Lithium Quotes

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.” The first psycho therapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness when they care more about what they give than what they get. The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.” The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said. The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.” But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.” My bones said, “Write the poems.

It's difficult. I take a low dose of lithium nightly. I take an antidepressant for my darkness because prayer isn't enough. My therapist hears confession twice a month, my shrink delivers the host, and I can stand in the woods and see the world spark.

The battery was a lithium thionyl chloride non-rechargeable. I figured that out from some subtle clues: the shape of the connection points, the thickness of the insulation, and the fact that it had “LiSOCl2 NON-RCHRG” written on it.

When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when its gone, its like it was never there at all.

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together- the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night- can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model, like I came off the assembly line flat-out fucked and my parents should have taken me back for repairs before the warranty ran out. But that was long ago.

I start to get the feeling that something is really wrong. Like all the drugs put together – the lithium, the Prozac, the desipramine, and Desyrel that I take to sleep at night – can no longer combat whatever it is that was wrong with me in the first place. I feel like a defective model.

Lithium tweaks many mood-altering chemicals in the brain, and its effects are complicated. Most interesting, lithium seems to reset the body’s circadian rhythm, its inner clock. In normal people, ambient conditions, especially the sun, dictate their humors and determine when they are tuckered out for the day. They’re on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Bipolar people run on cycles independent of the sun. And run and run.

You see, the chemists have a complicated way of counting: instead of saying "one, two, three, four, five protons," they say, "hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron.

I now know for certain that my mind and emotions, my fix on the real and my family's well-being, depend on just a few grams of salt. But treatment's the easy part. Without honesty, without a true family reckoning, that salt's next to worthless.

I've been accustomed to mysteries, holy and otherwise, since I was a child. Some of us care for orphans, amass fortunes, raise protests or Nielsen ratings; some of us take communion or whiskey or poison. Some of us take lithium and antidepressants, and most everyone believes these pills are fundamentally wrong, a crutch, a sign of moral weakness, the surrender of art and individuality. Bullshit. Such thinking guarantees tradgedy for the bipolar. Without medicine, 20 percent of us, one in five, will commit suicide. Six-gun Russian roulette gives better odds. Denouncing these medicines makes as much sense as denouncing the immorality of motor oil. Without them, sooner or later the bipolar brain will go bang. I know plenty of potheads who sermonize against the pharmaceutical companies; I know plenty of born-again yoga instructors, plenty of missionaries who tell me I'm wrong about lithium. They don't have a clue.

Diazapam (that's valium), temazepam, lithium, ECT, HRT - how long must I stay on this stuff? Don't give me anymore!

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

I occasionally laugh and tell him that his imperturbability is worth three hundred milligrams of lithium a day to me, and it is probably true.

People used to think gold was worth fightin’ over, and that shit gets made by every supernova, which means pretty much every planet around a G2 star will have some. Stars burn through lithium as fast as they make it. All the available ore got made at the big bang, and we’re not doin’ another one of those. Now that’s scarcity, friend.

Half the time he seems autistic, the rest of the time he's like a lizard jacked full of lithium and speed. These things do not promote love in most of us.

Overhead announcement at psychiatric hospital: Lithium is no longer available on credit.

Patient sees [lithium] medication as a promise of a cure, and a means of suicide if it doesn’t work. She fears that by taking it she will risk her last resort

They used to treat sheep carcasses with Lithium so if the Coyotes went after the herd and bit on the treated carcasses, the got so sick they kept their teeth to themselves.

I don't mean to sound like a spoiled brat. I know that into every sunny life a little rain must fall and all that, but in my case, the crisis-level hysteria is an all-too-recurring theme. The voices inside my head, which I used to think were just passing through, seem to have taken up residence And I've been on these goddamn pills for years.

Like diabetes, she referred to it. Diabetics take insulin. In the same way, people with bipolar disorders took lithium, and alcoholics went to AA. Diabetes is the all-purpose analogy in my culture. Everybody has some form of it that needs to be tended on a maintenance basis. No one is ever cured, no one gets all the way well.

Nicola Yoon “When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen -7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesmally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when it's gone, it's like it was never there at all.

The young woman's perfect breast didn't yield beneath the gentle pressure of two latexed fingers. "What're you doing?" Professor Robert 'Lithium Bob' Beck frowned at me. "I don't know. It's what I did when I first saw her…" "Why?" asked Doc Donald, about to assist with the post mortem. "She seemed so… pink. Maybe to see if she was alive…" I saw the Prof and the Doc exchange a look. It was an unconventional - no, plain weird - place to touch her.

