A New Jersey Teen Swallowed Benadryl to Hallucinate. Poison Center Calls From Teens Have Doubled This Year.

A New Jersey teenager swallowed a large dose of Benadryl this fall, chasing the hallucinations a social media trend promised. Within hours the teen was confused, disoriented, and slurring words badly enough that a parent called poison control. What started as a dare ended in a hospital bed.

The stunt has a name on TikTok: Benny tripping, sometimes called the Benadryl Challenge. Teens take several times the recommended dose of diphenhydramine, the sedating antihistamine in Benadryl, to trigger hallucinations instead of drowsiness. Diane Calello, executive and medical director of the New Jersey Poison Control Center at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, said her team handled this specific case. "What may look harmless on a screen can become a medical emergency in real life," she said.

The numbers behind the comeback

America's Poison Centers, the trade group for the country's regional poison hotlines, counted 10,068 calls involving diphenhydramine among 13 to 19 year olds in 2024. That climbed to 13,284 in 2025, a 32 percent jump. In just the first five months of 2026, call volume hit 6,179, more than double the same stretch of 2025.

Three children in Connecticut died from apparent diphenhydramine overdoses over a two-month stretch this year. State officials have not confirmed whether the deaths are connected to the online challenge, and Kenvue, the company that makes Benadryl, has pointed to that same uncertainty in its own public statements. What is not in dispute is the direction of the raw numbers.

Researchers mapped this pattern before it had this year's numbers attached to it

In August 2026, researchers at Rocky Mountain Poison and Drug Safety in Denver and Kaiser Permanente San Francisco published a retrospective analysis in the journal Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. The team, led by Jacob Altholz, compared online mentions of "benadryl challenge" and "benadryl trip" against the National Poison Data System's count of diphenhydramine cases. The underlying data was not new: it ran from July through December of 2020, the first documented wave of the trend.

The pattern held anyway. Spikes in online mentions were followed by a significant rise in adolescent poison center calls, with the strongest statistical link appearing about ten days after mentions peaked. Call volume stayed elevated for more than 25 days after that.

“Many families have Benadryl and other over-the-counter medicines at home and would never expect it to send a child to the hospital.”

The correlation the researchers found was real but modest on its own, a statistical relationship of 0.26 at its peak, the kind of signal useful for an early warning system rather than proof that one post causes one overdose. Still, six years and one pandemic later, the same mechanism that 2020 data described, teenagers seeing a dare online and poison centers getting calls about ten days after, is the same mechanism showing up again in 2026's numbers.

Why this one keeps fooling parents

Diphenhydramine is sold without a prescription and sits in most medicine cabinets for allergies and sleep. That is exactly why it works as a dare: nobody has to buy anything suspicious, ask an older sibling, or find a dealer. America's Poison Centers data shows the share of teen diphenhydramine cases tied to intentional misuse, as opposed to accidental exposure, rose to 13.2 percent in 2026, up from 7.3 percent in 2020.

The drug did not get more dangerous. More teens are taking it on purpose.

Public health reporting about viral self-harm trends carries its own paradox: naming the stunt is also how more people learn it exists. Calello's warning is aimed at parents, not at the platforms where the dare circulates, and it does not try to resolve that tension so much as work around it, by making sure the adults who stock the medicine cabinet know what they are looking at before the next call comes in.