The Secret, Magical Life Of Lithium
November 16, 2024 10:08 PM   Subscribe

 
Super interesting thanks, I never knew how a metal could fix a mental condition (although it still sounds a bit unknown), but I know a guy who's life was revolutionzed by lithium, going from nearly institutionalised to completely normal in less than a year. Unbeliveable to see and very nice to see.
posted by unearthed at 12:03 AM on November 17, 2024 [1 favorite]


Spodumene? [LiAlSi2O6]: there's a reef of that lithium-rich white rock exposed on the West face of the hills behind our house. Sufficient to attract €2milion of Chinese venture capital to fund drilling some test cores 10-12 years ago. Driving to work at The Institute at about that time, I wondered about the level of lithium in the ground water and also whether different species of tree would/could preferentially concentrate Li Na and K. I was, ludicrously, teaching water chemistry at the time and devised a lab practical testing the tree filter hypothesis.

One the students in that class insisted that I was going to supervise his final year research project the next academic year; and that became a PhD project. Although it was initially refused external funding because ". . . the supervisor lacks any track-record or credibility in the field of water chemistry . . .". True dat! But the following year, The Institute had hired a real water chemist who took over the teaching and the graduate student and secured funding.

We/ they sampled water [out of domestic boreholes connected to kitchen faucets - which meant we didn't need Chinese VC! ] from transects across the county.
Q. and the answer???
A. data is really noisy.
One of the side-bars to the adventure was testing all the holy wells in the region . . . to find that their lithium titre was not significantly elevated.

Lawrence Wright’s 2010 New Yorker article “Lithium Dreams” is on message but has some push-back
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:16 AM on November 17, 2024 [13 favorites]


In 1897, the bestselling car in the U.S. was the electric Columbia Motor Carriage. Back then, electric vehicles were outcompeting their counterparts powered by petrol and steam. New York City even had a short-lived electric taxicab service called the Electrobat.

In my yard there are remnants of the Interurban railway, which was an extensive electric interurban railway built in the late 1800s that ran hundreds of miles throughout the Cleveland suburbs, thus connecting the city with the surrounding Ohio wilderness. It’s so interesting how electric and battery powered transport was available over a hundred years ago! The regression to dirty fossil fuels was only justified by greed.
posted by waving at 4:07 AM on November 17, 2024 [8 favorites]


Fascinating article; thanks for posting!
posted by travertina at 5:32 AM on November 17, 2024


I did not know about the relative scarcity of lithium, which is fascinating.
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:45 AM on November 17, 2024


Yeah, I don’t know if I can truly appreciate lithium without experiencing an alternate reality in which it doesn’t exist.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 7:09 AM on November 17, 2024 [1 favorite]


I loved the bits from the deep-time astronomers. Where is it?
posted by clew at 9:29 AM on November 17, 2024


Glad to see the mention of John Cade. So capable and so human. The story of how he came (with tremendous care and perseverance yet also somewhat accidentally) to learn that lithium can relieve mania is truly bonkers. And his work has helped so many. I owe him my life.

The fact that we yet have only theories to understand why it helps people with bipolar disorder is … fascinating.

Great article overall. Thanks for posting.
posted by jerome powell buys his sweatbands in bulk only at 12:47 PM on November 17, 2024 [2 favorites]


No mention of lithium's possible role in the obesity epidemic, I see.

I personally find the evidence amassed at the linked page fairly compelling, though it is by no means proof that increased exposure to lithium is responsible.

But I’ve been frustrated in the couple of years since I first read it at my inability to find published values for the lithium content in Seattle tap water and water districts of friends of mine scattered around the PNW, and I haven’t seen ads for water purification systems that mention an ability to remove lithium ions from drinking and cooking water.

