Man ‘hears God’ while hallucinating on antibiotics

A case of pneumonia led one man to “hear God” after tripping
on antibiotics in a rare case of antibiomania, a state of psychosis
from taking the common remedy (https://bit.ly/3GqcVn6).
A recently published case study appearing in the journal BMC
Psychiatry reported symptoms of a 50-year-old man with
a bacterial infection of the respiratory illness, requiring
antibiotics to treat.
However, the man who had never before ingested an antibiotic
in his life soon discovered he is one of the few people in the
world who experience psychedelic hallucinations thanks to
conventional antibiotics.
The report described the man as having mood swings, feeling
irritable and beginning to believe he was dying and hearing
voices that were not there.
It was God, he claimed. The voice told the man that he was
selected by God for a “special mission,” report authors wrote.
Two days after beginning his antibiotics course, the man was
checked into an emergency psychiatric unit in Geneva, Austria,
where he was treated with anti-anxiety medication. He was
eventually put back on antibiotics for pneumonia, but his
psychosis returned.
“At midnight, he started hearing voices again, he felt persecuted
and anxious,” doctors said.
Researchers noted in the journal that the term antibiomania,
“referring to manic symptomatology induced by antibiotics,”
first was used in 2002, but the exact number of incidences
remains unknown.
Antibiomania is a “clinically rare phenomenon” considering
how often antibiotics are used globally, authors wrote.
LiveScience spoke to Pascal Sienaert, psychiatric lecturer at the
Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, which published
a review in 2017 of dozens of likely cases of antibiomania,
including those reported to drug monitoring programs for the
World Health Organization and the US Food and Drug
Administration.
“I have seen, in my own experience, at least three cases, one
with repeated episodes,” said Sienaert, who was not involved
in the current report. “My colleagues, they all have had some
cases. So if you add up these numbers worldwide . . . there’s
certainly an under-report of cases.”
The patient’s symptoms of psychosis related to antibiotics
cleared within a week of ceasing the drug, according to the
report.
Sienaert explained to LiveScience that the connection between
antibiotics and the nervous system is not yet clear to researchers,
but noted that some types are known to affect neurotransmitters
in the brain responsible for keeping neurons from going haywire.
“That might explain why, in these circumstances, mania arises.
By inhibiting an inhibitory neurotransmitter, that results in
excitatory function,” Sienaert said.