Celebrity & Other Suicides: Maudsley & Lithium!
Atacama where Lithium is extracted
© Am Ang Zhang 2015
One of my ex-juniors, now retired, called to ask if I have read about another celebrity suicide. How very sad! If we look back there has been many such suicides and it is sadder that many are very talented people.
Dr.
Baldessarini of Harvard:
“Lithium is
far from being an ideal medicine, but it’s the best agent we have for reducing
the risk of suicide in bipolar disorder,” Dr. Baldessarini says, “and it is our
best-established mood-stabilizing treatment.” If patients find they can’t
tolerate lithium, the safest option is to reduce the dose as gradually as
possible, to give the brain time to adjust. The approach could be lifesaving.
In recent write ups about
antidepressants, there is no mention of Lithium. The Cockroach Catcher first
worked with one Australian Psychiatrist that worked with Cade and I was, so to
speak, very biased towards Lithium. Yes, Lithium has side effects that might be
serious. But hang on, you get to live to experience it. Think about it.
"Many psychiatric residents have no or limited experience prescribing
lithium, largely a reflection of the enormous focus on the newer drugs in
educational programs supported by the pharmaceutical industry."
One might ask why there has been such a shift from Lithium.
Could it be the simplicity of the salt that is causing problems for the younger
generation of psychiatrists brought up on various neuro-transmitters?
Could it be the fact that Lithium was discovered in Australia? Look
at the time it took for Helicobacter pylori to be accepted.
Some felt it has to do with how
little money is to be made from Lithium. After all it is less than one eighth
the price of a preferred mood stabilizer that has a serious side
effect: liver failure.
Some felt it has to do with how
little money is to be made from Lithium. After all it is less than one eighth
the price of a preferred mood stabilizer that has a serious side
effect: liver failure.
First, why a small group from the
Maudsley Hospital in the 1960s could, in an
almost malicious manner, have sown scholarly confusion about the true
effectiveness of lithium. Aubrey Lewis, professor of psychiatry and head of the
Maudsley, considered lithium treatment “dangerous nonsense” (47). Lewis’s colleague at the Maudsley,
Michael Shepherd, one of the pioneers of British psychopharmacology, agreed
that lithium was a dubious choice. In his 1968 monograph, Clinical Psychopharmacology, Shepherd
said that lithium was toxic in mania and that claims of efficacy for it in
preventing depression rested on “dubious scientific methodology” (48). Shepherd also scorned “prophylactic
lithium” in an article with Barry Blackwell (49). Moreover,
Shepherd was publicly contemptuous of Schou. He told interviewer David Healy
that Schou had put his own brother on it, and that Schou was such a
“believer” in lithium that he seemed to think “really there ought to be a
national policy in which everybody could get lithium”
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