Persistent hiccups are funny right up until they are not. In the past 48 hours, they have disrupted sleep, eating, and speech, and in psychiatric inpatients they can be severe enough to force a medication change in someone who badly needs the medication.
Aripiprazole, one of the most widely prescribed antipsychotics in the United States, has a small but consistent literature linking it to exactly that. And the emerging explanation is counterintuitive: the problem may be that the dose is too low, not too high.
