117. Cannabis-Induced Psychosis: A Mother’s Story of Love and Loss - Tara Couture of Slowdown Farmstead
Medicine Stories
Amber M Hill
4.8 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 April 2025
⏱️ 93 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2021 Tara and her family got the knock on their door that every parent fears most. In the days that followed they discovered eighteen-year-old Mila’s journal and were able to piece together the shocking and devastating chain of events that led to her death.
Tara’s Instagram and Substack, Slowdown Farmstead, is followed and admired by tens of thousands of people. Tara and her husband raised their three daughters on their beautiful Canadian farm, lovingly tending to and butchering their own livestock in order to nourish their family and community. Deeply acquainted with the cycles of nature, Tara has a perspective on the interconnectedness of life and death that was the daily reality for our ancestors but eludes most modern people.
But that did not prepare her for what could happen when a drug that is now bred to be as strong as any pharmaceutical- and which is often misunderstood as being a benign herbal medicine- snuck its way into her daughter’s life at a vulnerable time and completely rewired her brain in a matter of months.
It is our hope that sharing Mila’s story will make more people aware of the increasingly common psychosis that is a side effect of the new high-THC strains of cannabis on the market, and especially of its dangers for the developing teenage brain.
Please read the articles linked below for more.
Tara's essay What Happened To Our Daughter- don't miss the dozens of resources about the risks of cannabis at the end
Patreon bonus conversation- What We Want Our Daughter To Know: women, restriction, chronic illness & more on Tara’s metabolic journey
Learn more about Tara’s book Radiance of the Ordinary
Slowdown Farmstead on Substack and Instagram
Cannabinoid Hyperemesis Syndrome
Take our fun quiz Which Healing Herb Matches Your Energy?
My website MythicMedicine.love
Mythic Medicine on Instagram
Medicine Stories Facebook group
Music by Mariee Siou (from her beautiful song Wild Eyes)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | We have such a sickness in this culture where we want to cut off the hard parts and just revel in the superficial gloss. |
| 0:15.1 | And it's such a, it's such a dastardly lie to tell people that they can live their lives that way because it cuts us off from everything that's genuine and everything that can like profoundly have meaning and touch us and shape us and evolve us. |
| 0:34.9 | Hi friends. Welcome back to the Medicine Stories podcast. I am your host, Amber Hill. Today's episode has been in the works for years. Like many of you, I'm sure I've been following Tara at Slowdown Farmstead on Instagram for many, many, many, |
| 0:57.2 | years. And once she moved over to Substack, I moved over as well. She's still on Instagram. |
| 1:05.7 | And about four years ago now, when I first heard that her youngest daughter had died at age 18, |
| 1:17.2 | I was just shocked. It was so surprising, so awful. And then as the story started to piece together, |
| 1:29.3 | and then once Tara really shared the story, |
| 1:32.3 | it was just a whole another level of disbelief |
| 1:38.3 | at what transpired and awe and respect for the way Tara held the story and her daughter's life, the life of their family, |
| 1:52.8 | Tara's husband and Mila's two older sisters as well. They've since added a grandchild, a granddaughter also. |
| 2:05.1 | And so I am honored to present to you this interview today in which Tara tells more of the story, tells the story as it can only |
| 2:20.0 | be told through speaking it instead of writing it. Thank you. Thank you for listening and thank you |
| 2:29.1 | so much, Tara, for trusting me and my listeners with Mila's story. |
| 2:37.8 | I have also been wanting to talk about what is related to this story, which is |
| 2:44.4 | cannabis-induced psychosis for years. |
| 2:48.6 | I've had quite a bit of conversations in my Instagram stories about this subject over the years. |
| 2:54.4 | I've, as I tell Tara in the interview, known three teenage girls to also experience psychosis from smoking weed. |
| 3:03.7 | And actually, I just remembered a fourth in high school. |
| 3:07.0 | One of my best friends had an episode on Halloween night after hitting a blunt, which she had done plenty of times before. |
| 3:15.3 | But, you know, it's a cumulative thing I've noticed. |
| 3:18.9 | And that's very much true in this story. |
| 3:22.5 | I would love you to check out the story I've linked below from |
... |
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