Weed + Anxiety + Medication

Hello guys. I am a 22 year old girl with social & general anxiety, bpd, and depression. I started smoking weed recreationally when i was around 16. I was on medication, but found that most of the time I had a good high. I was carefree and laughing nonstop.
I stopped smoking for a bit and when I started again, I was probably on different medications, but for the same thing-- just normal anti depressants. I've always noticed that I get significantly higher than the people I smoke with. It makes me a bit self conscious but I figured it wasn't anything serious aside from maybe a bit of an annoyance to the people who chose to smoke with me. I honestly never even considered it could be my medications mixing until I was about 18 and took one hit from a bowl and got so high that I was hallucinating. My friend that was with me at the time didn't express any concern and actually seemed quite annoyed with how panicked I was. I ended up just laying there twitching and afraid until I fell asleep.
I wasn't sure why it happened but it scared the crap out of me, so I did some research, chalked it up to the weed not mixing well with my medications, and I didn't smoke for a while after that.
I've hallucinated 2 other times after smoking and was terrified but at least I knew what to do when I came across that situation.
In the past year or so I have been smoking weed often, usually multiple times a week. I am still on antidepressants and benzos. I still find that I get higher than the people I smoke with. When I am high, I like to be alone or with my boyfriend. If I'm around people, I get extremely anxious and paranoid and worry that I might start hallucinating or something. I also get extremely nervous that everyone around me thinks I'm high, or even if they KNOW I'm high, that they'll think I'm acting too weird.
Even after my high dissipates, lately, like in the past few weeks I've noticed pretty significant paranoia, disassociation, and just a general weird, uneasy feeling. Despite all of this, I don't really want to stop smoking weed because, when the circumstances are right, I do have a really good high. It makes everything more enjoyable (especially sex lol), but ONLY if I'm alone, or with my boyfriend, who is pretty much the only person I would allow to see me high anymore.
Is this normal? Has this ever happened to anyone else? If so, could you describe what happened, I'm really curious about this. I'm wondering should I just stop smoking altogether? If I don't, could anything serious happen because of the medications not interacting well with the weed? Could I go insane or something?
Also wondering if it could be beneficial to come off my medications and smoke weed medically? Would the weed actually be helpful for my anxiety if I were to go off my medication? I don't want to be stupid and go off my medication, but it really isn't working for me. I'm not sure what to do. It's so confusing to me that weed actually helps some people with their anxiety when it makes me so paranoid.

*****************Also, I have only smoked medical marijuana in the past year and have hallucinated once during that time. I also wasn't sure which board to post this in, so I'm sorry is it doesn't belong here!! >.<

Thanks for your help guys. <3

Hmmmm, so my experience: When I started smoking weed, I really enjoyed it. I was a lightweight and definitely had hallucinations -- I think it's possible that the weed hit me so hard *because* I had anxiety, so I was very attuned to what my body was feeling so I paid much closer attention to the differences in my body than other people. Or maybe I'm just a lightweight I wasn't taking any medications at this time, so it's just definitely the way I am naturally.

I kept smoking, occasionally hallucinating but usually not, and always getting much higher than everyone else. However, I started having panic attacks more and more often (incredibly anxious during and afterwards to the point where I'd feel sick) and I think they got worse because I had more and more bad experiences of being high built up.

One day (maybe 9 months after I started smoking weed), I got high with my boyfriend (nothing different then usual), and he drove us to get fast food. And I got SICK. I was disassociating and had severe nausea and I thought I was going to die. I made him park the car because I was so afraid that if it moved, I'd get so sick that I'd actually die. We sat in the parking lot for four hours (I kept waiting for the high to wear off so I could calm down, but the feeling never lessened or went away) until I finally told him to take me home. When I got home, I couldn't sit up in bed for a week straight -- each time I did, I thought the nausea was too bad and I thought I'd die. I was disassociating and I felt like I couldn't see anything and nothing was real. I had to always have an apple and glass of water on my bedstand because I was convinced that if that happened to me again and I didn't have an apple or water, I'd die. My mom took me to every Urgent Care and the doctors kept telling me they had no idea what was wrong with me -- we thought it was something physical.

