Hallucination may be due to excessive coffee intake (page 3 )

The association between caffeine intake and hallucination-proneness in these students, Dr. Charles Fernyhough, a co-author of the study, said may mean that those students who were more prone to hallucinations used caffeine to help cope with their experiences.

Dr. Victor Lasebikan, a chief consultant psychiatrist, University college hospital (UCH), Ibadan. Describing caffeine as the most widely used brain altering substance, declared that it was known to produce adverse effects such as nervousness, irritability, anxiety, headaches and heart palpitations in its consumers.

While the use of coffee may not directly lead to hallucination, he said the fact that its use may lead to sleep deprivation may be the reason for the hallucination.

“When someone is deprived of sleep for a day or two, there may not be any serious problem, but when sleep deprivation lasts for above a week, one of the earliest adverse effects would be tiredness and irritability. In animals, things like hair loss and hallucination had been noticed.

“Basically, there are different types of coffee-decaffeinated, caffeinated and so on. The concentration of coffee is also dependent on its source. For instance, in Asian countries, you have coffee with very high caffeine content. However, the more concentrated the coffee one takes, the more the chances of it leading to hallucination.”

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