SSRIs are a huge help to me. I'm one of the lucky (?) ones.

For those curious about what a brain zap is, it's like you're going about your normal business, then you feel a jolt like you're surprised, but only in your head. Then it's difficult to remember what you were thinking about prior to the zap. When it happened to me last, I stopped walking and couldn't resume my inner monologue/ train of thought. I just started walking and let another one conjure itself up.

It's been decades since I've had one, Wellbutrin is much better.

Thats exactly the problem I'm having!

Working with my GP to titrate off Sertraline (Zoloft) at the moment.

My GP, like many others, wasnt really aware of the issues with getting off the drugs!

I describe the brain zaps as like a wave of electricity.

Like a Sci-Fi pulsing wave. As if i've got some sort of giant capacitor discharging in my brain.

The sort of thing from a 50s Sci-Fi movie thats a tower of electricity, glowing and pulsing and radiating an electrical light show!

Exactly the sort of thing that might re-animate Frankenstein!

It's not painful as such, but it's debilitating and causes you to literally pause and make a sharp intake of breath.

I hate being on the bloody things. Wish I'd never started them. CBT is much more effective in the long term, for me. YMMV.

I find SSRIs kill my motivation and creativity.

I'd really suggest anyone think twice before assuming these pills, that GPs dish out like candy, are an easy and consequence free solution!

I think there’s more to it than just messing with serotonin.

There’s something about Sertraline (Zoloft) that seems to make it quite reliable at causing brain zaps. 3 people I’ve known who stopped Sertraline all experienced brain zaps. 1 of those people also talked about stopping Prozac (cold turkey) and Lexapro (4wk taper) and did not have the zaps, but a 4-month taper of Sertraline was not enough to avoid them.

In fact in the article they recommend switching to Prozac and then tapering that, as a way to avoid the zaps.

> Someone I know took about 4g of MDMA over a 4-day period

I am all for freedom of drugs and people experiencing one of the most beautiful states of mind one can achieve, but 4g MDMA over 4 days is literally in the attempted brain-damage territory.

> sleep paralysis with demons in the room (feeling like you are laying in bed with a demon coming towards you but you physically cannot move)

This gave me literal chills when I read it because this exact thing happened to me for the same reason as your acquaintance (but far, far lower doses). I was prone to getting sleep paralysis anyways, but abusing MDMA resulted in the most terrifying experience of my life two nights in a row. Your description was spot on.. I felt the covers on my bed being pulled off of me by some demonic presence the first night, and the second night the same thing happened but that time I was lifted out of my bed and slowly dragged away. Felt like I was awake and perfectly conscious the entire time and I literally frozen with fear to the point where I couldn't speak. I stayed up the entire night after that for fear of it happening again. I also got terrible brain zaps for weeks afterwards, too.

i used to get zaps when my body tried to feel good on normal occasions after 'fucking with my seratonin levels'. I remember i used to get them when I was reading something i found clever or funny, chugging cold water, biking etc.

I think some other posters already commented, but I wouldn't put too much stock in the MDMA being MDMA -- I use MDMA pretty frequently and never had brain zaps from it, but when I was on sertraline and quit without tapering off, I definitely had the brain zaps being described, and I still get them almost 15 years after discontinuing sertraline.

MDMA depending on where you are and what you got can be quite a few things, it's why test kits are important. It's not to say that MDMA cannot cause brain zaps, but given that we know that MDMA is usually cut with a lot of filler/other drugs without the user knowing, I would acknowledge it could do it, but would always have doubt it was actually the MDMA due to the knowledge that whatever the users who experienced brain zaps took likely had many other drugs/substances in it. In the current political climate surrounding drugs, I'm not even sure how a study could effectively be done correctly.

Which is unfortunate because brain zaps really suck and withdrawal from SSRIs is pretty rough. I easily get into addictive substances, and have successfully stopped use on quite a few pretty heavy things, and they didn't come close to the withdrawals from SSRIs for me. This is personal experience of course, and likely many other factors in my life helped with my stopping some recreational drugs without hugely adverse affects, but SSRIs just nothing helped and at the time (2010-2015), I really couldn't find any reliable information online or from doctors about the brain zaps.

I'm glad to read this article because it's great to see that there is attention to this and more focus on the side effects of SSRIs. SSRIs definitely can help many people, but it is pretty intense drug and the withdrawal is nasty for quite a few people.

I've gotten them from taking SNRIs, so I wonder if norepinephrine is involved somehow, or maybe SNRIs are not actually that selective.

> Someone I know took about 4g of MDMA over a 4-day period

For anyone reading who's unfamiliar, this is a ridiculous dose of MDMA. A normal recreational dose would be 0.1g-0.2g once every few months. (I have no idea whether this dose is safe or not, just saying it's a common one for people to take.)

