When Kalpit Sharma started smoking cannabis, he thought it was just part of "living his life" as a university student. After all, he had been told that the drug was relatively harmless.
That all changed in the summer of 2021, when he started hearing voices in his head.
"I would bike around, and the chain of the bike, it came off. And I thought that I could speak to birds, and birds were telling me how to put the chain back on," said Sharma, who was studying at York University in Toronto at the time.
Those voices are known as auditory hallucinations — a hallmark of psychosis. When they became more frequent and insistent, he went to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health for an assessment.
Sharma was shocked when he was told that he had been exhibiting signs of psychosis — and eventually he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
In 2023, Myran co-authored two studies looking into the connection between cannabis and psychosis. They found a 220 per cent increase in emergency room visits in Ontario for cannabis-induced psychosis between 2014 and 2021 — with the number rising from about 400 people to about 1,400 over that seven-year period.
"For men aged 14 to 24, the risk of developing schizophrenia rises to over 40 per cent within three years" of showing up in an ER for cannabis-induced psychosis, he said.
Myran was also lead author of a separate study released in early February that found 27.5 per cent of people who visited an emergency room for cannabis use developed an anxiety disorder for the first time within three years. For complete article including videos go to https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/cannabis-induced-psychosis-bad-trip-1.7116217
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