Quotes About Lithium

Particles were coming out of the lithium, hitting the screen, and producing scintillations. They looked like stars suddenly appearing and disappearing.

Overhead announcement at psychiatric hospital: Lithium is no longer available on credit.

They used to treat sheep carcasses with Lithium so if the Coyotes went after the herd and bit on the treated carcasses, the got so sick they kept their teeth to themselves.

Patient sees [lithium] medication as a promise of a cure, and a means of suicide if it doesn't work. She fears that by taking it she will risk her last resort

I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn't work for me, the answer would be a simple no—and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I suppose I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough I think I would choose to have it. It's complicated.

high altitude coupled with rigorous exercise can raise lithium levels. I became completely disoriented and totally incapable of navigating my way down the mountain.

The humor, however, was a bit more in the recounting than in the actual living through it. Unfortunately, this resistance to taking lithium is played out in the lives of tens of thousands of patients every year.

John Cade's article about the use of lithium in acute mania first appeared in 1949, in an obscure Australian medical journal

Renewables require the use of vastly more land, longer and less-utilized transmission lines, and large amounts of storage whether from lithium batteries, new dams, compressed air caverns.

Lithium makes a fine battery because it's a scarily reactive metal. Pure lithium ignites on contact if it touches water - a flake of it would sizzle and fry on the water-rich cells of your skin.

Lithium prevents my seductive but disastrous highs, diminishes my depressions, clears out the wool and webbing from my disordered thinking, slows me down, gentles me out, keeps me from ruining my career and relationships, keeps me out of a hospital, alive, and makes psychotherapy possible.

Like diabetes, she referred to it. Diabetics take insulin. In the same way, people with bipolar disorders took lithium, and alcoholics went to AA. Diabetes is the all-purpose analogy in my culture. Everybody has some form of it that needs to be tended on a maintenance basis. No one is ever cured, no one gets all the way well.

Havin' fun while freedom fightin' must be one of those lunatic Texas traits we get from the water - which is known to have lithium in it - because it goes all the way back to Sam Houston, surely the most lovable, the most human, and the funniest of all the great men this country has ever produced.

In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium.

Lithium remains the gold standard, but many drugs now treat bipolar disorder. Medication is critical and should be combined with psychotherapy. Compliance is a major problem. Patients believe that once they're better, they no longer need the medication. It doesn't work that way.

I am one of millions who have been treated for depression and gotten well; I was lucky enough to have a psychiatrist well versed in using lithium and knowledgeable about my illness, and who was also an excellent psychotherapist.

Courtney," I warn, getting furious, "if you just said what I think you said: that your lithium is in a carton in the freezer next to the Frusen Glädjé and is a sorbet"—I'm screaming this—"if this is really what you said then I will kill you. Is it a sorbet? Is your lithium really a sorbet?

Krissa had since learned a great deal about the drug Lithium and was now aware of how controversial it was.

As the cosmos continues to cool—dropping below a hundred million degrees—protons fuse with protons as well as with neutrons, forming atomic nuclei and hatching a universe in which ninety percent of these nuclei are hydrogen and ten percent are helium, along with trace amounts of deuterium ("heavy" hydrogen), tritium (even heavier hydrogen), and lithium.

Women who put on a few pounds after starting lithium sometimes say the cure is worse than the disease. The weight gain shoots them straight into depression.

Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?" The New York Times (Sept. 13, 2014).

Anna Fels. "Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?" The New York Times (Sept. 13, 2014).

As much as he hated his lithium, here it was his friend. Leonard could feel the huge tide of sadness waiting to rush over him. But there was an invisible barrier keeping the full reality of it from touching him. It was like squeezing a baggie full of water and feeling all the properties of the liquid without getting wet.

Justine was pretty enough, and sweet enough, when she wasn't walking the razor's edge of an organic emotional instability—but I couldn't really hold that against her. Plenty of people have to take some kind of medication to keep stable. Lithium, supermodel sex vampires—whatever works, I guess.