They drank it at health spas. They put it in seven-up. They even used it for mania and depression.

Lithium was the elixir of the early 1900s, until big food tried to sell it as a table salt.

That was one step too far.

Welcome to the Carlad Psychiatry Podcast, keeping psychiatry honest since 2003.

I'm Chrisaken, the editor-in-chief of the Carlisat Psychiatry Report.

And I'm Kelly Newsom, a psychiatric MP and a dedicated reader of every issue.

Our recent episodes traced a lineage of psychiatric revolutions, from Freud to

DBT, from Kall Jung to Alcoholics Anonymous. These pioneers drew from a deep well, their own

struggles with depression, psychosis, and addiction. Other trailblazers were inspired by what they witnessed in family members,

and that's the spark that lit the way for lithium. Lithium had a lot of false starts in medicine,

but it finally caught on in the 1950s when a Danish psychiatrist named Morgan Shoe began studying

lithium for depression and bipolar disorder.

Shue went to medical school with one goal to understand mood disorders. His own brother

suffered from severe recurrent depressions, depressions that came on every spring, and eventually

his went into remission on lithium.

But how did Dr. Shue get the idea to try lithium in the first place, fresh out of residency training?

That's where the story gets tangled. There's no straight line here. It winds through spas, Victorian literature, and a dangerous theory about crystals

in the blood. We're going to start this tale at an unlikely source, gout.

Back in the 1840s, the English physician, Alfred Beringered, discovered that gout was caused by elevated uric acid crystals.

This was a landmark moment. Medicine was just beginning to move away from ancient Greco-Roman theories

and toward an empirical science.

And like a lot of exciting discoveries, physicians stretched it as far as it would go.

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