Courtney,” I warn, getting furious, “if you just said what I think you said: that your lithium is in a carton in the freezer next to the Frusen Glädjé and is a sorbet”—I’m screaming this—“if this is really what you said then I will kill you. Is it a sorbet? Is your lithium really a sorbet?

And so once again peace reigned in his kitchen cabinet. The voices he'd been hearing as he lie in bed stopped. His doctor took him off the Lithium. Tho every now and again he'd hear what seemed to be the sounds of love making emanating from the kitchen . . . and the muffled sobs of a can of refried beans. Probably just the Mexican couple in the apartment upstairs. (From "Kitchen Cabinet Confidential")

I'm not sure if i believe in love at first sight or any of that shit. But i know that sitting there in a room with half-retarded motherfuckers drooling from their lithium and Trazodone, whatever I felt, it was close. Like I had this need to hold her, protect her bones from her parents or drugs or whatever wouldn't let her sleep and night, and i wanted her to think i was funny and sexy and smart and beautiful, just fucking beautiful. Sitting there while the tech introduced us to her, I wanted to be better than I was, not just to fuck this girl, but to be better for her. Guess that's a good enough definition of love.

June sent Jean to Southeast Louisiana Hospital, a by-all-accounts horrible asylum in Mandeville, where she was put on lithium. In 1966, when she was thirty-one, my grandmother Jean shot herself with a shotgun on her infant son’s grave, just over eight years after his death. I can’t imagine the grief that she must have felt.

What I mean is this: Prozac has rather minimal side effects, the lithium has a few more, but basically the pair keep me functioning as a sane human being, at least most of the time. And I can’t help feeling that anything that works so effectively, that’s so transformative, has got to be hurting me at another end, maybe sometime further down the road. I can just hear the words inoperable brain cancer being whispered to me by some physician twenty years from now.

They said downstairs the Parnate made me black out. It did a blood pressure thing. My mother heard noises upstairs and found me she said down on my side chewing the rug in my room. My room’s shag-carpeted. She said I was on the floor flushed red and all wet like when I was a newborn; she said she thought at first she hallucinated me as a newborn again. On my side all red and wet.' 'A hypertensive crisis will do that. It means your blood pressure was high enough to have killed you. Sertraline in combination with an MAOI2828 will kill you, in enough quantities. And with the toxicity of that much lithium besides, I'd say you're pretty lucky to be here right now.’ 'My mother sometimes thinks she's hallucinating.’ 'Sertraline, by the way, is the Zoloft you kept instead of discarding as instructed when changing medications.’ 'She says I chewed a big hole out of the carpet. But who can say.

A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity.

The uncomfortable, as well as the miraculous, fact about the human mind is how it varies from individual to individual. The process of treatment can therefore be long and complicated. Finding the right balance of drugs, whether lithium salts, anti-psychotics, SSRIs or other kinds of treatment can be a very hit or miss heuristic process requiring great patience and classy, caring doctoring. Some patients would rather reject the chemical path and look for ways of using diet, exercise and talk-therapy. For some the condition is so bad that ECT is indicated. One of my best friends regularly goes to a clinic for doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a treatment looked on by many as a kind of horrific torture that isn’t even understood by those who administer it. This friend of mine is just about one of the most intelligent people I have ever met and she says, “I know. It ought to be wrong. But it works. It makes me feel better. I sometimes forget my own name, but it makes me happier. It’s the only thing that works.” For her. Lord knows, I’m not a doctor, and I don’t understand the brain or the mind anything like enough to presume to judge or know better than any other semi-informed individual, but if it works for her…. well then, it works for her. Which is not to say that it will work for you, for me or for others.

for now, lithium and cobalt are all we have. To date they are the only materials we have sufficiently decoded to make rechargeable batteries out of at scale. We know that the “green” path we are on is unsustainable. We just don’t have a better one to consider until our materials science improves.

As much as he hated his lithium, here it was his friend. Leonard could feel the huge tide of sadness waiting to rush over him. But there was an invisible barrier keeping the full reality of it from touching him. It was like squeezing a baggie full of water and feeling all the properties of the liquid without getting wet.

Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving. Lithium helps cleave the proteins from DNA so people can wind down. Notice that sunlight still trumps lithium during the day and resets the proteins; it’s only when the sunlight goes away at night that lithium helps DNA shake free. Far from being sunshine in a pill, then, lithium acts as “anti-sunlight.” Neurologically, it undoes sunlight and thereby compresses the circadian clock back to twenty-four hours—preventing both the mania bubble from forming and the Black Tuesday crash into depression.

