Caffeine Withdrawal Disorder

Now, Religion in the News: a report and comment on religious trends and events being covered by the media. This week’s item is from Columbia News Service, March 29, 2005 with the headline, “Shrinks Take Coffee-Drinking Seriously: Caffeine withdrawal should be classified as an illness, some psychiatrists say.

Ann Mayo wakes up in the morning and immediately turns on her coffeemaker. Her black cup of coffee is ready by the time she gets out of the shower. She gets dressed and fills her travel mug with a second cup. She refills again as soon as she gets to work. By the end of the day, Mayo has had ten cups. When Mayo sleeps in on the weekends, she wakes up with a headache, but that’s easily remedied with a cup of coffee. ‘It’s almost like being a junkie,’ Mayo said. ‘You want your caffeine.’

“While Mayo, a computer specialist at a hotel jokes about her caffeine cravings, Roland Griffiths, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, believes it’s a real problem. Griffiths is recommending that caffeine withdrawal be recognized within the psychiatric community. He is lobbying to have it included in the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Known as the DSM, the manual is publish by the American Psychiatric Association and is used by mental health professionals to help identify conditions and treat patients. It is also used by insurance companies to decide whether to pay the medical bills.

‘Physicians and health care providers need to be aware that caffeine can produce withdrawal symptoms, and in some cases cause significant distress or functional impairment,’ Griffiths said. ‘Also,’ he added, ‘caffeine is the most widely used mood-altering drug in the world, and caffeine consumers need to know what really happens when they stop taking it.’ Coffee is an 18 billion-dollar-a-year industry. Eight out of ten adult Americans drink coffee, averaging 3.4 cups a day. Drinks like Red Bull and caffeinated water are also increasing in popularity.

‘If all sources of caffeine disappeared tomorrow, we would probably have a revolt,’ said Suzette Evans, a professor in the psychiatry department at Columbia University, who has worked with Griffiths and agrees that caffeine withdrawal should be in the DSM. ‘No one sees it as an issue, though, because caffeine is readily available and it’s socially sanctioned.’”

Tom: Dave, I don’t know if we can be very objective about this. You don’t drink coffee, I don’t drink coffee; we don’t drink soda. People may accuse us of leaning to the Latter Day Saints, but that’s not…

Dave: No…

Tom: …the case either.

Dave: Being legalistic.

Tom: Yeah.

Dave: No, but we’re not, because there’s nothing in the Bible against it.

Tom: [laughing] Right. However, the issue of the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders – I’ll give our listeners a little background in that…

Dave: Now, Tom, you’re going to take off on these guys again?

Tom: Well, look, Dave, it’s a…

Dave: Well, just the facts.

Tom: …it’s a book that’s growing, that’s all I want to do.

Dave: [laughing] Right, it is growing.

Tom: [laughs] Right. In 1952, there were 106 so-called “mental disorders” listed.

Dave: Now, Tom, don’t forget, when I was a boy, I can remember Sunday afternoon, we would go and visit a mental institution. It was called an insane asylum in those days. They only had two categories: you were either crazy, or you were sane. It’s gotten worse and worse.

Tom: And I’m afraid it’s covering everything and anything – not that the psychology industry has anything to gain by this, Dave. I wouldn’t be so bold as to imply that.

Dave: Tom, may I say it again? I know I repeat myself. When you get as old as I am, your memory fails. But I do remember that I said this – I think it’s worth saying again: you remember the first psychiatric problem for which they had a name? It was called “drapetomania,” a very serious psychiatric problem. It was cured by the Civil War – remember? The symptoms of drapetomania were an overwhelming urge to escape the plantation. [laughs] That was a mental disorder! They were serious about it! Tom, I don’t have too much confidence in this, because they vote on it!

Tom: But, Dave, you’d think with the numbers here… Again, 1952: 106 mental disorders. The list grew to 182 in 1968, then to 265 in 1980, 292 in 1987, and the latest count – this is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; it’s Edition 4, and they have 374 mental disorders. Now they want to add the symptoms created by caffeine to this list.

Dave: Tom, they desperately want psychology to be a science. Now, they’re just pulling the rug out from under themselves! You don’t vote on a science. You know, Einstein comes up with E=mc², and the guys say, “Well, I think we ought to vote on that. What do you think? How do you feel about two plus two is four?” You don’t vote on science, okay? Now, you can go back and check your figures. You can go back and check your experiment, but you don’t vote on it. It either is or it isn’t, okay?

Now, the problem in trying to make a science out of psychology is the subject of your experiment is hopping about capriciously with a free will. You don’t know what he’s going to do next, and if you’re going to make a science out of human behavior, you have destroyed humankind, because they are now machines and not free will agents who can make a valid, moral choice. Morals are out.

Tom: But, Dave, excuse me for being a little bit more cynical here, but as this article says, “The DSM manual published by the American Psychiatric Association is used by mental health professionals to help identify conditions and treat patients. It is also used by insurance companies to decide whether to pay the medical bills.” That may have a lot to do with this, Dave.

Dave: Tom…

Tom: How many coffee drinkers are there?

Dave: Tom, it’s pitiful. I’ll just be blunt. It is pitiful. Where do you go to find out whether something really is a mental disorder? Oh, you go to the DSM! But how do they decide in the DSM? It could have been two or three thousand psychiatrists who voted against it as being a mental disorder, but there were more, a few more, who voted for it, and now this becomes the basis of a scientific diagnosis, and you get paid from the insurance company. Tom, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. And this is why many psychiatrists, psychologists – not Christians – are writing to expose their own profession.

Tom: Dave, we’ve mentioned in past programs that the homosexual lobbyists actually were effective in getting homosexuality removed from the DSM. Well, I would think at some point the insurance companies are going to say, “No, we’re going to lobby against this caffeine mental disorder, because it’s going to cost us big bucks!”

Dave: Right, I would think so.