Quote Originally Posted by GhostFace2K
Ok, so this happened a while ago, but i'm starting to suspect this from a lot of people on this forum... about 2 years ago my brother went completely NUTS, and was doing all kinds of crazy shit. He was eventually arrested and institutionalized for a short time while they put him on lithium and some anti-psychotic. He literally thought he was Jesus and had these manic depressent phases (exact opposite of being depressed) and then he would slip into a depressed phase. He switched moods very often, and was pretty damn crazy (thought he was the Messiah, thought he could not be hurt etc..) so anyway... the psychologist (psychiatrist?) told him that there was a high probability that his heavy usage of marijuana may have caused his bipolar disorder. They said the prolonged use of marijuana effected a delicate balance of chemicals in his brain and eventually made him bi-polar due to the imbalance. My question is, how many of you are or know somebody that is bi-polar (or some kind of mental disorder) and smoked a lot of weed prior to this?
A few things...

1. Marijuana cannot make you bipolar. Nor can marijuana make you schizophrenic. But what marijuana CAN do is that if a person already has a genetic disposition towards getting the mental illness, marijuana or other drugs can help to set it off.

2. Manic Depressive Disorder and bipolar disorder are the same thing. You have periods of extreme dark depression that may result in suicide attempts, etc... and mania, which is the polar opposite of depression characterized by extreme feelings of happiness and extreme energy. Imagine a kid with ADD on speed, that's basically what mania is.

3. Thinking you are jesus is a hallucination or a delusion. That's not an aspect of Manic depressive disorder. Sounds like your brother may have some other underlying psychological problems, perhaps even the waking hallucinations could be from paranoid schizophrenia. I would certainly hope not for your brother's sake, I'm just saying.

4. A psychologist is a person with a medical license that can proscribe pharmaceuticals. A clinical psychiatrist will usually deal with listening to the patient and attempting to figure out what the root of the problem is.

5. I know someone who is bipolar, and he has smoked marijuana for about 3 or 4 years before he was clinically marked as having the disorder. It is difficult to say if he would have still been bipolar if he had or had not consumed marijuana recreationally for so many years prior to the emergence of his mental condition.

Best of luck.