Just ignore the voices.

Last night I was on the phone with BestFriend and she said to me that my last few posts had been so reflective. Not that that was a bad thing. So I thought I would write something a little more tongue-and-cheek. This one is for BestFriend.

This past week I read about a preliminary study in the Journal of Personality and Individual Differences (JPID) that examined the connection between the propensity to hallucinate and caffeine. This seemed like a timely topic since this past week also marks the 6 month anniversary of me having sworn off caffeine, mainly in the form of coffee and tea.

Previous studies have found that stress plays a role in the development of psychotic hallucinations. Psychotic hallucinations are first-rank symptoms of disorders like schizophrenia. And not to make light mental disorders, but my experience of graduate also ranked high in fostering psychotic hallucinations.

Work has shown that the hormone cortisol plays a role in translating the experience of stress into the biology of psychosis. In this issue of JPID, Jones and Fernyhough (2008) hypothesized that factors causing individual differences in cortisol response should explain why some individuals are more prone to hallucinations or persecutory ideation. One such factor is caffeine intake.

In a self-report questionnaire taken by 219 co-eds (194 of these were women), which if you are interested in, you can take here, the researchers found when stress level was controlled that caffeine intake per kg was postively correlated to an individual's vulnerability to hallucinations.

I am totally aware that correlation is not causation. But I think there might be something to the whole caffeine-induced hallucination. As a grad student I may not have thought my eyes were made out of grapes, but I did sometimes hear voices. And I drank a lot of coffee.

Around my oral comprehensive, I was drinking up to seven cups a day. I would often think that my officemate Ms.Smiley had said something when in reality she hadn't. It became this routine. I would turn around and ask her, "What did you say?" and she would respond with, "Just ignore the voices."

During that seven-cups-a-day phase, I was teaching a tutorial and I was at the board describing how to answer a problem. I thought someone in the class had asked a question. So I turned around and asked the class, "Who had a question?"

You know undergrads, they're so shy. I didn't want the person not to have a voice, so I said, "Okay guys, it's really okay to ask questions, in fact this is how you learn. "

Nothing. I looked out and all I saw were these anxious looking students.

Well, I thought maybe I had made a mistake and someone caught it. So I turned to them and said, "Maybe someone has caught a mistake I have made. That's great because you know, I'm not perfect. So if you've found one it's okay to tell me."

Still nothing.

A little exasperated, I asked the class again, "So no one said anything?" Finally, a meek undergrad in the front row, responded with, "No one said anything."

"Hmmm. I guess my officemate was right, I should just ignore the voices." with that I turned back to the board and continued with the problem.

That incident made me realize that it was time to cut back on the java.

But let's get back to the study. Although they found that high caffeine intake (I mean do people really drink kg of coffee?) may increase your vulnerability to hallucinations, it doesn't cause persecutory ideation (PI). This is essentially the delusion that others have it in for you. Maybe caffeine doesn't induce PI (that abbreviation is no coincidence), but grad school certainly does.

I looked at the 10 items on the Persecutory Ideation Questionnaire (PIQ) (McKay et al. 2006) that test your vulnerability to PI.

1. I sometimes feel as if there is a conspiracy against me.
2. I feel at times that I am deliberately ill-treated by others.
3. I often feel that others have it in for me.
4. People mean to do and say things to annoy me.
5. I sometimes feel that people are plotting against me.
6. I sometimes feel that people are laughing at me behind
my back.
7. Some people try to steal my ideas and take credit for them.
8. I sometimes feel that I am being persecuted in some way.
9. I often pick up hidden threats or put-downs from what
people say or do.
10. Some people harass me persistently.

I know that as a grad student, I certainly felt that 2, 3, 4,6,8, 9 and 10 were true. According to their criteria, I was borderline paranoid. But you know what, that's okay because I'm in good company. Apparently, 10-15% of the population experience paranoid thoughts and persecutory delusions (Freeman 2006). I think most of these people end up in grad school.

Now, I don't touch caffeinated drinks - just the herbal stuff. I don't hear voices anymore, but I think that caffeine is like acid. It stays in your body and occasionally rears its ugly head. Like the other day I was frying an egg and I swear that it started to jiggle and make sounds like a chicken. Thank god for granola.