I also think we should note that despite his early work showing that lithium could control mania, John Cade banned lithium therapy from the treatment center he ran up until the end of his career.
posted by jamjam at 8:23 PM on November 17, 2024 [1 favorite]


There was a Scientific American article a few decades ago (1980s?) called something like "How Lithium Helps Mood". [I cannot find it as their archive has no internal search and is paywalled.] The article said a lot of interesting things about lithium, comparing it to its periodic column-mates hydrogen and sodium. And concluded by saying, in essence, we have no idea how lithium affects mood.
posted by neuron at 9:12 PM on November 17, 2024


Which salt tastes best?[slyt] An informal taste test comparing salts of Lithium, Sodium, Potassium, Rubidium, and Cesium.

tl;dw Lithium Chloride wins.
posted by otherchaz at 12:19 AM on November 18, 2024 [3 favorites]


Jamjam, that article you shared is super fascinating! My own anecdote to add is that when I moved to a small German town for four years I easily dropped 30 pounds. My diet did not change much, I was eating healthfully for years but couldn’t lose weight in the US. After I returned I did keep the weight off tho.
posted by waving at 3:08 AM on November 18, 2024 [2 favorites]


Twenty years ago as a graduate student, I possibly gave myself lithium poisoning, which resulted in me being frightened by a movie.

I was using lithium-6 enriched lithium carbonate to make some cold neutron shielding. When a neutron hits lithium-6, the compound nucleus fragments into a helium nucleus and a tritium nucleus (1n + 6Li →4He + 3H). Neither of these products can emit any gamma rays, and both are so heavy they stop pretty much instantly in solid matter, where they turn into gases and float away. So on a cold neutron beam, a fairly thin block of material which is made of lithium-6 and other stuff that likes neutrons less will turn the neutron beam into ... pretty much nothing. No immediate radiation, no activation products, and not even enough tritium to worry about, unless you work hard at trapping the tritium.

(The tritium production does matter in the nuclear weapons context, but a nuclear weapon might release a kilogram of neutrons in an instant. My experiment used a microgram of neutrons over about two years. But I did have to become a "nuclear materials custodian" in order to move the stuff around. Additionally lithium-7, the more common isotope, converts neutrons into extra neutrons, which also matters for nuclear weapons. Before the lithium-battery revolution, essentially all of the mined lithium in the world had been isotopically separated by some country's nuclear program; I don't know whether that's still true.)

The lithium we had access to had been converted into lithium carbonate, which is a white solid with the consistency of laundry powder. It has the same chemical structure as its periodic-table-neighbor baking soda (which is apparently called "sodium bicarbonate" for historical reasons). A colleague had developed a process for mixing the carbonate powder into a commercially available fireproof epoxy, which you could pour into molds before it cured, and which dried hard enough that you could machine threaded holes in it. I think the epoxy was actually sold for sealing and fireproofing boats. So I did the physics job of designing the shielding that we needed, splitting the design into plates that we could cast in flat molds, figuring out how thick the plates needed to be so that the lithium would stop whatever fraction of the neutrons we decided on, and figuring out how much of the material to get. We wound up needing about a half-kilogram of lithium metal, which was a few kilograms of lithium carbonate, where most of the mass is in the carbon and oxygen atoms.

The night before we were going to mix and cast the epoxy plates, I tried to access a Material Safety Data Sheet for lithium carbonate and couldn't find one in the usual places. (This was before they were renamed "Safety Data Sheets.") So I turned to the internet, and didn't have much luck there either. One of the documents I found reminded me that lithium carbonate is the form in which lithium is delivered for its psychiatric purposes. That document warned that practitioners needed to watch their patients for symptoms of lithium toxicity, which included "a metallic taste in the mouth" and "terrors."

The medicinal doses are, I presume, amounts that would fit in a pill. Most medicinal active ingredients are measured in milligrams or even micrograms. I had a five-gallon bucket of this stuff.

So I meet the craftsperson who has built our molds, and we do the mix-and-pour together. Measure out the resin, measure out the hardener, measure out the powder; mix using a drill with a T attachment on the end; put the mixing pot in a vacuum chamber to pump out the bubbles; pour the mixed material into the molds before it hardens. We were working in a great big space with several fans running, but I don't think we had a fume hood, and we definitely didn't wear any sort of masks. Every time we poured the carbonate powder, there was a little dust cloud. And of course, as soon as I saw this, I started wondering: is that a funny taste in my mouth? Or am I just being suggestible? Surely I'm just being suggestible.

