CBD For Mental Health: Does It Help?

Ever since CBD products became legal for sale and use in most Western nations in the late 2010s, their sales have skyrocketed. The global CBD market is currently worth about 10 billion dollars, and it’s expected to soar to more than 200 billion dollars by 2032.

Users choose CBD (the abbreviation for the plant compound cannabidiol) for its many apparent medical benefits, including chronic pain relief and help with insomnia. But the most common reason people cite for trying a CBD product is to relieve the stress and anxiety they experience.

There’s no definitive evidence proving that cannabidiol can ease any mental health disorder. Research to date is only considered to be preliminary, which is why CBD’s medical benefits are always described as “apparent,” and it’s why no government has approved the use of CBD as a prescription medication except for several rare forms of childhood epilepsy.

However, studies have repeatedly shown that cannabidiol appears to provide relief for those suffering from anxiety, stress, depression, and even more serious mental health disorders like PTSD and psychosis, as well as developmental disorders like autism.

That would be a welcome development in the medical world. Mental health and psychiatric conditions are often treated with medication regimes that bring with them a long list of troubling side effects ranging from drowsiness, headaches, and mental confusion to weight gain and sexual dysfunction.

CBD, though, isn’t associated with any serious side effects, and the mild ones that are occasionally experienced are seen mostly in those new to cannabidiol or using extremely high doses. Nearly a billion people worldwide suffer from mental health disorders, and the possibility of being able to offer many of them a benign treatment would be game-changing.

Many patients aren’t waiting. They’re regularly using CBD oil, capsules, edibles, or vapes to help ease their depression, anxiety, or stress. Anecdotal and clinical reports are almost uniformly positive, despite the difficulty of determining the appropriate dose of cannabidiol to choose.

What evidence supports the use of CBD for mental health issues? How much should you take, and which products might be best? And exactly what is CBD?

We have answers.

What Is CBD?

Non-intoxicating CBD is one of the two most important plant compounds found in hemp and cannabis plants. The other is psychoactive THC (tetrahydrocannabinol). CBD and THC are classified as “cannabinoids,” and they’re two of more than 100 cannabinoids contained in those plants.

Cannabis contains large amounts of THC and very little cannabidiol, while hemp is rich in CBD and has very little THC content. That explains why all of the CBD products available online and in an enormous number of local shops contain cannabidiol extracted from hemp plants; they can provide their apparent benefits without impairing users in any way.

Both cannabidiol and THC are believed to provide numerous health and wellness benefits. However, THC also gets users high when they smoke marijuana or consume other products sourced from cannabis. That’s the reason why CBD products are seen as a more desirable option for those who simply want relief for their medical issues.

CBD (and THC) deliver apparent benefits by interacting with a full-body network of receptors called the endocannabinoid system (ECS). The ECS governs most important human functions; since cannabinoids are so similar in chemical structure to the endocannabinoids that serve as ECS messengers, CBD is able to interact with the receptors to send its own control messages.

And those messages seem to trigger positive results for people using CBD products.

Apparent Benefits of CBD

Research into CBD’s effects only began in earnest in the 1990s and 2000s, since the existence of the ECS wasn’t discovered until the late 1980s. Scientists had focused almost exclusively on THC before then because they hadn’t realized that cannabidiol was an important compound.

They now know differently.

Preliminary studies have found a wide range of medical benefits that CBD appears to deliver. One has been recognized by the medical establishment. Doctors now prescribe cannabidiol (in the form of the medication Epidiolex) to treat Lennox-Gastaut and Dravet syndromes, two rare types of childhood epilepsy that don’t respond well to anti-seizure medications.

The other apparent benefits are still the subject of further research, but they include:

• Relief of pain caused by inflammatory and anti-immune diseases like arthritis, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, and many more; other types of chronic pain may also be helped.
• Easing or slowing neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, and possibly providing overall neuroprotective effects.
• Reducing seizures in epilepsy patients other than the ones already being treated with cannabidiol.
• Helping people with insomnia and other sleep quality issues.
• Lowering heart health risks like high cholesterol levels and high blood pressure, and potentially providing more wide-ranging cardiovascular benefits.
• Easing or preventing outbreaks of acne and other skin diseases.
• Possibly helping patients fight some types of cancer.

We’ve left the most important (at least, for those reading this article), for last:

• Providing relief from stress, anxiety, depression, and other mental health disorders.

That last potential benefit deserves more attention.

Research Into CBD’s Use for Mental Health

Before we get to the specifics of studies that have been done to investigate CBD’s effects, we need to talk about endocannabinoids a bit more. You’ll remember that endocannabinoids serve as messengers in the ECS, but some of them have an additional impact on health and wellness: making us feel good.

The primary endocannabinoid is known as anandamide, informally called the “bliss molecule” and released by the body when we experience happiness. Some studies show that cannabidiol prevents the breakdown of anandamide, which leaves more anandamide in the system, boosts CBD users’ levels of happiness, and improves their mental outlook.

