Sandy: Hello and welcome to Psychology by Sandy. Do you like Starbucks, do you know that if you drink too much coffee a day you may have a mental disorder. Today we are going to be talking about caffeine-related mental disorders. Before we get started I just want to let you know again I am not making this up, I'm getting this at American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical manual for mental disorders and there are four different disorders associated with caffeine. The first is the 305.9 which is caffeine intoxication, the next is 292.89 which is caffeine-induced anxiety disorder, the next is 292.85 which is caffeine-induced sleep disorder and the last is 292.9 my favorite its caffeine-related disorder not otherwise specified.
Before I get stared on the mental disorder for caffeine consumption, I just want to go with some interesting facts about caffeine. The first one is caffeine and coffee come from the Arabic word kahve. Number two caffeine is the most commonly used psychoactive substance, what that means is caffeine is the most popular mind altering drug in the world. Number three, in North America 90% of adults that consumes some from of caffeine each and every day. Number four, the average American adult consumes about 26.7 gallons of caffeine each and every year, that's about 400 cups of coffee. Number five, global consumption of caffeine is estimated at a 120,000 times annually.
So where does caffeine come from? Caffeine is a naturally produced substance found in certain plants and the plants produce it as a defense mechanism against bugs. So if the bug bites into the plant that contains or produces caffeine that it's going to die. So, it's basically a naturally organic pesticide. Caffeine is used as a commercial pesticide to spray on crops. Now if you take this small little bug, give him a small amount of caffeine it's going to kill the bug they are going to die. However, if you take that same small amount of caffeine we give to a person its going to be more of a stimulant. However caffeine is still a poison, in fact if you just give a person ten grams of caffeine just like the bug they are going to die.
So literally 90% of Americans are consuming inorganic pesticide every single day. While I am on the topic of pesticides, nicotine is also a naturally growing pesticide. It's used as a commercial pesticide just like caffeine and recently the tobacco industry got into a lot of trouble by adding nicotine to the cigarettes and make them more addictive. Now the food industry is doing the exact same thing. They are adding caffeine to coffee or your soft drinks and that way they are making their products more addictive to us. You probably know that soft drinks such as Coca-Cola and Dr Pepper have caffeine in them.
Now originally, colored drinks were made, which naturally has a little bit of caffeine in them. Right now, the colored drinks only have about 5% of the caffeine, where did the other 95% of the caffeine come from, it came from the decaffeinated coffee they took the caffination and they put into your soft drink and why did they do that you may ask, probably did it because the caffeine is very addictive so they want you to purchase their products more and more so they can make some money.
Caffeine is an addictive drug and if you are addicted to caffeine and you don't get enough of it you are going to go through withdrawal symptoms. Now caffeine withdrawals not contained in the DSM, however they are planning on adding it to the next edition of the DSM. Now I do want to read you something from Roland Griffiths a PhD in Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins. Caffeine is the world's most commonly used stimulant and it's cheap and readily available so people can maintain their use of caffeine quite easily. The latest research demonstrates however that when people don't get their usual dose, they can suffer a range of withdrawal symptoms including headache, fatigue, difficulty concentrating. They may even feel like they have the flu with nausea and muscle pian.
Now here is the list of caffeine intoxication symptoms listed in the DSM. One restlessness, two nervousness, three excitement, four insomnia, five flushed face, six diuresis, may you have to poo a lot, seven gastrointestinal disturbance, eight muscle twitching, nine rambling flow of thought and speech, ten tachycardia or cardiac arrhythmia, basically your heart beats faster or irregular heart beat, eleven periods of inexhaustibility, twelve psychomotor agitation. Now one thing that stupid about the DSM is they list caffeine intoxication as a disorder, they list caffeine-induced anxiety disorder, caffeine-induced sleep disorder and they are bad to list caffeine withdrawal as a disorder.
However, they don't list caffeine addiction as a disorder and I guess they really don't want to do that because that means 90% of Americans are mentally ill. Here in America we have a lot of health issues such as insomnia, irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux, anxiety problems, hyperactivity, trouble concentrating or ADHD type symptoms and all of these problems are associated with caffeine. So if you have any of these caffeine is just going to make it worse. Now I don't think caffeine usage is a psychiatric problem otherwise 90% of Americans would have a mental illness.
However, I do think it may become a health issue and I do want to read you something from a study, it was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The researchers identified five clusters of common withdrawal symptoms. Headache, fatigue or drowsiness, depression irritability, difficulty concentrating and flu like symptoms of nausea, vomiting and muscle pain or stiffness. In experimental studies, 50% of people experienced headache and 13% had clinically significant distress or functional impairment. For example severe headache and other symptoms incompatible with working. Typically, symptoms occur 12 to 24 hours after stopping caffeine with peak intensity between one and two days and per duration of 2 to 9 days. In general, the incidents are severity of symptoms increased with increases in daily dose. But from doses as low as one hundred milligrams per day or about one small cup of coffee also produce symptoms.
So I want to leave you with another quote from the study that was done, have you ever met somebody who you know they have to have their first cup of coffee every morning before they could do anything, just want to read this, it says the satisfying feelings and perceived benefits that many coffee users experienced from their morning coffee appeared to be as simple negative effects of caffeine withdrawal after overnight.
So you may be having trouble waking up in the morning or you know you have to have that first cup before doing anything but you may be just experiencing what withdrawal symptoms from not enough caffeine. So that's it for this week's edition of Psychology by Sandy and next week's topic is going to be hypersexuality verses hyposexuality. Please leave comments or like greetings subscribe to videos and I will see you next week.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services