The Life of Lithium

Okay, so… since Lithium is pretty much the oldest drug used as a mood stabilizer I guess we should give it the respect it deserves and get to know it just a touch before ingesting it, right?  Now, I should make it clear that these history lessons should be thought of more as lesions than lessons, as I don’t have a research team working with me at the moment and I only have so much patience cross checking information… but here we go…

 At the end of the 1700s, the miners and the scientists came out of the ground with a mineral called petalite which contained Litium, however it wasn’t isolated to stand independently on it’s own until the early 1800s when electrolysis was imposed upon what is now known as lithium oxide.  And just to clarify, these Swedish scientists were not attempting to remove the hair from these minerals as these fall into the category of non-hair-growing minerals, and this form of electrolysis is when you stimulate decomposition by introducing the liquid or solid to an electric current.  Hello electricity… Hello what is now called Lithium Oxide, since we have not yet isolated Lithium… Let’s meet up and make Lithium cause maybe it’ll help people with their manic moods… and so here we are.

Before we get too far with this, I feel like I should mention that there is also a company called Lithia Springs Mineral Water who claim that in the mid-1800s the spring that they pull water from was used by a few doctors because of it’s high lithium content to treat alcoholism, opium addiction and other key issues that I’m hoping to face at some point in the near future, so I suppose I should hurry and get my order in when they start accepting them this summer.

Now, the real clincher of exciting knowledge… Lithium comes from the Greek word ‘lithos’ which means ’stone’ seeing as it was the only element in Group 1 of the periodic table that was from a mineral, where the other two common elements, sodium and potassium were discovered from plant sources.  The only thing more exciting than that is that Lithos is also a typeface made to resemble the geometric letterforms of Ancient Greek engravings and an article I found written in that typesetting went on to discuss the views that Ancients Greeks (or at least some of them) had towards mental illness, and a good majority of them viewed it as possession from evil spirits and used exorcism, which in some instances used physical beatings in attempts to drive the spirits away.  That said… would it be safe to say that one way to view Lithium nowadays might be that your psychiatrist has tossed you a stone to throw at your demons?

So then, from what I gather… our scientists got to work and throughout the late 1800s used lithium to treat a number of issues because they found it was effective at breaking down uric acid.   The most common disease being doused with miniscule bits of lithium at the time was gout, a disease where your body cannot properly metabolize uric acid, causing arthritis in the smaller bones in your feet (but not limited to those bones).  Uric acid was the Serotonin of it’s day in a way (popularity, I mean) and was blamed for many disorders, one of those being manic depression.  Apparently, a few doctors began using lithium to treat ‘mania’ throughout the 1870s, (mania being the manic state of bipolar disorder) as it seemed to sedate the patient from experiencing these hyper-enthusiastic states of sweaty-forehead coated euphoria.  So, on the one hand, lithium was being used to treat arthritis in the body and on the other, trying to induce arthritis in the mind.  Seeing that the pharmaceutical industry couldn’t patent that gentle little silvery-white metal known as atomic element #3, a significant budget was never spent on research and lithium began suffering from abandonment issues of it’s own until the mid 1900s.  

In 1949, John Cade so couragously began using extracts from pee that he took from schizophrenic patients and injecting it into rodents hoping to isolate the culprit agent that was causing that socially unacceptable behavior.  In experiments such as these, do you think that in order to see if one specific rodent seems to detach from reality to embrace a delusional, fantasy driven world, do you first need to spend time getting to know the rodent in order to properly observe the transformation?  If not, how do you truly gauge the schizophrenia they are acquiring from the pee injections?  And if they do seem upset, could it be justified that most anyone might get upset if someone was peeing IN them.  Unfortunately, Cade didn’t succeed at transforming the rodents’ ideological perception of themselves, but he did confirm that an isolated lithium ion tranquilized the rodents, and that was that.  He began treating hospitalized patients and published the first paper to be written on the use of lithium in the treatment of acute mania.  In 1970, the use of lithium was actually approved by the Food and Drug Administration, regardless of the fact that no one really knew why it worked.  That didn’t come until 1998.  

Researchers based out of the University of Wisconsin came to the conclusion that lithium promoted glutamate stabilization.  What is glutamate?  A key molecule in cellular metabolism.  Without getting too far gone with tons and tons of information, for now just think of it as this… glutamate needs to travel through the brain from neuron to receptor to keep things functioning nicely.  Too much glutamate between neurons gives you mania, too little gives you depression.  Lithium helps regulate and stabilize this, like a car wash for the roadways, only the suds seem to bind the car to the middle lane.  Or at least, that’s what everything seems to say.  Personally, I can’t confirm any of this as I haven’t started taking it yet, but it’s coming and the more I learn about it, the more my nerves seem to sputter and splinker and splunket.  Lots of unfeigned sp-ing.  Sort of like that nervousness you feel when the hooker jumps off from her straddle and rips the condom off of you, screaming out with earnest passion… ‘I just want to feel you’.  There’s an underlying fear-engulfed excitement, but the ambiguity of what’s to come slightly inhibits the enjoyment of your otherwise harmonious union.  Or at least, something close to that.

There are a lot of warnings and side effects and ’causes of death’ (more in the early life of the drug) that have occurred, but there are also a lot of success stories, so who would want to miss out on those odds?  You are supposed to have blood tests and thyroid tests and a few other tests before using it, and then again every few months being on it.  Did my psychiatrist demand that I do that prior to taking it?  Of course not.  Did yours?  How often do they?  Sadly, the inconvenience of taking the blood test would put off most people from taking the drug and is it really worth the risk of losing another taker who will most definitely be successfully sedated from that awful state of mania?  I have to stop now, I’m prematurely judging and my banter is just that until I have proven different by putting some time in on the drug.  Start soon.  Can’t Wait?