Therapeutic Cannabis Use for Sleep and Mental Health

Abstract

Introduction: The evolving global landscape around cannabis regulation has renewed interest in exploring the therapeutic potential of cannabinoids for several medical conditions. Of these conditions, sleep and mental health concerns are often reported among the most common reasons for therapeutic cannabis use. In this work, we investigated the patterns and profiles of cannabis use in naturalistic samples to better understand its use for the management of sleep and mental health symptoms. We focused our examination on insomnia, depression, and anxiety, as cannabis is most often used to manage these conditions.

Results: Across our studies, cannabis was generally perceived to be efficacious for the management of insomnia symptoms in various mental health conditions. Analyses of strain categories revealed differences in perceived symptom improvement between strains for some conditions. In individuals with insomnia, indica-dominant and indica hybrid strains were found to reduce insomnia symptom severity more than cannabidiol (CBD) strains and sativa-dominant strains. Among individuals managing insomnia symptoms in depression, indica-dominant, indica hybrid, and sativa-dominant strains were perceived to be more efficacious than CBD strains. An additional investigation of several mental health conditions revealed pre-symptom severity, age, gender, and the ratio of CBD to THC as the factors most strongly associated with symptom change following cannabis use. Distinct patterns of cannabis response were also observed between individuals with insomnia, depression, and anxiety.

Conclusion: Our research investigating cannabis use for insomnia symptom management suggests that across conditions, individuals may perceive symptom improvements with cannabis use. Our subsequent work on cannabis use for mental health suggests that symptom profiles may have a role in the perceived effects of cannabis. These results highlight the therapeutic potential of cannabis-based products for sleep and mental health; however, the generalizability of this work is limited due to potentially biased samples of cannabis users who may have been more likely to perceive cannabis as effective. Our findings further emphasize the need for placebo-controlled investigations that can assess the safety and efficacy of cannabinoid treatments for general therapeutic use.