Yes, others will point to the higher dose for psychiatric patients.
I would point to the soulless robot, the empty husk of a once vibrant, creative brain.
We are devs, and our brain is our livelihood. In me it killed my creativity and my passion. Not only did I not want to code anything new, I could not conceive of new things. I stopped improv jams on guitar, I could not write songs. I became wonderfully adept at doing scales. Scales over and over.
I'll take my mood disorder- because it comes WITH emotions.
This is just to give you a 'crazy person's' impression of Lithium. Your results may vary.
I agree that when I first got on those meds at 21 after a psychotic break I was totally torn up. Now at 35 I couldn't imagine my life any other way. Have I become less creative? I honestly don't know and it's kind of frightening to think that perhaps I have. How would I ever know?
If you haven't seen what your life you be like permanently institutionalized (I've been hospitalized for mania 6 times) perhaps strong drugs aren't for you. If you have seen the other option (life inside a hospital), it makes a lot of sense.
If you think Li makes you a zombie, try intramuscular haldol or seroquel or even ativan. Those will knock you out, the first one literally. :)
Lithium is a very harsh mistress, but if you have type 1, which is akin to emotional epilepsy, she will bring you to heel.
I guess I took dangerous risks, depending on who you talk to. :) I was never suicidal or homicidal, but I definitely did things that were out of character and scary to people outside. One of the most interesting things is that I remember everything and it all seemed 'rational' at the time. Not rational per the normal definition of rational, but following my line of reasoning everything made sense. I don't want to go into too much details online as it wouldn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out who I am. As it is you can google stalk me and eventually figure out my story. Regardless it isn't that interesting.
The threat part is that 1/5 people with bipolar die of suicide w/ 25% to 50% attempting. That is so, so scary. I was deeply affected by the passing of Robin Williams for that reason. That's almost always on the depression side.
For me, my mania was just ... extra happy ... going right up into the mystical amazement with life, the universe and everything that people typically associate with psychedelics, etc. 14 days into a hospital stay (my longest was 17 I think) that happy go lucky feeling sleeping ~1-3 hours max on heavy sedation becomes... much more agitated and frustrated.
Not attempting to edit this post for clarity, but yeah, that's a rough sketch of my situation. It's been 6 years since I was last hospitalized (I had my friends take me in), but I'd say the feeling coming on is like an electric charge of infinite energy reverberating from the base of my skull. Sounds awesome in theory, but it doesn't convert to tangible output when the smoke clears. I could write on and on about these experiences, but so can many others... /r/bipolarreddit and /r/bipolar are some spaces where people let loose on their experiences.
I described my experience with lithium, and while there were sedatives and antipsychotics that I was prescribed which had a far greater numbing effects, I was not speaking to them.
All of the medications I tried had different consequences, Lithium's were not the worst (Lamictals were the most interesting musically).
Be well. I can only hope our life experiences both rock regardless of whatever bumps in the road we hit. I didn't put the low-lights of my life on meds into my post, but they are legion. Leeeeeeegion.
The article omits 7up (which contained lithium for a while) and lithia water which you can buy online right now: http://lithiamineralwater.com/store.htm
It would be one thing if micro-doses of lithium were sold as a supplement, which individuals can opt to take. But the article goes as far as to suggest adding it to drinking water -- it seems very irresponsible in my eyes to leave it to the government to decide "how docile" the population should be above the natural level / what trade-off with suicide rate is acceptable.
There are better ways to deal with the problem of suicide than pushing society slightly closer to the "souless robot" end of the spectrum.
For example, the amount of moisture in your skin: too little and it cracks and bleeds, too much and you get fungal infections. But adding moisture to cracked-and-bleeding skin isn't making it "a bit more fungal" -- it's pushing it into the healthy buffer range.
I'd imagine there are many, more complex, factors involved in brain chemistry / mood suppression, so it would be a lot more difficult to determine where this middle lies.
If you're using high suicide rates to suggest we're not in the middle and need more lithium in everyone's water, I'd have to disagree. In the vast majority of cases, a better healthcare system which ensures those who need it are connected with mental health professionals would help nip the problem in the bud. Rather than solving it with these lithium microdoses, causing to those on the verge of suicide to not have the lucidity of emotion to commit to the act, and the rest of the population having their brain chemistry played with too.