As the cosmos continues to cool—dropping below a hundred million degrees—protons fuse with protons as well as with neutrons, forming atomic nuclei and hatching a universe in which ninety percent of these nuclei are hydrogen and ten percent are helium, along with trace amounts of deuterium (“heavy” hydrogen), tritium (even heavier hydrogen), and lithium.

Mary Karr once wrote, “In the entire history of anxiety worldwide, telling someone to calm down has worked zero times.

Legend among crematory workers holds that the lithium batteries inside pacemakers explode in the cremation chamber if not removed.

Lithium isn’t for people who have bad moods. Lithium is for lifers.

Mogens Schou, a Danish psychiatrist who, more than anyone, is responsible for the introduction of lithium as a treatment for manic-depressive illness,

John Cade’s article about the use of lithium in acute mania first appeared in 1949, in an obscure Australian medical journal,

high altitude coupled with rigorous exercise can raise lithium levels. I became completely disoriented and totally incapable of navigating my way down the mountain.

Nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when it's gone, its like it was never there at all.

The humor, however, was a bit more in the recounting than in the actual living through it. Unfortunately, this resistance to taking lithium is played out in the lives of tens of thousands of patients every year.

Lithium regulates the proteins that control the body’s inner clock. This clock runs, oddly, on DNA, inside special neurons deep in the brain. Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls—at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants. This process goes awry in manic-depressives because the proteins, despite the lack of sunlight, remain bound fast to their DNA. Their brains don’t realize they should stop revving.

Apple will probably use a version of cobalt oxide operating at 4.35 volts and delivering about 165 milliampere hours per gram, a 22% improvement on the best lithium-​ion cobalt-​oxide batteries delivered in recent years.

The battery was a lithium thionyl chloride non-rechargeable. I figured that out from some subtle clues: the shape of the connection points, the thickness of the insulation, and the fact that it had "LiSOCl2 NON-RCHRG" written on it.

Possible Scandinavian-psychodrama parody, a boy helps his alcoholic-delusional father and disassociated mother dismantle their bed to search for rodents, and later he intuits the future feasibility of D.T.-cycle lithiumized annular fusion.

Take the lithium-ion batteries needed to power electric cars and store solar energy. Producing such batteries requires cobalt, cobalt that right now is being dug out of the ground by slaves in the Congo, including many children,70 some as young as four.

It turns out we haven't seen the show but I don't want to be tacky enough to bring up the fact I own one, so I lightly kick Courtney under the table. This raises her out of the lithium induced stupor and she says robotically, 'Patrick owns an Onica. He really does.

Los Angeles, brutal claustrophobic basin of delusion and ripoff, clutter, eerie, sticky, horrible. They came, they saw and wend blind. O hallucination of urban gray slabs. . . . Poor ruined sunsore and sadness for demented City of Angels, of white torment and hideous albino predator birds.

Something like that,” I said. “One of my mom’s boyfriends did yoga, and, god, it was so stupid-looking and irritating because we all had to be quiet while he did it, but he was the calmest motherfucker I’ve ever met in my life. Nothing my mom did would even faze him for a second. She ended up leaving him because he was too calm. She said—” “That’s fine, Lillian,” Carl said, cutting me off. “Anyway, we do yoga every morning. We teach them, I don’t know, like a mantra or something so they can calm themselves down.” “Why not just give them a ton of medication, lithium or something? Keep them at an enforced level?

In love, it’s the amount of time it takes for lovers to feel half of what they once did. When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when it’s gone, it’s like it was never there at all.

If the biochemists were able to demonstrate the physical workings of neuroses (phobias, or difficulties getting pleasure from life), if they could pinpoint the chemicals and impulses and interbrain conversations and information exchanges that constitute these feelings, would the psychoanalysts pack up their ids and egos and retire from the field? They have partially retired from the field. Depression, manic-depression, schizophrenia: All that stuff they always had trouble treating they now treat chemically. Take two Lithium and don’t call me in the morning because there’s nothing to say; it’s innate. Some cooperative efforts—the sort the brain makes—would be useful here.

A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be.

They’ve cranked up the lithium so high, I can hardly see straight. I feel like a robot, my feelings have completely evaporated and I couldn’t even say boo to a goose. I’m no danger to anyone.” “I’m not thinking you’re a danger to anyone.” “I’m no danger to myself, then.” Rami stops, spaghetti-laden fork halfway to his mouth. There is a long pause. “Are you sure about that?

