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Granted I was an almost constant user, I maintained a "high" basically from when I woke up until I went to bed at night. It was def a form of self medication, it did help with a lot of ADHD symptoms because rather than getting lazy I would get hyped and very active. Used it that way basically from a little before covid, all through covid, until November of last year. It did affect my work performance, looking back, but I interviewed for that job high, I went to work high most of the time, still got good reviews, raises and a promotion. I was addicted or dependent or whatever term you want to use. But like high functioning I guess.
But in November I crashed hard. Had a complete psychotic break. I thought the government was using 5g to beam mind control beams, an array of numbers containing hidden brainwashing instructions, to make me believe I was this person, when really I was a fake, an android put into this life to do their bidding, they killed the real me and I was the replacement, and this happened all the time, I just happened to pick up on one of their transmissions.
I'm a rational guy, I don't know where this shit came from. I have pages in my notebook documenting it. Luckily my wife is amazing and I was kind of able to talk myself out of it enough to have her convince me and remind me of what was real. Since then I had to quit. I def got some intelligence points back. And I haven't had any more episodes. But damn that scared the shit out of me. I didn't even know it was possible.
On the addiction aspect, the addiction stems from purely psychological, at least in my experience, unlike other drugs like nicotine which is chemical/physical addiction. I've smoked weed and tobacco/vapes, was at one point dependent on weed but was able to quit cold turkey and haven't felt any cravings since.
Nicotine on the other hand is very much a constant battle that I feel like I could relapse at time, just a wiff of second hand smoke is enough to give me very strong withdrawal jitters. Infact, I feel that a heavy contributer of my weed dependency was a transference of my nicotine addiction.
In that sense, targeting mental health issues through therapy and appropriate prescriptions for co-occurring mental health conditions will likely help kick cannabis dependence.
Quitting smoking and vaping is harder, last year was the first time in my life where, after not having a cig in a long time, I was at a thing and people were smoking and I bummed one and it was absolutely disgusting to me. Felt great to hate it tbh.
But in like 13-15 years of habitual smoking I never had a psychotic episode from it.
There's multiple studies that suggests that the psychological dependency is bidirectional where as pre-existing mental disorders can lead to cannabis dependency, cannabis dependency can lead to exacerbation of the pre-existing mental disorders, and excessive use can lead to trigging mental disorders you maybe genetically prone too and commonly psychosis. Psychosis has symptoms overlapping with schizophrenia, however you're symptoms seem a bit extreme for Psychosis. Is there perhaps a history of schizophrenia &/or paranoid personality disorder in your family? If you don't know, perhaps consider looking into it.
I don't know, maybe a proclivity but our family wasn't really the type for diagnosing mh disorders. I had to fight like hell to get my own diagnoses as an adult.