Anyway, we did this job for eight hours, and then I met some friends after work to see a movie. The movie was called "Hotel Rwanda."

I don't know if you remember "Hotel Rwanda," but it's about the 1990s genocide. The protagonist runs a hotel, and when the genocide begins, he starts housing folks with the "wrong ethnicity" and somehow preventing the hotel from being overrun by the murderers by filling up the guest register with fake names. I was a young man with a young family, like the protagonist. When the protagonist found himself confronted by soldiers, I tried to imagine what I would have done in his place, and I got it wrong every single time. What would I have done here? Died. What about here? Died. And here? My whole family would have died. The whole movie is like this. There is a scene where the protagonist comes out into a foggy place in front of a wall. The fog clears a bit and he --- and we --- realize that the wall is a mound of corpses, not yet in a mass grave. The protagonist backs silently out of the view the same way he came in.

And this story is true.

It's the scariest fucking movie I have ever seen in my life. I was literally white-knuckling the theater armrests for nearly the entire time. I honestly don't know whether I was so frightened because I am a human being appalled at the reality of genocide, of whether I was so frightened because I had poisoned myself. I could probably answer that question by watching the movie again, but I wouldn't really like either outcome, so I don't plan on it.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 10:08 AM on November 20, 2024 [4 favorites]


The amygdala mediates emotional responses including fear, and lithium improves the "functional connectivity" between the amygdala and other parts of the brain, so it seems reasonable to nominate that effect for a primary role in lithium's ability to enhance fear.

But people with William's syndrome have certain parts of their amygdalas enlarged without apparent deficits in the rest, and they have lower social anxiety than average including less fear of strangers, as well as a reputation for lacking race prejudice, though they may have greater than average fear of things like spiders.

I can scarcely begin to guess how they might respond to "Hotel Ruanda", with or without lithium!
posted by jamjam at 11:41 PM on November 20, 2024


fantabulous timewaster: When the protagonist found himself confronted by soldiers, I tried to imagine what I would have done in his place.
Maybe you do yourself an injustice. I was at a family funeral a tuthree weeks ago and said hi to M the oldest mourner, the principal's SiL, who was born in Northern Nigeria in 1932. One Sunday when she was 16, the family went on a picnic in the bush but she was feeling crap so stayed at home with a hot water bottle. That afternoon a[nother] race-riot broke out and a mill of Hausa-men appeared in the compound looking for Samuel the Ibo cook. M met them on the porch and told them to wait. She re-appeared loading a second cartridge into her father's shot-gun and invited the loudest voice to try something. The crowd looked at their feet, shuffled a bit and then left the compound . . . quite a bit calmer.
posted by BobTheScientist at 5:07 AM on November 21, 2024 [1 favorite]


I've told that story many times, but this may be the first time I've written it down. I have occasionally tried to find some document that describes those two symptoms and failed. I find "tremor," and I find anecdotes about night terrors, but all of the reliable-looking sources mention more prosaic symptoms like "weird poop" and "weird pee" and "confusion."

Furthermore, apparently the therapeutic dose of lithium is roughly an entire gram per day. I can't tell whether that gram is the lithium mass or the lithium carbonate mass (the carbonate group makes up five-sixths of the mass of the compound). But it seems impossible that I could have inhaled hundreds of milligrams of dust.

But on the third hand, sometimes material absorbed through the lungs is metabolized differently from material absorbed through the gut. Meanwhile, on the fourth hand, the inhalation difference is usually for compound that are somehow processed by the liver from the gut, while inhalation can put them directly into the bloodstream unaltered; but lithium carbonate just dissolves into lithium ions in either case. And on the fifth hand, ---

Oh, screw this. I have occasionally asked mental health professionals if this connection is plausible and gotten "maybe" with a shrug. I'm never watching that movie again, and I'm wearing a mask when I work with dusts and powders.

And I don't care if it's the most delicious: I'm never using lithium chloride to season my food, holy shit.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 5:45 AM on November 21, 2024


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