>>50050702https://youtu.be/pkcJEvMcnEgLithium is a naturally occurring element (number three on the periodic table) that was first discovered in 1817 and was found in mines in Australia and Chili. Its mood-stabilizing effects, however, were not recognized until late in that century. In fact, some concluded that gout was the cause of mood disorders.
It was Australian psychiatrist John Cade who, in 1949, published one of the first papers on the use of lithium in the treatment of acute mania. From that time on, lithium was increasingly prescribed.
Excerpt from Nature's "Lithium: the gripping history of a psychiatric success story"
>Working from an abandoned pantry in Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital near Melbourne, Australia, he began to collect urine samples from people with depression, mania and schizophrenia, aiming to discover whether some secretion in their urine could be correlated to their symptoms. With no access to sophisticated chemical analysis and largely unguided by theory, Cade injected the urine into the abdominal cavities of guinea pigs, raising the dose until they died. The urine of people with mania proved especially lethal to the animals.>the urine of people with mania proved especially lethal to the animalskek