Lithium saved my life. And continues to do so despite the lackadaisical negligent Drs. who dole out life threatening drugs and leave a sick mental patient to fend for themselves. Thank you, Marisa for the eye opening, important article on Lithium.
Lithium is among the oldest psychotropic medications. It was first used in 1817 to treat gout and was found to have mood stabilizing properties. Throughout much of the nineteenth-century it was used to treat a variety of illnesses. In 1929 when 7 Up was created it actually contained lithium and was sold as a cure-all. The use of lithium then disappeared for the first half of the twentieth-century. In 1949 it was used to treat manic patients by an Australian doctor, John Cade. Then in 1954 a Danish psychiatrist, Mogens Schou, undertook a controlled trial of the use of lithium for mania. The United States was among the last countries to use lithium for mania in bipolar disorder. The Food and Drug Administration didn’t approve the use of lithium until 1970, when the rest of the world had been using it successfully for almost ten years (read a more detailed account of lithium’s long and…
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Jacqueline Cioffa 