Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When you use something to cope
What you tried at that age is a poor guide to what is in front of your child now. Cannabis today is far stronger than the same word used to mean.
The sentence that closes most of these conversations is I turned out fine. Try a different one: ask what it does for them, when they reach for it, and what the days without it are like. You will learn more in five minutes of that than in an hour of comparing generations, and they are far more likely to keep talking to you.
If you are using something to cope and it has become hard to stop, please speak to a doctor before changing anything.
Qur’an and Sunnah
the man who has taken his own passion as a god: are you to be his guardian (Quran 25:43). Even the Prophet is told he is not the keeper of another person's wanting, which lifts some weight off a parent.
أَرَءَيۡتَ مَنِ ٱتَّخَذَ إِلَٰهَهُۥ هَوَىٰهُ أَفَأَنتَ تَكُونُ عَلَيۡهِ وَكِيلًا
Think [Prophet] of the man who has taken his own passion as a god: are you to be his guardian
Qur’an 25:43read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In a birth cohort of nearly four thousand seventeen year olds, a distinct group drank specifically to manage distress, and that group carried more internalising symptoms and greater risk of harm than other drinkers. What the substance is for turned out to matter more than the bare fact of drinking. It is an observational study, so it describes who is at risk rather than proving what causes what.
Stapinski LA, Edwards AC, Hickman M, Araya R, Teesson M, Newton NC, Kendler KS, Heron J. (2016). Drinking to Cope: a Latent Class Analysis of Coping Motives for Alcohol Use in a Large Cohort of Adolescents.. Prevention science : the official journal of the Society for Prevention Research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
You cannot help with a habit until you know what it is being used for.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
The fog after cannabis is not gone by morning. In younger users learning can stay dulled for several days, so Saturday night is still in the room on Wednesday.
If a young person is using regularly, waiting to see whether they grow out of it is a gamble. Help early is nearly always cheaper than help later.
There are medicines that make stopping smoking easier, and one of them can sometimes cover a mood or attention problem at the same time. That is a fair thing to ask a doctor about.