Dangerous TikTok Challenge Still Active, Five Years Later

FRIDAY, Sept. 26, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Teenagers and young adults are still harming themselves as part of a social media challenge that’s now five years old.

The Benadryl Challenge, which started in 2020 on TikTok, has spread to other social media platforms and is still being attempted by foolhardy young folks, researchers will report Sunday at an American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in Denver.

The challenge dares viewers to take heavy doses of over-the-counter allergy medicine containing the drug diphenhydramine. They must fight off the drowsiness caused by the meds to experience intoxication and hallucinations.

However, overdoses of diphenhydramine also can cause dangerous heart rhythm abnormalities, seizures, coma and even death, researchers warn.

Through 2024, cases of diphenhydramine overdoses continued to rise and fall, as the Benadryl Challenge cycles through social media, researchers said.

“The fact that we continue to see spikes in harmful diphenhydramine use years after the challenge first went viral shows just how powerful and dangerous social media trends can be,” researcher Dr. Noelia Swymeler, a pediatric resident physician at the University of Oklahoma at Tulsa School of Community Medicine, said in a news release.

Earlier this month, a South Carolina teen nearly overdosed on Benadryl in an attempt to get high, according to WMBF News. The girl suffered hallucinations and her heart rate leaped to nearly 200 beats per minute.

The 13-year-old told doctors that a friend told her she could get high if she took enough Benadryl, according to her mother.

“I saw all of the different TikToks she had been looking at,” the anonymous mother told WMBF. “They were all kids doing Benadryl, and it just kind of blew my mind. I thought that was a safe medication. Not something a teenager would get into.”

For the study, researchers tracked reports to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Adverse Event Reporting System for diphenhydramine between 2013 through 2024. The team focused on reports involving children and young adults between 10 and 25 years of age.

May 2020 marked the challenge’s emergence with the first related hospitalization, researchers said.

Later that year, the FDA issued a warning about the Benadryl Challenge, urging parents and caregivers to lock away diphenhydramine to prevent misuse by teenagers. 

Researchers found a total 413 reports, with 2020 and 2023 having the highest counts, 73 and 62.

Case reports spiked past predicted levels at odd intervals, including July 2020, December 2020, July 2021, February 2023, May 2023, January 2024 and June 2024, showing how such a challenge can resurface again and again in social media.

A 13-year-old Ohio boy died in April 2023 while participating in the challenge with some friends in his home, according to CNN. Jacob Stevens went into a coma after overdosing on Benadryl, and was on a ventilator for a week before he died.

“This research highlights the need for better education, stronger safeguards and continued awareness to prevent teens from being harmed by medications they can easily find in their own homes,” Swymeler said.

Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The Partnership To End Addiction has more on the Benadryl Challenge.

SOURCES: American Academy of Pediatrics, news release, Sept. 26, 2025; CNN, April 19, 2023; WMBF, Sept. 10, 2025

What This Means For You

Parents should lock away medications containing diphenhydramine and warn their children against dangerous social media trends.