The half-life of a substance is the time it takes for it to lose one half of its initial value. In nuclear physics, it’s the time it takes for unstable atoms to lose energy by emitting radiation. In biology, it usually refers to the time it takes to eliminate half of a substance (water, alcohol, pharmaceuticals) from the body. In chemistry, it is the time required to convert one half or a reactant (hydrogen or oxygen, for example) to product (water). In love, it’s the amount of time it takes for lovers to feel half of what they once did. When Natasha thinks about love, this is what she thinks: nothing lasts forever. Like hydrogen-7 or lithium-5 or boron-7, love has an infinitesimally small half-life that decays to nothing. And when it’s gone, it’s like it was never there at all.

I have often asked myself whether, given the choice, I would choose to have manic-depressive illness. If lithium were not available to me, or didn’t work for me, the answer would be a simple no—and it would be an answer laced with terror. But lithium does work for me, and therefore I suppose I can afford to pose the question. Strangely enough I think I would choose to have it. It’s complicated.

that country became a center for making mobile phone components and handsets. 5. The controller board is made in China because U.S. companies long ago transferred manufacture of printed circuit boards to Asia. 6. The lithium polymer battery is made in China because battery development and manufacturing migrated to China along with the development and manufacture of consumer electronics and notebook

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables. Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day I would be grounded, rooted. Said my head would not keep flying away to where the darkness lives. The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight. Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do. I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling. You will find a good man soon.” The first psycho therapist told me to spend three hours each day sitting in a dark closet with my eyes closed and ears plugged. I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet. The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth. Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness when they care more about what they give than what they get. The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.” The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me forget what the trauma said. The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems. Nobody wants to hear you cry about the grief inside your bones.” But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson River convinced he was entirely alone.” My bones said, “Write the poems.

In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium.

Incidentally, when it comes to 'unworkably quirky names for your baby', I believe that the greatest possible argument against teenagers becoming pregnant is that the baby names you like when you're, say, fifteen, single-handedly prove you're not ready for motherhood yet. My teenage diary records that, had I had a child in 1988, I would have called them either 'Kitten Lithium', 'K. T. Blue', 'Tatty Apple' or 'Aloyious Jonst'. Thank God my access to sperm was severely limited, to the amount of 'none'.

the universe began fourteen billion years ago with the emergence of elementary particles in the form of primordial plasma, which quickly morphed into atoms of hydrogen, helium, and lithium; a hundred million years later, galaxies began to appear, and in one of these, the Milky Way, minerals arranged themselves into living cells that constructed advanced life, including evergreen trees, coral reefs, and the vertebrate nervous systems that humans used to discover this entire sequence of universe development.

Los Angeles is like a white world, filled with ever smaller white circles, leading to some perfect white core. Los Angeles is where the angels with their white capped teeth and their white tennis dresses, gradually edged closer to the pure center, ambrosia, the fountain of youth.

But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.

Soranus of Ephesus (AD 98–138) seems to have discovered lithium as a cure for manic depression by recommending that severely disturbed patients be treated with the alkaline waters of the town, which contained high levels of lithium salts. A more radical approach consisted of a pioneering form of electric shock treatment: the Greeks used the ‘electric torpedo’, or eels, as a cure for headaches, believing that ‘the touch of a living torpedo stupefied or blunted the acute sense of pain’. An oil was prepared from the dead fish for use when no live ones were available.

As his psychotherapist for years, I had been privy to his dreams and fears, hopeful and then ruined relationships, grandiose and then shattered plans for the future. I had seen his remarkable resilience, personal courage, and wit; I liked and respected him enormously. But I also had been increasingly frustrated by his repeated refusals to take medication. I could, from my own experience, understand his concerns about taking lithium, but only up to a point; past that point, I was finding it very difficult to watch him go through such predictable, painful, and unnecessary recurrences of his illness.

Once I started seeing the college clinic psychiatrist, he pulled out my blood and showed me what was really in it, glanced at each trace mineral in the lab results, each lurking marker, but his eyes were focused on the good stuff, the chemicals he'd put there. I don't know if I believe in "Indian blood," but at times, I have wished I could test positive for it when the phlebotomist pulled my blood every month, checking to make sure my lithium levels aren't high enough to pickle my kidneys. Instead, the doctor only ever reads off results that sound like the bottom of a deep quarry, as though my body collects stones.

Los Angeles. . . . It was some sort of organic ruin, an accident of architecture and brutal necessity. The iridescence was somehow almost legible, suggesting a calligraphy of exposed bone, transparencies, experimental skin grafts. The blood of Los Angeles was a red neon wash, a kind of sea of autistic traffic lights.

I’ve always lived here, by the sea. I was a beach brat. I was born riding the peak of a crest of a wave. I was born with salt in my eyes. No, I mean it. I was conceived right down there on that beach. Six years old and surfing. It’s all that sea in me. That’s what makes my eyes change color. I’ve got waves inside. The ocean runs through me, man.

