(David Railton/ Medical News Today) — Two new studies report an increased risk of psychosis among smokers of not only marijuana, but tobacco, too.
The tobacco study has now been published in the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, and the marijuana study — which was conducted by the same team — has now been published in The British Journal of Psychiatry.
Research has found links between psychosis and both tobacco and marijuana smoking — particularly in regard to schizophrenia-related psychosis.
However, the precise reasons why people who experience psychosis are more likely to smoke are not clear.
Some scientists think that smoking might act as a kind of “self-medication” — that is, people with psychosis might find that smoking relieves their symptoms, perhaps due to some unidentified neurological mechanism. (…)