Turns out the weed had triggered a SEVERE panic attack, which in turn triggered anxiety, severe OCD, and agoraphobia. I didn't leave my house for two months because I was so afraid that I'd have another attack and be isolated and not be able to get to a place where I could save myself from being sick like that again and dying. The disassociation was constant for those two months. For the following six months or so, I was physically able to go outside, but I still got nausea and dizziness and general panic/anxiety (so still agoraphobia) and I would have periods where disassociation would roll over me. It was terrifying. I wasn't able to ride in cars because I had severe panic attacks and disassociation for over two years, and I stopped being able to eat food because I was so afraid that it could have LSD or cannabis in it (getting high again was my worst fear and I was convinced I'd die if I had a second experience like that). I'm finally, three years later, somewhat close to as stable as where I used to be, but I feel like I lost a couple years of my life in that breakdown.

I really don't think your reaction is because of your medication. Over the span of eight months, my body's reaction to weed morphed significantly, and I think it's just part of the chemicals in your body changing in your teens and twenties. My best friend, who has anxiety, OCD, and bipolar disorder, is on medications and uses weed medically. It's been incredibly helpful to her and none of my friends on medications have found a negative correspondence between weed and meds.

Everyone's bodies are different and some people are helped by weed, but it's not abnormal to have paranoid and anxious reactions to weed. Recently, a few of my other friends, who have been smoking for years and didn't have much anxiety before have both gone to the ER for panic attacks that ended up turning into anxiety disorders. Weed can do that to people! It's really such a varied response. Weed can definitely be fun, but if you're already having paranoid reactions to it, I would say that's likely how your body processes weed and you shouldn't use it as your primary medication, because there's a chance it won't have anti-anxiety effects.

So to answer your questions: what you experience when you get high is normal. My experience, I think, is a pretty worst case scenario, but it IS something that happens. (My dad worked in a psychiatric hospital in the 80's and a lot of the people he saw had schizophrenia induced by cannabis & LSD overusage in the 60's). I'd say that if weed so far hasn't been very helpful for your anxiety, I wouldn't use it as a primary medication -- I'd suggest finding an anxiety medication that works well for you and then choosing to smoke weed or not on top of that. In my own experience, I wish I had stopped smoking when I first noticed the panic attacks and disassociation, but so it goes. I don't think you could go insane from the medications interacting with weed, but weed by itself, especially combined with a predisposition for mental disorders CAN have negative physical and mental effects. (I'm still salty that it helps so many people and not me). Continue to smoke weed if you'd like -- it can be fun and it could be a large part of your lifestyle -- but make sure to seek other help for your anxiety and be aware that it can affect you negatively!

You sound a bit like the constant battle between my parents and me over weed in one person. haha, a real conflicting answer here, because, I really support weed smoking, I do it daily myself, and have been for over 6 years. Now I was on antidepressants and stimulants for 4 years and I smoked Weed regularly for maybe 2 of those years in total and went mad, got sectioned and switched to meds for bipolar disorder along with a new diagnosis. the new meds do help, and I now know that I was Bipolar, and that the antidepressants and stimulants were keeping me in a hypomanic state, and I literally always felt buzzed/anxious or on edge. Weed also does this, medical or otherwise. Weed can increase or decrease anxiety, it's a bit of a stimulant and depressant, and hallucinogen, so yes all the effects you are feeling are normal. Since I came off the antidepressants, and only take stimulants recreationally or at raves, I haven't "gone mad", and I have been smoking weed every day though, so this proves to me that the combination of weed and meds, or just the meds on their own were causing an increase in my anxiety, which is understandable as the antidepressants have a mania-inducing/stimulating effect on bipolar patients and stimulants are stimulants, and weeds a bit of one so, self explanitory. all you need to do now is ask yourself do you want to continue taking it, is it helping you enough to keep on taking the risk getting a hold of, and smoking , ? at least you know you wont die or anything on it!

Any type of drug, especially a hallucinogen, has a high possibility of causing a bad trip when you have an anxiety disorder. Marijuana can in fact cause long term side effects such as dissociation and paranoia, especially if you're already mentally ill.

I use to smoke too and one day, I don't know if it's because of the type of weed or if I wasn't in a good mood or something, I had the worst trip ever. I hallucinated, was paranoid and everything. Every time I tried to smoke after that the same thing would happen so I stoped. Ever since that experience I've developed derealization. This was over 3 years ago btw.

*mod edit*