Here's a useful comparison:
Before we were iodizing salt, most people were actually in "the middle" of iodine-consumption. Anywhere from "nearly none" to "tons and tons" was "the middle"--your body can work miracles to create homeostasis from random inputs. But some people were getting no iodine at all, and these people would get very sick.
So we added just a little bit of iodine to salt. The iodine-deficient people--the people who were previously getting utterly no iodine--stopped getting sick, because now they were getting a little bit of iodine, and that was enough. Everyone else was getting slightly more iodine--but this didn't push anyone from "getting a tolerable amount of iodine with the excess just excreted" to "having a hyperiodine problem." There was nobody exactly one dose away from having too much iodine, because we just don't consume that much iodine.
This same story holds for any vitamin or mineral. Calcium, phosphorous, iron, etc. are all things most people get the right amount of--but "the right amount" is almost any amount, because the body knows how to take just the right amount from the stream of input it's getting, and throw the rest out. The only wrong amounts are either zero, or more than exists in any human-friendly environment.
Actually, there was: 'thyroid shock'. Iodization in the USA was accompanied by a wave of, I think, a few thousand deaths on net when people who grew up iodine-deficient were suddenly exposed to iodized salt. (This was covered by one of the historical papers I cite in http://www.gwern.net/Iodine although I forget which.)
Of course, the benefits of iodization were on net huge and I'm very much a fan of iodization, but it would be wrong to say nobody was hurt by the introduction of iodized salt.
I guess another way to think about environmental chemicals is by analogy to poisons: if they were common in the environment, you'd have a tolerance to them, but since they aren't, you don't. You can build up a tolerance by parts, at which point the poison stops being one and just becomes another chemical the body handles.
What is there to show that "this same story holds for any vitamin or mineral"?! Surely there are many which have no positive effect on the body, where zero would be the best dosage. What law of biology suggests that every mineral is in some way beneficial to the human body?
Lithium happens to have an effect on moods in the brain in such a way that suicide is less likely - but the mood dampening effects may well diminish people's positive emotions too (for example). For someone with no mental health issues or risk of suicide, this could well be an overall negative effect, and therefore makes no sense to force on the entire population.
I can see why the drinking water suggestion invites paranoia. As the article mentions a solution like adding it to salt could also work.
As to why that is relevant to microdosing...
- High doses: major mood suppression -> practically no chance of suicide
- Micro doses: (?) -> lower chance of suicide
Simple reasoning would suggest that (?) == some degree of mood suppression. I'm not sure how you've concluded that this "could not occur" with lower doses?
Putting it in salt is hardly better than putting it in the water supply, it's still systematic mass "medication" which would become difficult to avoid.
You call it "simple reasoning" to make your inference about microdosing, but actually we have no idea how lithium even affects the brain / mind, so it's not possible to arrive at the conclusion by reason. It would have to come from evidence from controlled studies, and I believe these indicate that side-effects are restricted to high doses.
Also, "practically no chance of suicide" -- you can't be serious about that; no drug can guarantee or even come close to that.
You already have salt with and without iodine, so no, wouldn't be difficult to avoid. Whether you should call it "medication" is debatable; giving someone vitamin C is not necessarily medication, it can be a food supplement. The same could be argued for lithium which occurs naturally in certain water springs.
i have, for years, and i currently take "antipsychotic medication", which is actually a yet another term that, thanks to marketing, has lost all meaning. the comments about lithium making you "docile", and "soulless robots" are spot on. and there are "antipsychotics" that act as mood stabilizers that are a lot less soul-sucking than lithium is.
respectfully, it is you who are misinformed.
that is the statement i was responding to.
> Even at therapeutic doses I think you are generalizing too much, as many people do not experience such side effects.
that's cool and all, but that's just, like, your opinion, man. if you're going to accuse me of generalizing, you could at least do so with something other than a sweeping, unqualified generalization. i find it amusing that this thread is full of people who don't actually take this medication telling people who actually have what its effects are. in fact, lithium has been documented both anecdotally and in research[2] to have measurable effects on cognition, and a dulling effect on mood.
[2]: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=lithium+cognitive+effect...
Granted, I was overstating my case there. But I maintain, not everyone has those side effects. The more pertinent point was that the article is advocating trace amounts.
One probably should avoid hastily generalizing one's own experience to what the drug's effects are like generally.
But doesn't pot bring apathy? People are actually starting to legalize that...
Again though, that's at prescription levels. Trace levels in drinking water probably won't make us all into soulless robots ripe for totalitarian rule.
edit: missing words