For long time readers of what was once called the blogosphere, the name Frederik deBoer may be familiar. After a couple years break as a blogger, he’s back, revealing his struggle with mental illness. I found this bit concerning lithium particularly interesting:
Other side effects are drug-dependent. For me, lithium is the basis of everything. It is the foundation of my treatment. A mood stabilizer, it is one of the most reliable and widely-prescribed psychiatric medications in the world. The pills flatten you out, trimming off the emotional highs and lows that can, for many, cause so much wreckage in their lives. An element of the periodic table, lithium cannot be patented and is thus available fairly cheaply at almost any pharmacy. The emotion-moderating effects are apparent after 3-4 weeks and those benefits make it easier to stay on the pill. Not only is the clinical evidence of its efficacy in patients clear, multiple studies have found that places with higher natural levels of lithium in the drinking water have lower rates of violent crime and suicide. This came as little surprise to me. When you have experienced bipolar mania, the shaking delirious heart-racing paranoiac acceleration of everything you are, lithium’s steady and reliable presence is as comforting as a drug can get.
I haven’t examined his links, so I don’t know if the studies he cites attempt to compensate for culture – itself undoubtedly influenced by lithium – in a credible way. But it does remind me of Kevin Drum’s notes on lead in the environment, and how its presence and cessation correlate with falling levels of crime.
Whether there’s anything practical to be drawn from the lithium studies is not immediately obvious to me. If the effects were dramatic, I’d expect evolution to weed out the particularly vulnerable.
But it is a fascinating clue that the old mind-body dualism argument is really not viable.
