“Sleepy Chicken” was a potentially dangerous TikTok trend that took the general population by storm, and even now, it is unclear whether its originator was making a parody or not.
Sleepy Chicken is what it sounds like — preparing a sleep-inducing chicken. This is achieved by cooking the chicken in NyQuil. Parody or otherwise, simply the act of doing this once created severe risks for the person filming.
Before going into why this is obviously dangerous, people did have reasons for attempting such a feat. According to Poison Control, the intended “benefits” of Sleepy Chicken are curing cold or flu symptoms. This trend arose during Covid-19, possibly raising interest in creative new cures for Covid symptoms. No scientific claims can back up the idea of Sleepy Chicken, however, according to Forbes.
Even if this trend was scientifically supported, the risks outweigh the benefits — not only can boiling NyQuil change the chemical properties of the medicine for the worse and potentially create poison, but also inhaling medicinal fumes can be dangerous for the lungs, according to Healthline. Poison Control discussed the dangerous chemical components and their effects, noting how the high concentration of NyQuil was dangerous in itself, as often the entire bottle was used to cook the chicken.
So far the trend has led to the hospitalization of three teenagers and the death of one teenager, according to WattPoultry.
As the trend was on the rise, the federal Food and Drug Administration had to issue a warning statement about these dangers and raise awareness. However, the FDA received some backlash for issuing that statement — after all, the warning spiked double, if not triple, the original interest in the trend. The number of times the trend was searched before the warning was below 10, but the week after, that number had risen to thousands, according to Fox News. And because of this, TikTok took the initiative to ban the challenge altogether.
Some sources, such as Mashable, believe that this was not a real trend. Sleepy Chicken was hypothetically a 4-Chan (another social media platform) joke many years before this. But no matter how the trend was started and whether or not it was a joke, Sleepy Chicken was undoubtedly a “trend” — one that has a body count. Even if this was a stunt for social media, the repercussions are immense.
Sleepy Chicken is but another example, just like its Tide Pod predecessor, of irresponsible posting. TikTok is an app with users of all ages, from toddlers to elders (even though toddlers should not be there). Children and young teenagers can be exposed to dangers like this and be gullible enough to believe the hype.
And although questioning things you watch online is essential, posting something like Sleepy Chicken without a warning that it is a parody — if it indeed was — is irresponsible.
