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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I've never actually touched weed, but I would see this with my friends in high school and college.

In the better case, they just become insufferable and pseudo-intellectual because they started watching Alan Watts and Carl Sagan while stoned and would become convinced that they know everything about physics and philosophy.

In a lot of cases though, and this is more obvious in hindsight, it feels like they were using weed as a means of dealing with the fact that they were deeply unhappy and depressed people. Instead of confronting their problems and seeing a therapist/psychiatrist or any of the other things that they could do to actively improve their life, they would spend their evenings and weekends getting high.

I don't inherently have an issue with people using recreational drugs; I've gotten drunk before [1], but it should be done in moderation.

[1] I never did it that much and I haven't had anything to drink at all in years.

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On the opposite end of that is the plethora of psychiatry/psychology professionals whom are terrible at their profession and are likely causing more harm than good.

I see it along the same lines as brands, your typical Great Value psychologist will greatly underperform the Kirkland psychologist who will greatly underperform the ... and so on.

Then there's the subset of the population whom have been abused in the most horrific ways by psychologists.

Not to counter your point, just as additional discussion.

Sure, I've had my share of issues with therapists, but I think the solution is to fix the therapists, not to YOLO it by self-medicating with weed.

Great, how does one fix the therapists? Or is this another one of those tricky systemic generational problems that means that I'll have to YOLO something for my own life before they're fixed?

I'm not claiming I know how to fix it, but I am quite confident that the solution to fixing issues with depression, focus, or any other number of psychological issues is not reading a Reddit post about weed and/or mushrooms and pretending you understand enough about pharmacology to fix these problems.

Therapists and psychologists and psychiatrists require training and as such will still be considerably more likely to help you than weed. Obviously there are bad professionals; I've hired bad electricians before but that does not imply I should try and do all the wiring in my house myself.

You seem to be assuming that everyone can afford a therapist.

If only there were some sort of system where everyone who had money gave it to some organization, percentage based so rich people gave more, and then this organization used it to pay for therapists, and everything had access to therapy and other stuff like that? Totally insane crazy idea, I know. It could never possibly work. But just imagine if it did! Everyone would be able to get the therapy and help they deserve. What a world that would be. Alas.

No, I would say making therapy affordable would be part of fixing it.

On the other hand I and a lot of my friends who were unhappy did it, grew out of it, and found some happiness.

Meanwhile I know many people who did the therapy rout and are still there decades later. Not sure their path was better.

Just because you can name counterexamples doesn't really undermine my point. I know people who were alcoholics in college and then stopped being alcoholics later but that doesn't mean we should encourage people to be alcoholics in college.

I am not trying to undermine your point. I just don’t think the current obsession with therapy is doing any favors.

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