Swords, Guns and AI Technology will take us far, far and farther, until it dumps us back where we came from, in the caves, but of concrete ruins. We will once again fight with spears and axes, made of broken bits of chips and circuit boards. Silicon, lithium, gold, all will be worthless, apes will barter again with sheep and boars. Yesterday's world was obsessed with swords, today's world is obsessed with guns, tomorrow's world will be obsessed with AI, and it always ends up with death and destruction. Day after tomorrow it'll be business as usual, savage world will be back obsessing with fire, then again with swords, then guns, and so on, till the sky pours ashes and seas boil over.

Moon. Big white moon. White as milk moon. You’re all I can see from my window, here in the dark. Your light falls silver and white across the walls of my cell. The night-tide surges strong in me. So strong I can feel the grip of their drugs loosen. They fancy themselves high priests. Their gods have names like Thorazine and Lithium and Shock Therapy. But their gods are new and weak and cannot hope to contain me much longer. For I am the handiwork of far more powerful, far more ancient deities. Very soon my blood will learn the secret of the inhibiting factors the white-coated shamans pump into my veins. And then things will be very different, my beautiful moon. My white big moon. White as milk moon. Red as blood

I for many years after my initial diagnosis was reluctant to take my medications as prescribed. Why was I so unwilling? Why did it take having to go through more episodes of mania, followed by long suicidal depressions, before I would take lithium in a medically sensible way? Some of my reluctance, no doubt, stemmed from a fundamental denial that what I had was a real disease. This is a common reaction that follows, rather counter-intuitively, in the wake of early episodes of manic-depressive illness. Moods are such an essential part of the substance of life, of one’s notion of oneself, that even psychotic extremes in mood and behavior somehow can be seen as temporary, even understandable, reactions to what life has dealt.

In the first lively second (a second that many cosmologists will devote careers to shaving into ever-finer wafers) is produced gravity and the other forces that govern physics. In less than a minute the universe is a million billion miles across and growing fast. There is a lot of heat now, ten billion degrees of it, enough to begin the nuclear reactions that create the lighter elements—principally hydrogen and helium, with a dash (about one atom in a hundred million) of lithium. In three minutes, 98 percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.

RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.

The neutrons, as we have said and as their name suggests, carry no electrical charge. The protons have a positive charge and the electrons an equal negative charge. The attraction between the unlike charges of electrons and protons is what holds the atom together. Since each atom is electrically neutral, the number of protons in the nucleus must exactly equal the number of electrons in the electron cloud. The chemistry of an atom depends only on the number of electrons, which equals the number of protons, and which is called the atomic number. Chemistry is simply numbers, an idea Pythagoras would have liked. If you are an atom with one proton, you are hydrogen; two, helium; three, lithium; four, beryllium; five, boron; six, carbon; seven, nitrogen; eight, oxygen; and so on, up to 92 protons, in which case your name is uranium.

There are only two states of polarization available to electrons, so in an atom with three protons in the nucleus exchanging photons with three electrons-a condition called a lithium atom-the third electron is farther away from the nucleus than the other two (which have used up the nearest available space), and exchanges fewer photons. This causes the electron to easily break away from its own nucleus under the influence of photons from other atoms. A large number of such atoms close together easily lose their individual third electrons to form a sea of electrons swimming around from atom to atom. This sea of electrons reacts to any small electrical force (photons), generating a current of electrons-I am describing lithium metal conducting electricity. Hydrogen and helium atoms do not lose their electrons to other atoms. They are "insulators." All the atoms-more than one hundred different kinds-are made up of a certain number of protons exchanging photons with the same number of electrons. The patterns in which they gather are complicated and offer an enormous variety of properties: some are metals, some are insulators, some are gases, others are crystals; there are soft things, hard things, colored things, and transparent things-a terrific cornucopia of variety and excitement that comes from the exclusion principle and the repetition again and again and again of the three very simple actions P(A to B), E(A to B), and j. (If the electrons in the world were unpolarized, all the atoms would have very similar properties: the electrons would all cluster together, close to the nucleus of their own atom, and would not be easily attracted to other atoms to make chemical reactions.)

A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be. Most cars—EVs included—are driven during the day. That means they charge at night, when solar-generated electricity cannot be part of the fuel mix.*

He seems so drugged up and slow. I miss his laughter, his impulsiveness, his wacky sense of humour, even his obsessive practicing. It makes me wonder who he actually is. If the old Flynn was ill – courtesy of a chemical imbalance in the brain – is this lithiumed Flynn the real MyCoy? Or perhaps both characters are just facets of a hidden, deeper soul that I have yet to meet. I just don’t know. Sometimes I fear that the drug-free Flynn searingly manic, then catastrophically depressed – is who he really is. But because in that form he is not acceptable to conventional society, he has to be drugged so that his emotions are tempered and his behavior controlled. Perhaps we are blindly living in an Orwellian society where individualism is feared and the biggest pressure is the one to conform. Perhaps Flynn is sane and the rest of the world is mad. The thoughts go round and round in my head.

