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The caffeine defence

A man in the US who killed his wife is claiming caffeine insanity as a defence:

A Kentucky man accused of strangling his wife is poised to claim excessive caffeine from sodas, energy drinks and diet pills left him so mentally unstable he couldn’t have knowingly killed her, his lawyer has notified a court.

Crazy as it may seem, this defence has apparently worked at least once before. Because, after all, it is America, the land where personal responsibility is a dirty word and where everything is somebody else’s fault.

But this was the kicker in the article:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — published by the American Psychiatric Association showing standard criteria for the classification of mental disorders — defines overdose as more than 300 mg. That’s about three cups of coffee.

Wow. I guess that means that everyone who works in the ad biz is crazy. Then again, we kind of already knew that.

{ 1 comment… add one }
  • Sigivald 09.21.10, 12:50 PM

    Just an indication that the DSM needs to be (at least partially) rewritten or scrapped.

    I’m not aware of any other drug where “overdose” is defined as a specific amount rather than by a set of reactions.

    (I suppose there could be some, but normally it’s an effect that defines overdose, and the effects always vary by person and by dose-to-mass ratio.

    Defining overdose as “300mg” strikes me as so fundamentally shoddy a mode of operation that the entire category is brought into disrepute.)

    (And the reactions for “caffeine intoxication” [which is, as far as I can tell, the category they’re speaking of] are not the same as what any reasonable person would call “overdose” in any other context.

    It’d be like the DSM calling being slightly drunk “alcohol overdose”.

    In every other context I’ve ever seen, an “overdose” has dangerous, possibly deadly effects.

    In this case, some jackass defined it as a harmless and basically normal effect.)

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