[dagogo redux]

“Are you saying that psychotherapy is ineffective only against those actively using MJ”

I think you may misunderstand the implications for psychotherapy in the settings of use, versus abuse, versus addiction, versus intoxication with various substances.

First, psychotherapy can be ineffective for a wide variety of reasons, and these reasons may be related to drug use or not. Likewise, impediments to emotional development can occur for a wide variety of reasons unrelated to substances.

Second, many potentially addictive and abusable classes of meds are actually prescribed in psychiatry and medicine, and in the proper therapeutic doses they usually have no significant adverse effect on whether people make good use of psychotherapy or not, and in certain cases can actually facilitate it.

By extension, recreational or intermittent use and even abuse of these same sorts of substances does not entirely bring psychological maturation or the benefits of psychotherapy to a halt the way even small periodic use of MJ does. Once again, this is likely due to its slow clearance from parts of the brain where its effect is to inhibit the laying down of new emotional memories.

Full-out addictive use of daily heavy doses of intoxicants and such is, of course, quite another matter, and you are right that this would be a contraindication for psychotherapy in my practice. But the insidious effect of MJ is that it robs the effectiveness of psychotherapy even in moderate intermittent use, and of all the substances that might undermine psychotherapy it stands alone in this regard IMO.

Hope that clears that up.

[Albion Wilde]

I think you may be painting with a very broad brush. A person with severe anxiety disorder or ADD to begin with may be calmed by intermittent use of small amounts of MJ. You might try gaining their trust with talking until they can trust you enough to suspend use and go onto a pharmaceutical that you prescribe.

Even then, there is no one-size-fits-all with medications, licit or illicit, or with brain or hormonal chemistry. With my own extremely clear family history of thyroid illness, it took me decades to get an accurate diagnosis and two additional years to get the proper type and dosage of medication. Meantime, I was treated and mischaracterized for a vast array of diagnostic dead ends. And I lived in the two cities containing the top medical care in the nation during this ordeal.