Theta programming, Phillips said, "involved the surgical implantation of sodium/lithium powered high frequency receiver/transducers coupled to a multi-range discharge capacitor that , when signaled by remote control would electronically stimulate designated parts of the brain to signal the victim to respond according to his or her hypnotic program. "These "Delgado" experiments were only partially successful," Phillips said, "with a high mortality and paralysis rate. However, the technical mind control equipment evolution has advanced to levels well beyond the grasp of most people. Non-implanted, non-programmed victims will hold the largest majority since, in the 1990's breakthroughs were made which allow mind control without either implant or trauma base". The new Theta programming," Phillips said, "operates by computer driven satellite directed energy. Now, anybody can become a target of the new technology.

My father is taking me to my first baseball game. The Philadelphia Athletics are playing. I feel I've been sitting on my strange hard seat for a long time. I stand up. It is the National Anthem. "I want to go home now," I tell my father. He is looking down at the big green field. "But the game hasn't started yet," he says. Then he shrugs. He laughs and his laughter is big like the wind. "O.K., kid. O.K." And he takes my by the hand and leads me out of the stadium.

The way we define their problems, our diagnosis, will determine how we approach their care. Such patients typically receive five or six different unrelated diagnoses in the course of their psychiatric treatment. If their doctors focus on their mood swings, they will be defined as bipolar and prescribed lithium or valproate. If the professionals are most impressed with their despair, they will be told they are suffering from major depression and given antidepressants. If the doctors focus on their restlessness and lack of attention, they may be categorized as ADHD and treated with Ritalin or other stimulants. And if the clinic staff happens to take a trauma history, and the patient actually volunteers the relevant information, he or she might receive the diagnosis of PTSD. None of the diagnoses will be completely off the mark, and none of them will begin to meaningfully describe who these patients are and what they suffer from.

During the past decade, observant readers have seen many news items about stunning breakthroughs in battery designs, but I cannot find any ever-accelerating growth in the performance of these portable energy storage devices in the past fifty years. In 1900 the best battery (lead-acid) had an energy density of 25 watt-hours per kilogram; in 2022 the best lithium-ion batteries deployed on a large commercial scale (not the best experimental devices) had an energy density twelve times higher—and this gain corresponds to exponential growth of just 2 percent a year. That is very much in line with the growth of performances of many other industrial techniques and devices—and an order of magnitude below Moore’s law expectations. Moreover, even batteries with ten times the 2022 (commercial) energy density (that is, approaching 3,000 Wh/kg) would store only about a quarter of the energy contained in a kilogram of kerosene, making it clear that jetliners energized by batteries are not on any practical horizon.

Was it real? Well, of course not, not in any meaningful sense of the word "real." But did it stay with me? Absolutely. Long after my psychosis cleared, and the medications took hold, it became part of what one remembers forever, surrounded by an almost Proustian melancholy. Long since that voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on an elegiac beauty, and I don't see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute sadness at its being so far away from me. So unobtainable in so many ways. the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness of my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe, once I was better, that the illness was one I should willingly give up. Even though I was a clinician and a scientist, and even though I could read the research literature and see the inevitable, bleak consequences of not taking lithium, I for many years after my initial diagnosis was reluctant to take my medications as prescribed." An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison Pages 90 - 91, 2nd paragraph.

THE SPEED OF TIME VARIED, fast or slow, depending on the depth of my sleep. I became very sensitive to the taste of the water from the tap. Sometimes it was cloudy and tasted of soft minerals. Other times it was gassy and tasted like somebody’s bad breath. My favorite days were the ones that barely registered. I’d catch myself not breathing, slumped on the sofa, staring at an eddy of dust tumbling across the hardwood floor in the draft, and I’d remember that I was alive for a second, then fade back out. Achieving that state took heavy dosages of Seroquel or lithium combined with Xanax, and Ambien or trazodone, and I didn’t want to overuse those prescriptions. There was a fine mathematics for how to mete out sedation. The goal for most days was to get to a point where I could drift off easily, and come to without being startled. My thoughts were banal. My pulse was casual. Only the coffee made my heart work a bit harder. Caffeine was my exercise. It catalyzed my anxiety so that I could crash and sleep again. The movies I cycled through the most were The Fugitive, Frantic, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, and Burglar. I loved Harrison Ford and Whoopi Goldberg.

