Good afternoon, everyone. It's Dr. Nigro again with our next episode of Psychology Unplugged.

Thanks, everyone, for your comments, feedback. Much appreciated.

I enjoyed speaking with a lot of you guys over the past week and look forward to upcoming conversations and meetings with a lot of you guys.

Today's topic is one of the most fascinating and severe psychiatric

conditions, and this is schizophrenia. The original term was dementia precocks.

And actually, schizophrenia goes back into, you can find it in Egyptian hieroglyphics.

It's a very scary disorder.

And it's one of the few psychiatric conditions that has a typical age onset which is

generally between 16 to 30 and the reason for that is that period is considered to be one of the most stressful times in a person's life,

beginning to plan going to college, marriage, career, children. And I think I've mentioned

this before, something called the diathesis stress model, which is the

intersection and interaction of a genetic predisposition and stress and the release of glucocorticoids.

So some risk factors for schizophrenia, certainly family history.

Family history is a very significant contributory factor in offspring at some point developing

full-blown schizophrenia.

Marijuana use in adolescence has been linked to a first break psychosis. And I have seen this several times in my office doing a neuropsychievel.

And, you know, prior to marijuana being legal in the United States and various states,

we would generally ask about substance use.

My wife, I'm sure, could attest this as well, had to specifically ask for marijuana,

not just drugs or alcohol because, you know, well,

it's legal so we don't consider it a drug. Well, yeah, so is alcohol. Both are mind-altering agents.

But I really try to warn kids' adolescents, if they're smoking marijuana, especially if they have a family history,

...