It’s also been documented that the ECS is the primary regulator of the body’s stress response and that CBD use enhances the system’s function, helping it keep stress levels under control.

With that knowledge, it’s easier to understand why so much research indicates CBD could help people dealing with mental health conditions.

Stress and Anxiety

A fairly large number of studies have reported cannabidiol’s effectiveness against both stress and anxiety.

Seven of them were double-blind, controlled clinical studies with placebos, the “gold standard” of research. Nearly 250 people were involved (along with another 120 in a partially-controlled study), and all of the studies showed that CBD significantly lowered the participants’ stress levels — performing essentially as well as medications prescribed for patients with stress.

Less research has looked at PTSD sufferers, but initial results show that cannabidiol appears to reduce people’s often-troubling symptoms by more than 25%, while easing the nightmares they commonly experience. There’s even some evidence that CBD use immediately after a traumatic event might prevent the development of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Other studies have tested cannabidiol as a potential treatment for anxiety; most have focused on specific types of anxiety disorders. The findings show strong evidence for CBD’s effectiveness in patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), social anxiety disorder (SAD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and panic disorder (PD).

In most of that anxiety research, CBD was tested as an immediate treatment to relieve symptoms. So far, there’s very little information on whether cannabidiol could be effective as a daily treatment to prevent chronic anxiety issues.

Depression

Fewer studies have examined CBD’s possible use to treat depression, but the results of anxiety studies already show some promise in this area. Prescription meds that are effective against anxiety are often prescribed to treat depression as well, so anything that works for anxiety may also help with depression.

Much of the research focused on depression has involved animal subjects, and it’s regularly shown that CBD functions as an antidepressant. And one of those studies found that cannabidiol also appears to boost the brain’s response to serotonin (“the feel-good hormone”) — the same chemical that SSRI anti-depression medications are designed to increase,

As for research involving humans, it’s limited so far. In one study testing CBD’s effect on anxiety patients, participants showed noticeable improvement in their depression symptoms as well. Another large but anecdotal research study, with several thousand respondents, found that two-thirds of the people who said they used CBD for depression reported that it worked well.

Other Mental Health Issues

Several studies have indicated that CBD may be an effective weapon against psychosis. In one, more than three dozen patients were given either cannabidiol or an antipsychotic medication; those receiving CBD responded just as well as those taking the medication but suffered none of the med’s common side effects like weight gain or hormonal issues.

Sleep difficulties, neurological disorders, and autism are often believed linked to mental health issues. Preliminary studies show that CBD appears to ease insomnia and sleep disorders, slow the progress of neurodegenerative diseases and provide neuroprotective effects, and improve autism symptoms like speech and social interaction difficulties, and repetitive behaviors.

Much more research is ongoing into all of these areas, but CBD already shows great promise as a possible treatment for a number of mental health issues without the side effects associated with pharmaceutical approaches.

What Form of CBD to Use — And How Much

This section must be preceded by a caution. Cannabidiol hasn’t been proven effective for any mental health condition; any use of CBD products with the intent of relieving the issues we’ve discussed should only be begun after consultation with your doctor or another healthcare professional.

Forms of CBD Products

CBD can be used in quite a few ways, but some would seem to be better choices than others for immediate or short-term effects.

When CBD oil is dropped under the tongue (a method called sublingual administration), or when cannabidiol is vaped, it works much more quickly and more effectively. That’s because the CBD is rapidly absorbed by the tissues under the tongue or in the lungs, and reaches the ECS in just minutes.

Other methods of ingesting CBD don’t provide that advantage. Whether you’re adding CBD oil to food, consuming CBD edibles or beverages, or taking CBD capsules, they all must pass through the digestive system before the cannabidiol is released. And digestion can cause problems.

One is that the CBD stays in the stomach for 30 minutes to two hours before it’s released to do its work in the body, an obvious problem for those who are looking for quick relief from the stress or anxiety they’re feeling. The other is that much of the cannabidiol is lost in the digestive process, so the CBD that remains won’t be as effective as a “full dose” would be.

A final note: topical CBD products can’t make it through the skin to reach the bloodstream, so they wouldn’t be effective for mental health conditions.

How Much CBD to Take

Spoiler alert: there’s no right answer. Here’s why.

• Since CBD isn’t a prescription treatment, there are no accepted dosage guidelines to follow.
• The effects CBD delivers vary greatly depending on the user’s weight and BMI, physical and medical condition, the speed of their metabolism, and other medications they may be taking.
• The doses of CBD that appear to be effective in research and clinical studies vary greatly, depending on the disease, illness, or disorder being treated.

Most experts recommend starting with a very low daily dose, somewhere between 5-25 milligrams, but others suggest 25-75mg per day for anxiety or sleep disorders. However, that’s far below the doses that some researchers have found to work for stress, anxiety, and depression, which range from 300-600 milligrams daily.

The best approach, once again, is to discuss CBD usage and dosages with your doctor or a mental health professional. To put your mind at ease, though, research has shown that as much as 1,500 milligrams of CBD is well-tolerated by humans, with no serious side effects.

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