...even though [my psychiatrist] understood mor than anyone how much I felt I was losing--in energy, vivacity, and originality--by taking medication, he never was seduced into losing sight of the overall perspective of how costly, damaging, and life threatening my illness was. He was at ease with ambiguity, had a comfort with complexity, and was able to be decisive in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. He treated me with respect, a decisive professionalism, wit, and an unshakable belief in my ability to get well, compete, and make a difference. Although I went to him to be treated for an illness, he taught me, by example, for my own patients, the total beholdenness of brain to mind and mind to brain. My temperament, moods, and illness clearly, and deeply, affected the relationships I had with others in the fabric of my work. But my moods were themselves powerfully shaped by the same relationships and work. The challenge was learning to understand the complexity of this mutual beholdenness and in learning to distinguish the roles of lithium, will, and insight in getting well and leading a meaningful life. It was the task and gift of psychotherapy.

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach....During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony..... But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

Let us pause for a moment and consider the structure of the atom as we know it now. Every atom is made from three kinds of elementary particles: protons, which have a positive electrical charge; electrons, which have a negative electrical charge; and neutrons, which have no charge. Protons and neutrons are packed into the nucleus, while electrons spin around outside. The number of protons is what gives an atom its chemical identity. An atom with one proton is an atom of hydrogen, one with two protons is helium, with three protons is lithium, and so on up the scale. Each time you add a proton you get a new element. (Because the number of protons in an atom is always balanced by an equal number of electrons, you will sometimes see it written that it is the number of electrons that defines an element; it comes to the same thing. The way it was explained to me is that protons give an atom its identity, electrons its personality.) Neutrons don't influence an atom's identity, but they do add to its mass. The number of neutrons is generally about the same as the number of protons, but they can vary up and down slightly. Add a neutron or two and you get an isotope. The terms you hear in reference to dating techniques in archeology refer to isotopes—carbon-14, for instance, which is an atom of carbon with six protons and eight neutrons (the fourteen being the sum of the two). Neutrons and protons occupy the atom's nucleus. The nucleus of an atom is tiny—only one millionth of a billionth of the full volume of the atom—but fantastically dense, since it contains virtually all the atom's mass. As Cropper has put it, if an atom were expanded to the size of a cathedral, the nucleus would be only about the size of a fly—but a fly many thousands of times heavier than the cathedral. It was this spaciousness—this resounding, unexpected roominess—that had Rutherford scratching his head in 1910. It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world—billiard balls are most often used for illustration—they don't actually strike each other. “Rather,” as Timothy Ferris explains, “the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other . . . were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.” When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter), your electrons and its electrons implacably opposed to any closer intimacy.

Another common form of mental illness is bipolar disorder, in which a person suffers from extreme bouts of wild, delusional optimism, followed by a crash and then periods of deep depression. Bipolar disorder also seems to run in families and, curiously, strikes frequently in artists; perhaps their great works of art were created during bursts of creativity and optimism. A list of creative people who were afflicted by bipolar disorder reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities, musicians, artists, and writers. Although the drug lithium seems to control many of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, the causes are not entirely clear. One theory states that bipolar disorder may be caused by an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. Dr. Michael Sweeney notes, “Brain scans have led researchers to generally assign negative emotions such as sadness to the right hemisphere and positive emotions such as joy to the left hemisphere. For at least a century, neuroscientists have noticed a link between damage to the brain’s left hemisphere and negative moods, including depression and uncontrollable crying. Damage to the right, however, has been associated with a broad array of positive emotions.” So the left hemisphere, which is analytical and controls language, tends to become manic if left to itself. The right hemisphere, on the contrary, is holistic and tends to check this mania. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran writes, “If left unchecked, the left hemisphere would likely render a person delusional or manic.… So it seems reasonable to postulate a ‘devil’s advocate’ in the right hemisphere that allows ‘you’ to adopt a detached, objective (allocentric) view of yourself.” If human consciousness involves simulating the future, it has to compute the outcomes of future events with certain probabilities. It needs, therefore, a delicate balance between optimism and pessimism to estimate the chances of success or failures for certain courses of action. But in some sense, depression is the price we pay for being able to simulate the future. Our consciousness has the ability to conjure up all sorts of horrific outcomes for the future, and is therefore aware of all the bad things that could happen, even if they are not realistic. It is hard to verify many of these theories, since brain scans of people who are clinically depressed indicate that many brain areas are affected. It is difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem, but among the clinically depressed, activity in the parietal and temporal lobes seems to be suppressed, perhaps indicating that the person is withdrawn from the outside world and living in their own internal world. In particular, the ventromedial cortex seems to play an important role. This area apparently creates the feeling that there is a sense of meaning and wholeness to the world, so that everything seems to have a purpose. Overactivity in this area can cause mania, in which people think they are omnipotent. Underactivity in this area is associated with depression and the feeling that life is pointless. So it is possible that a defect in this area may be responsible for some mood swings.

