Life
If you've ever taken antidepressants or other kinds of psychiatric drugs, and have had to alter your dosage or attempt to come off them, you may be familiar with the phenomenon of "brain zaps." Also known as brain sparks, electrical shocks and a host of other colorful names, they're a recognized psychological symptom that feels as if the brain is filled, briefly, with electrical shocks or waves — a very bizarre, but normal, side effect of adjusting an antidepressant dose that reveals interesting things about how antidepressants work in your brain.
Brain zaps can be difficult to explain to others, and differ markedly between people: my own feel as if somebody is striking a spark just behind my tongue, while others report stronger or more all-encompassing feelings, from lightning strikes to "pop rocks" in the brain. They can also be found in some people with very severe anxiety, and in the brains of many people with adult ADHD. But current medical opinion holds that they're not anything to be worried about. Instead, they're a pretty remarkable phenomenon — and scientists investigating the peculiarities of antidepressant withdrawal syndrome in particular wonder if they might have something to do with the tie between sleep, stress, and brain function.
What Does Withdrawal Mean?
Many of us immediately associate the idea of withdrawal with addiction, so some may ask whether the experience of brain zaps while psychiatric drug levels change is a signal that you're addicted to those drugs.
The big behavioral signals of addiction, according to psychiatrists, are craving and relapse. While antidepressant withdrawal syndrome can be unpleasant and a bit weird, it seems that people taking antidepressants don't actually get addicted to them in the same way that humans can form addictions to other drugs. Psychiatrists Peter M. Haddad and Ian M. Anderson wrote in Advances In Psychiatric Treatment in 2007:
"There is no evidence that patients crave antidepressants once they have stopped them or feel compelled to return to taking antidepressants once any discontinuation symptoms, if they occur, have ceased. This difference in prognosis, or long-term course, to that of the syndrome of dependence seen with alcohol, opiates and stimulants seems easily understandable by patients."
Other kinds of withdrawal symptoms might actually be more concerning to people who are going off antidepressants — and, notably, many of us aren't warned of these risks when we begin taking them. A review of studies on SSRI withdrawal syndromes in 2015 found that, alongside shocks, people who'd discontinued their SSRIs had a small chance of experiencing "visual and auditory hallucinations," the inability to control their urine, and uncontrollable itching. Antidepressant withdrawal syndromes can also be missed by doctors because it can be mistaken as a symptom of the psychiatric illness itself, rather than a medication issue. Many of these symptoms vanish rapidly as the body readjusts, but predicting duration and severity of these side effects remains difficult.
If you're planning on altering your antidepressant or sleep-aid medication soon, now is likely a good time to go and discuss potential physical and mental side effects with your GP or mental health specialist. And if you do experience zaps — or even hallucinations — don't panic. While the symptoms will likely vanish on their own, they may be able to be fixed by a more gradually reduced dose. Even though they're unpleasant, they're totally normal, so there's no reason to be alarmed.