A bad thing about MDMA is that you become tolerant to it very quickly, so people who do it too regularly need to take more and more over time to feel the effects. That's probably what happened to the parent comment's friend.

> sleep paralysis with demons in the room

I've heard of people experiencing similar things when practicing techniques for Lucid Dreaming or Astral Projection.

> Someone I know took about 4g of MDMA over a 4-day period

As an aside, there are several dozen drugs that street dealers sell as “MDMA” with wildly variable dose-response curves. 4 grams of MDMA sounds insane but it is absolutely feasible that a person could end up having to take that much of some other cathinone/MDxx drug for a comparable experience

Do these occur without the use of SSRI's? e.g. in ADHD patients? What if _someone I know_ has had these brain zaps extremely infrequently but definitely noticed them in the past?

Oh wow, I had a very similar experience with brain zaps after a slightly lower dose over 4 days. They were mostly non intrusive and around the nape of my head. I hope they’re not a signal of damage.

80% of everything is crap, including psychiatrists, plus if you take away SSRIs that's a huge chunk of their business. Upton Sinclair and all that.

If anyone has had their teeth whitened and felt the zaps in their teeth… it’s like that but in your brain.

Fucking sucked.

> Physicians were initially unaware or dismissive of brain zaps due to limited information and a focus on downplaying the addictive nature of antidepressants.

Seems like another example of: "Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial" https://www.deadlymedicines.dk/deadly-psychiatry-and-organis... "Deadly Psychiatry and Organised Denial explains in evidence-based detail why the way we currently use psychiatric drugs does far more harm than good. Professor, Doctor of Medical Science, Peter C. Gøtzsche documents that psychiatric drugs kill more than half a million people every year among those aged 65 and above in the United States and Europe. This makes psychiatric drugs the third leading cause of death, after heart disease and cancer. Gøtzsche explains that we could reduce our current usage of psychotropic drugs by 98% and at the same time improve patients’ mental and physical health and survival. It can be difficult, however, to come off the drugs, as many people become dependent on them. As the withdrawal symptoms can be severe, long-lasting and even dangerous, slow tapering is usually necessary. In his book, Gøtzsche debunks the many myths that leading psychiatrists – very often on drug industry payroll – have created and nurtured over decades in order to conceal the fact that biological psychiatry has generally been a failure. Biological psychiatry sees drugs as the “solution” for virtually all problems, in marked contrast to the patients’ views. Most patients don’t respond to the drugs they receive but, unfortunately, the psychiatrists’ frustrations over the lack of progress often lead to more diagnoses, more drugs and higher doses, harming the patients further."

Other alternatives for health and wellness I have collected: https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations...

One example from there: "The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs" by Stephen S. Ilardi

From the Amazon book blurb: "In the past decade, depression rates have skyrocketed, and one in four Americans suffer from major depression at some point in their lives. Where have we gone wrong? Dr. Stephen Ilardi sheds light on our current predicament and reminds us that our bodies were never designed for the sleep-deprived, poorly nourished, frenzied pace of twenty-first century life. Inspired by the extraordinary resilience of aboriginal groups like the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, Dr. Ilardi prescribes an easy-to-follow, clinically proven program that harks back to what our bodies were originally made for and what they continue to need with these six components:

  * Brain Food [supplement with Omega 3s; remember your brain is mostly fat]
  * Don't Think, Do [avoid excessive rumination by doing things]
  * Antidepressant Exercise [aerobic exercise is medicine]
  * Let There Be Light [get natural sunlight and supplement as needed with vitamin D3]
  * Get Connected [engage in face-to-face social activities regularly]
  * Habits of Healthy Sleep [get enough sleep by following basic guidelines]

TL;DR as Ilardi says: "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"

That said, if you are on prescription psychotropic meds already, do not stop taking them or change doses without some medically-approved plan for getting off them. Peter Gøtzsche wrote an entire book about that: "Mental Health Survival Kit and Withdrawal from Psychiatric Drugs: A User's Guide" https://www.amazon.com/Mental-Health-Survival-Withdrawal-Psy... "This book can help people with mental health issues to survive and return to a normal life. Citizens believe, and the science shows, that medications for depression and psychosis and admission to a psychiatric ward are more often harmful than beneficial. Yet most patients take psychiatric drugs for years. Doctors have made hundreds of millions of patients dependent on psychiatric drugs without knowing how to help them taper off the drugs safely, which can be very difficult. The book explains in detail how harmful psychiatric drugs are and gives detailed advice about how to come off them. You will learn: ... that psychiatric drugs should never be stopped abruptly because withdrawal reactions can be dangerous..."