It’s the oldest treatment for bipolar disorder — introduced 45 years ago — and is still widely used today. Lithium, derived from a salt that occurs in nature, was the subject of a recent study on suicide.
Suicide has been on my mind lately, ever since I started watching the show 13 Reasons Why on Netflix. In the show, high schooler protagonist Hannah Baker kills herself, leaving behind a set of detailed voice recordings on cassette tape, each one highlighting a person or reason why she took her own life. The tapes are secretly passed between classmates. The compelling storytelling concept hooks you in from the first episode.
The show has put suicide at the forefront of pop culture. But the science of mental illness, which often leads to suicide, continues to be studied ad infinitum.
Doctors at Sweden’s Karolinska Institutet have published a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, singing the praises of lithium as a suicide deterrent.
It is highly known that lithium has mood-stabilizing effects. It also prevents manic episodes.
But no one, until now, has studied its effects on suicide prevention.
“We now strongly augment the existing evidence that lithium treatment is protective against suicide attempts and suicide,” says Professor Paul Lichtenstein at the Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics. “We estimate that more than 10 percent of attempted or completed suicides could have been avoided if these individuals had been continuously taking lithium during the study period.”
The study examined 51,000 individuals with bipolar over the course of eight years (2006-2013).
During that time, 10,648 suicidal events took place. The subjects were studied with and without lithium treatment. And the risk of suicide-related occurrences was reduced by 14 percent while individuals were taking lithium, as compared with those not receiving lithium treatment.
Lithium is mysterious. I know that I took almost every antidepressant under the sun before my doctor and I tried lithium. Lithium was the magic bullet — it lifted me out of a yearlong depression. Ironic that years ago, I tried to commit suicide by taking a fistful of lithium. The doctors in the hospital said I was very close to needing dialysis. For me, lithium — despite the fact that it is 45 years old — is a substance that’s here to stay. And that is why I call it a “wonder drug.”
