In this episode , he'd been excited , restless and violent for over two months and was interfering so often that had be confined to a single room during the day , right ? So this is very debilitating what we now know to be bipolar depression . Um He commenced taking lithium citrate 20 grains , that's a measure of of the amount of lithium three times a day in four days .
The discovery of lithium as a treatment for bipolar disorder is truly a miraculous story that I think everyone should know . The key player in this story is a physician by the last name Cade .
Um I'm not gonna read these in detail now because it would take a lot of unnecessary time . But things like um case seven MC aged 40 years old suffering from manic recurrent mania . In this episode , he'd been excited , restless and violent for over two months and was interfering so often that had be confined to a single room during the day , right ?
So he had some time for observation . And during his imprisonment , he observed some of his fellow inmates as going through pretty wild vacillations in mood and energy , essentially going from manic episodes to depressed episodes or from manic to normal episodes . And for one reason or another , we don't know why because I couldn't find any report as to why he hypothesized this , but he hypothesized that there was some build up of some chemical in these people's brains that then they would urinate out and that urinating out of whatever chemical was in there would allow them to be more relaxed and not manic .
But it's an absolutely wonderful paper and it's an absolutely wonderful voyage into the history of psychiatry . Right down to the discussion where in just three short paragraphs cade really lays out the case for why lithium is such a important discovery in the treatment of what at that time they were calling psychotic excitement and what we now know to be manic bipolar depression .
