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the jurogan experience one of the things that happened to me um as a result of like traveling all over the world is that i met this schizophrenia researcher um his name is paul fletcher he's at cambridge um and he wanted to experience like schizophrenia he's treating these people and he wanted to really know because of this critique that you just laid out um he's the only person who i know in that area who's done this you know so he he did like ketamine to try and reproduce the experience because he heard that that was like reproducing the would reproduce experience of course it doesn't but this is what people have said our animal models use ketamine for that reason but it doesn't but he was curious enough to try to figure out what schizophrenic people who are diagnosed with schizophrenia he tried to figure out what they were experiencing um i don't know if he figured that out from this sort of experiential perspective but what i do know is that if i ever had a relative who had schizophrenia i would send them to paul fletcher um because his perspective on it i it really respects the person who has this diagnosis and um it offers them the greatest amount of hope that i have seen in that area and it would be good if other scientists in these areas drugs whatever it is would also seek to try to figure out the experience that their paper their patients are going through yeah it'd be almost like learning martial arts without ever sparring yeah yeah yeah or you know coaching basketball without yeah whatever playing yeah yeah under pressure do you is there anything that mimics schizophrenia that that someone is there like a commonly thought of substance that mimics schizophrenia um they have suggested large doses of amphetamines
over periods of time with sleep deprivation can mimic paranoid schizophrenia but i don't know if it really does i mean all of this stuff i am now questioning so i don't know i mean at one time if you would ask me that question maybe five years ago i would have said amphetamines but i don't know now schizophrenia is an odd one too right because doesn't it affect somewhere in the neighborhood of one percent of the population yeah that's a lot of people it's a lot of people um uh but i have a lot more hope about schizophrenia after having met paul fletcher just in terms of um i i don't want to bastardize his sort of model of thinking about it and so i may not have all the details right but i would just say just simply try and explain about like you and i we go through the world everybody we have these theories about how the world works like um like you smile i have a theory about what that means right and so uh oh joe likes me or he's happy today whatever and then i'm right because you tell me that whatever somebody who's diagnosed with schizophrenia they also have these models that they're testing out and so their model might be like uh you when you smile they think that you're angry or whatever uh and you're plotting against them yes and their motto is just wrong i mean it's just like they're just getting they just have uh they're bumping uh bumping up against uh these wrong answers and then when they get they get more wrong answers it's even it causes even more stress and that's very anxiety provoking and then all of that is playing into this it's like first of all your models are off and now you're just getting this increased anxiety and so i think that's how his model sees it so that that means that it's okay as long as we let people
understand that don't worry if your model is getting it wrong it doesn't mean that that something's wrong with you it could be maybe we are get we have it wrong in our society and you have you might have a better way of thinking about this so it's like as opposed to it being one way there might be multiple ways of thinking about these these solving these problems that humans saw throughout their day and that's how i think that's how he thinks of it um and it's a it's a it's a model of hope for me because um you lessen the anxiety among the patients and many of the much of the problems deals with this anxiety of people telling them that they're incompetent and you know how that is how that feels as an adult somebody telling you that you're incompetent it's like how can you tell me i'm i'm incompetent so it exacerbates whatever problems exactly i initially have it makes them far worse exactly yeah there's also a thing that seems to have i've only known a few people that are schizophrenic but it's it's a disturbing thing when they think that everybody's against them and they feel like they're on their own but by virtue of everyone being against them they feel they feel isolated yes and then their whatever paranoia they have it's like throwing dry sticks on it just rages into a fire and it gets even worse because they think that people are plotting against them and everyone's against them and they don't have anybody comforting them yes and we need that we all need that absolutely you know and i think particularly people with like a slippery version of reality probably need that more than most yeah when you say reality um it might be multiple realities and that's the thing that we need people to understand or that it's like it's okay um it might be your reality just might be different from theirs but not to the point where you have a different reality and that you're
allowed to abuse people not so i want to be clear because i know there are some people out here saying something about alternative facts not i don't mean it like where you manipulate people i mean it for people who are struggling uh like these people with schizophrenia um just to help lessen their anxiety yeah so with in terms of marijuana particularly like high doses of marijuana um particularly edible marijuana could really seriously exacerbate someone who has who's kind of hanging on barely anyway and then boom you eat an edible absolutely you're [ __ ] so someone like alex would say that person schizophrenia was brought on by marijuana whereas i think you and i would probably agree they were more likely inclined towards schizophrenia anyway and the high dose of marijuana pushed them over there and then you know everything all the evidence says what you just said i mean so when you look at the evidence where people have done all of these studies um folks who didn't have these predispositions um marijuana then doesn't cause people to be schizophrenic or have a psychotic disorder right but it certainly can precipitate um or exacerbate um um um psychosis in people who are pre-expressed predisposed so what i was going to get to was do you think that maybe for people that have this predisposition towards schizophrenia they should probably avoid psychoactive substances or avoid something that radically perturbs their version of reality they probably should avoid cannabis right um i don't want to say avoid everything because um is there anything yeah i mean so like they could maybe use that maybe would help them yeah so i spent a little time working in a heroin clinic
in geneva and so they give out heroin to these patients twice a day every day intravenous or oral however the patient wants it but a lot of intravenous heroin users and it's all you know sanitized setting hospital setting or clinic setting twice a day many of these people have psychotic disorders like diagnosed with schizophrenia and heroin helps mediation yeah with many of these symptoms and they feel better even more so in some cases than antipsychotic uh really yeah i talk about this in the new book in fact but yeah this is uh so i don't want to have this blanket statement that they should avoid psychoactive substances because some might actually be helpful and some other people have tried other drugs one psychiatrist in the netherlands gave his patients amphetamines and he swears that it works but that has to be researched out but we'll see but i know cannabis for sure uh i i wouldn't do that one you wouldn't do cannabis and perhaps maybe not high levels of amphetamines as well either right because i i don't know you know i i will i would have to um um slowly titrate and see whether or not it worked or whether or not people felt better catch new episodes of the joe rogan experience for free only on spotify watch back catalog jre videos on spotify including clips easily seamlessly switch between video and audio experience on spotify you can listen to the jre in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data cost all for free spotify is absolutely free you don't have to have a premium account to watch new jre episodes you just need to search for the jre on your spotify app go to spotify now to get this full episode of the joe rogan experience