Anne Harrington's new book is Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness.From the transcript of her Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:
GROSS: So I think the first drug that was used to treat manic depression was lithium, which you write was previously marketed as a health tonic. That amazed me when I read it.--Marshal Zeringue
HARRINGTON: Really? The first thing to know about lithium to understand its strange place in the history of psychiatry is that unlike all the other drugs, it wasn't invented in a laboratory. It's an element. It's found in the natural world. And it's found, for example, in certain kinds of spas in Europe that, in the past, you know, bragged about their high lithium content of their drinking water. And so it had a place in spa culture. It had a place as a feel good tonic. It was, for a period of time, an ingredient in a new lemon-lime soft drink that became quite popular in - up through the 1950s that gets renamed 7UP. And there's a...
GROSS: 7UP had lithium in it?
HARRINGTON: 7UP had lithium in it, and there's - no one quite knows for sure why Griggs (ph), the inventor of this soft drink - it had a very convoluted previous name. But it was renamed 7UP, and some think that this might be a reference to the atomic number of lithium. It's just under seven and the up meaning the suggestion that it lifts the mood. Lithium is no longer in 7UP. Cocaine is no longer in Coca-Cola.
GROSS: (Laughter) Right.
HARRINGTON: But there was this previous history of lithium. And then lithium sort of fortunes as a product, and it's used in all sorts of other things too that have nothing to do with, you know, the health industry. But its fortunes as a product in the health industry take a nosedive when it is used as the basis - or a compound of lithium is used as the basis for a salt substitute that ends up, people believe, causing heart problems and even several deaths. And so there's a warning sent out by the AMA and then eventually FDA that, you know, these salt substitutes - take them off the market. This is a dangerous drug. And so lithium's emergence in psychiatry emerges against the background of two relevant facts. One, it has a reputation now for being dangerous and, two, it's not going to make a pharmaceutical company very much money because they can't patent it.
GROSS: So is lithium still, like, a drug of choice for treating patients with bipolar disorder?
HARRINGTON: I think there are a lot of people who say it's a very...[read on]