Sweetman has not responded to an email from Reason seeking attribution for the girl's death and the circumstances behind it. Schaeffer subsequently told Reason that he actually had no direct knowledge about the incident KFOR reported.įurthermore, in an email, Schaeffer said, "pon review of our records, have found no cases that appear to have been inspired by the 'Benadryl Challenge.'" That assumption, however, would be incorrect. One might read Sweetman's story and assume, then, that Schaeffer knew about what happened with Phillips and was doing his job informing the public. KFOR interviewed Scott Schaeffer, director of the Oklahoma Center for Poison and Drug Information, who explained to reporter Cassandra Sweetman how consuming large amounts of Benadryl can cause heart problems and seizures along with those hallucinations. KFOR's reporting, however, leaves out any attribution and does not provide any actual comments from her family about the girl's death. "This needs to stop taking our kids or putting them in the hospital," she wrote. The Facebook post apparently comes from her Great-Aunt Janette Sissy Leasure, who blamed the "Benadryl challenge." Sun and the New York Post identify the girl as Chloe Phillips, a sophomore at Blanchard High School, who died on August 21. The attribution for the cause of death comes from a Facebook post that has been subsequently deleted. The story has bounced around several media sites now, including Newsweek and the Daily Mail. On August 28, Oklahoma City news outlet KFOR reported that a 15-year-old girl actually died from overdosing on Benadryl, ostensibly because she "fell victim to what's been called the Benadryl Challenge on Tik Tok," according to KFOR's report. So TikTok acknowledged the videos existed and has removed them.įast forward to the end of August. The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and McClatchy News reached out to TikTok and were told that, yes, the company had removed content from the platform that was violating their community guidelines by encouraging people to take excessive amounts of Benadryl. One girl took 14 of them and needed medical treatment.
The hospital, Cook Children's Hospital at Fort Worth, posted on its blog that the teens got the idea from a TikTok video that told them they could get high and hallucinate if they took several Benadryl pills. Three teens in Texas in May sought medical treatment after overdosing on Benadryl. Similarly, the "Benadryl challenge" starts with something real. But the kind of national panic that led to involvement by fearmongering lawmakers was just completely over the top relative to the actual risks.
Remember the "Tide Pod challenge"? Some teens did genuinely post videos of themselves eating Tide Pods, and there was a temporary increase in calls to poison control for laundry detergent ingestion. Are teens really trying to convince other teens to take tons of allergy pills to get high?Īs with all of these social media panics that start bouncing around the web and local news networks, this story has kernels of truth to it while suggesting a trend that is probably exaggerated. A teen in Oklahoma City reportedly died in August of an overdose of Benadryl pills, and this tragedy is fueling yet another social media "challenge" panic.
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