fuck is going on. Everything is different, you feel different, the room looks weird, you cannot recognize your own stuff, you vision is blurry, you feel like you are in the third person, you feel like your mind and body are separated from each other. You look at your hands and you don't feel they are yours, your past memories seem to be for someone else.

You go and try to sleep your trouble away hoping you will wake up differently but you don't ! You go wash your face to wake up or think maybe this is a dream but its not !you start to pinch yourself to see if you are in a dream and you hope to God it is a dream. If you are an atheist you start crying for God to help you, you are so desperate to do anything to get rid of this feeling. You look at the mirror and you cannot recognize yourself, you feel like it is a new person. It is really happening to you although you feel like you are in a dream.

You go out of the room, scared to tell your parents but they don't see anything weird about you. You are freaked out that they would know you are going crazy but then you freak out how everyone is not noticing anything wrong about you. The more scary is that you don't feel any connection to your family, they feel like strangers.

You think you are turning psychotic, losing your mind, or have a brain tumor. Ofcourse, when a person is psychotic he would not consider these feelings as something not normal, you know there is something wrong with you and it is just a feeling not reality.

You go out of the house, everything looks like its moving in slow motion, the cars seem to look like space ships, the world is in 2D, your anxiety is through the roof, you feel like you are an actor in a play, or watching the world behind a Tv screen. People look like they are from outer space. You try to talk to people even though you are so scared and socially anxious, you cannot understand anything they are saying, you see their lips moving but you don't understand what they say. You are in a trip and it is not going away.

You sit with your friends and you don't feel like you belong there with them, you don't even feel that you are in the moment. you body is here but your mind is somewhere else. You feel like you are going through life as an auto-pilot or a robot. You are also emotionally detached, you have no emotions towards anything. You feel emotionally numb, the only thing you can feel is severe depression

You rush back home and the first thing you do is visit Dr. Google. you read about people who think they are schizophrenic or losing their mind. You think again you are turning crazy and you read that it can be a symptom of schizophrenia. Later, you get releived that you are not psychotic and your disorder have a name and you are not alone. What is the name behind these feelings ? Depersonalization and Derealization.

"Diagnostic criteria include persistent or recurrent experiences of feeling detached from one's mental processes or body.[1] The symptoms include a sense of automation, going through the motions of life but not experiencing it, feeling as though one is in a movie, loss of conviction with one's identity, feeling as though one is in a dream, feeling a disconnection from one's body; out-of-body experience, a detachment from one's body, environment and difficulty relating oneself to reality"

Along with depersonalization disorder , comes another disorder which is called derealization disorder. "Derealization is a subjective experience of unreality of the outside world, while depersonalization is unreality in one's sense of self."

You spend 12 hours a day researching about your symptoms. You discover that there is no absolute treatment for it yet. You read in the blogs about people and how they did not get better. Most people in the posts talking about suicide, many of them quit work or college, did not leave their room for months. You also read a lot of posts about people has been having it for 30 years or more and it is not going away. Between few hundred posts you find one or two posts about people saying they recovered completely. Because you are so obsessed, you don't realize that most of the people who actually got cured won't come back and post about it, they would be busy living their lives.

No matter how much you have awareness, common sense, and intellectuality you would be hypochondriac and obsessed in very severe levels. It consumes and takes away your judgemental and critical sense. You start to analyse what is the reason behind that, you think it is because of some terminaly disesase and that you will never get better. You analyse every small symptom you have.

What actually causes Depersonalization ? There are a lot of factors, like:

1- Drug induced : for example, cannabis, mdma, ketamine, lsd

2- Trauma , PTSD

3- Temperol lobe epilepsy

4- Anxiety, Panic

5- Schizophrenic people experience it as a symptom.

6- Lyme disease.

Chances are that you are not psychotic or epileptic because a very small percentage of people who have it is due to that. Also, it is not related to a terminal disease. There is a logical explanation to what is happening, your mind is very tired of the amount of stress and anxiety so it protected itself by this shield. The vicious cycle begins. Anxiety and depression makes your depersonalization worse and then depersonalization makes anxiety and depression much more worse&#8230;etc. Y

Although what is mentioned above is related to my experience with depersonalization and derealization , I am going to talk about it now in a more personal level.

I used to smoke cannabis all through my university. I had experimented with other kinds of drugs but I did not get involved in them. After years of smoking cannabis, it started to affect me. It started to make me little anxious, brain fog, zoned out, decreased short term memory, fatigue. Although I never had any of these problems before but it wasn't that big of a deal I was still confident, smart, and social.

Before it all happened I was having stressful weeks. It was my senior semester at university, I was having insomnia, fatigue, and feeling a bit odd. Maybe this was the symptoms before it started to happen or what helped trigger it because I was in a bad state. One time I tried X pill which is MDMA and it all started.

I thought I was just coming down and tomorrow ill feel better but I did not. I was really freaked out. I woke up and felt that nothing of my stuff in the room are familiar. I was feeling that my body in numb like im drugged, my mind is in a fog. I also felt like a part of me is not here like I have this body and another thing is inside it and I know that something about my old self is not there. I felt that the memories of my past belong to another person. Although all of this felt SO real, I knew it was just a feeling and not reality and even so I thought I was getting crazy or turning psychotic. I thought I have lost my mind.

