About This Site

At The Caffeinated Brain, the world’s leading scientific and medical experts address caffeine’s potential to induce symptoms of mental illness in healthy people.

According to the World Health Organization, 80% of the global population regularly ingests caffeine, while 25% are diagnosed with a mental disorder. Clinical studies indicate that there may be significant overlap between those figures, and that many people diagnosed as mentally ill are simply suffering from caffeinism. Caffeine also exacerbates the symptoms of people who are suffering from organic, non–caffeine-induced mental illness.

As a small, lipid-soluble molecule (like alcohol, nicotine, and certain antidepressants), caffeine is one of the few substances capable of penetrating the blood-brain barrier, which is critical to maintaining cerebral homeostasis. Once it has penetrated this barrier, it is capable of affecting its victims’ thoughts and behavior, sometimes to an alarming degree.

Because anosognosia (loss of self-awareness) is one of the first casualties of a toxic brain, caffeinism victims may not suspect that they are ill, or—if they do—that caffeine is at the root of their symptoms.

It is the purpose of this site to alert the public to the dangers of caffeine intake, and to urge the medical community to eliminate caffeine from patients’ diets before diagnosing them with psychological disorders including anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADD/ADHD, mania, depression, schizophrenia and dementia.

For more information about caffeine and caffeinism, please visit our FAQs.