Then, I had a panic attack and it was the first time I experience it in my life, I thought I was having a heart attack. I thought I was dying and I started having these existential thoughts while lying in bed under the sheets waiting for this to go away. I felt that my heart was going out of my body and I was all shaking. I felt that it lasted for an hour or more.

I go out of my room pretending everything was normal. I went to university and as soon as I was on the road. I felt like I was in another planet. Imagine the feeling that you were put in a totally new country, the streets are not familiar, the people are not familiar, the language is not familiar; well this is 100 times more unfamiliar and it is your fucking city ! The car looks weird like they are moving in slow motion, colors look brighter. You feel like you are half asleep, half awake, zoned out.

You reach university. You go to your usual spot to hangout with your friends. You see them all talking and hanging around but you feel you are not there. You don't feel any connection to them like you are not close and didn't share any memories together. You know they are your friends and you hanged out like a million time but it just doesn't feel like it.

You feel like people are like robots, they are not real. They are all characters. You go to class and you see all your classmates there. You look at them and you notice like you are an alien, the are in a totally different state then you are. They are here but you are not there, only your body is there. You cannot understand anything the professor is talking about and your wittiness is 0, you feel you are iq-less, brain-dead.

I couldn't wait till the day finished and go home. I went home and I couldn't sit with my family because I did not want them to feel there is something wrong. The weird thing is that all day through university and my time at home, no one noticed anything. Even in the 9 months I suffered with depersonalization/derealization even my closest friends did not notice. In blogs, were people who suffer from it, they the exact same thing that people think you are normal although you feel like you are a zombie.

I went to my room closed the door. I went to take a shower, put the water on and sat inside the tub while the water is falling down on me. I sat there for 2 hours trying to figure out what to do, I wanted to isolate myself. Then, I lyed in my bed under the blankets and started thinking how I am going to get myself out of this mess.

In general, you feel anxious, paranoid, panic, numb, zoned out, brain fog, weird, detached, disconnected, depressed, like you are in a chronic bad trip, visual problems, avoidant, agoraphobic, fatigue, your body is all numb&#8230;&#8230;

I am not an anxious and paranoid person but no matter how much your feet are in the ground you will have all these thoughts eating up your head.

I made myself think logically and here are the tips for the people who are suffering from this disorder which have helped me recover.

1- You are NOT turning crazy, if you are turning crazy then you wouldn't be aware that the feelings you are having are not normal.

2- Don't get hypochondriac and think that the disorder you are having is because of some terminal disease or whatever. It is because of your tired mind which triggered the fight/flight response.

3- Don't start obsessing and reading about it online because this will make you feelings worse. Also, the experiences of people you will find online will be 90% negative because no one after he get cured will come and start to talk about it. You will find these people who have been having it for years. Why have they been having it for years because they did not take any actions and stayed obsessed.

4- Stop doing all drugs and alcohol.

5- Get your ass into the gym, this will increase your neurotransmitter which will stimulate your mind and will elevate depression. It will also distract your mind from this.

6- Try as much as you can to distract yourself whether by sitting with friends or watching comedy movies which will make you laugh, distracted, and boost your neurotransmitters.

7- Even if you feel that you are horrified to leave the house, you should drag your ass out of the house because if you do not do that you will probably remain in the same state and not improve. IF you are afraid of something and you won't overcome it then you will always be afraid of it. Once you start to make yourself socialize again, your confidence and mood to go out will slowly return. You will be less anxious and distracted which help in your process of recovery.

8- Go to a psychiatrist so he will prescribe you some meds and will tell you if you need psychotherapy or not.

While I was having this disorder, I managed to travel, earn my university degree at university, get multiple job offers, and work with an important company outside my country. It was not easy at all, some of the things I have done, I did not enjoy them at all and I had to push myself into them but I did them anyway. It is not about doing what you like or what you can, it is about doing what you should in order to remind yourself how you were and to connect to that person that you once where.


----------



## JacobG (Jun 14, 2015)

^


----------



## Amina_x (Nov 22, 2014)

Around 90% of the people here got it from weed. I can say that from experience.


----------



## JohnRg470 (Jul 18, 2016)

emichiganf said:


> Hi, so I I'm a teen. I use to be a heavy weed smoker and always had a good time!! but during the last few months it changed. One of the times I would overthink my high and scare my self that I would never feel normal again. And then one of last times (which I regret , this is probably what altered what I'm going through), I passed out because I was having a panic attack and was too high. A few weeks after that day my life changed, I feel different , sometimes I feel completly depressed and scared. Other days I just feel weird, like life doesn't make sense, I don't know how to explain it. Some days I feel fine. I'm so confsued because my whole life I have never had anything like this happen. Does anyone know if that bad time on weed could of did this? Will it go away? If I get help will it go away? Is this normal? I'm scared to tell my parents because they will think that my depression is just a drug withdrawals.... Help!


Hi my friend, It totally CAN cause it...Thats why i would always encourage people to not take it..Playing with your mental health can't be a good thing, i know, cause i done it when i was younger..Hence i'm on here..Good luck..


----------