Dr. Peter Breggin is an American psychiatrist, often referred to as ‘the conscience of psychiatry’. On his website Peter Breggin writes, ‘All psychiatric drugs have the potential to cause withdrawal reactions, including the antidepressants, stimulants, tranquillisers, antipsychotic drugs and ‘mood stabilizers’ such lithium.

Justine was pretty enough, and sweet enough, when she wasn’t walking the razor’s edge of an organic emotional instability—but I couldn’t really hold that against her. Plenty of people have to take some kind of medication to keep stable. Lithium, supermodel sex vampires—whatever works, I guess.

It was simple. A door opened. A crevice was torn in the fabric. Something entered. It stalked. It was a hunter. It was hungry but mindless as a shark. It would take anything. It was enormous.

growth of both solar power and electric cars, there’s now a bigger need for better energy storage systems, resulting in a next generation of lithium-ion batteries with increased range, and, as an added bonus, enough power to lift flying cars.

the ability to move from idea and invention to technologies and innovation and finally into the marketplace. This is not something that necessarily happens fast—energy is not software. After all, the lithium battery was invented in the middle 1970s but took more than three decades before beginning to power cars on the road. The modern solar photovoltaics and wind industries began in the early 1970s but did not begin to attain scale until after 2010. Yet the pace of innovation is accelerating, as is the focus, owing in part to the climate agenda and government support, in part to decisions by investors, in the part to the collaboration of different kinds of companies and innovators, and in part to the convergence of technologies and capabilities—from digital to new materials to artificial intelligence and machine learning to business models and more.

When I am high I couldn’t worry about money if I tried. So I don’t. The money will come from somewhere; I am entitled; God will provide. Credit cards are disastrous, personal checks worse. Unfortunately, for manics anyway, mania is a natural extension of the economy. What with credit cards and bank accounts there is little beyond reach. So I bought twelve snakebite kits, with a sense of urgency and importance. I bought precious stones, elegant and unnecessary furniture, three watches within an hour of one another (in the Rolex rather than Timex class: champagne tastes bubble to the surface, are the surface, in mania), and totally inappropriate sirenlike clothes. During one spree in London I spent several hundred pounds on books having titles or covers that somehow caught my fancy: books on the natural history of the mole, twenty sundry Penguin books because I thought it could be nice if the penguins could form a colony. Once I think I shoplifted a blouse because I could not wait a minute longer for the woman-with-molasses feet in front of me in line. Or maybe I just thought about shoplifting, I don’t remember, I was totally confused. I imagine I must have spent far more than thirty thousand dollars during my two major manic episodes, and God only knows how much more during my frequent milder manias. But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn’t fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you’re given excellent reason to be even more so.

Years from now, when all the vehicles are electric, when tens of millions of acres of Earth’s surface have been destroyed by open-pit mining for the enormous quantities of lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper required for EVs, when thousands of new landfills have been crammed full of batteries that can’t be recycled and are leaking horrifying toxins into the water table, when thousands of square miles of windmills have made extinct hundreds of species of birds with disastrous environmental effects, I will still—always, always—remember this special and exhilarating night, chauffeuring you two hither and yon in the dogged pursuit of justice, my destiny buddies.

airship smash,” replied the lad, somewhat proudly. “It’s an oxide of nickel battery, with steel and oxide of iron negative electrodes.” “What solution do you use, Tom?” asked Mr. Swift. “I didn’t get that far in questioning you before the crash came,” he added. “Well I have, in the experimental battery, a solution of potassium hydrate,” replied the lad, “but I think I’m going to change it, and add some lithium hydrate to it. I think that will make it stronger.” “Bless my watch chain!” exclaimed Mr. Damon.

There’s nothing quite so invigorating, so freeing, as piloting a gasoline-powered vehicle along an open road. Years from now, when all the vehicles are electric, when tens of millions of acres of Earth’s surface have been destroyed by open-pit mining for the enormous quantities of lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper required for EVs, when thousands of new landfills have been crammed full of batteries that can’t be recycled and are leaking horrifying toxins into the water table, when thousands of square miles of windmills have made extinct hundreds of species of birds with disastrous environmental effects, I will still—always, always—remember this special and exhilarating night, chauffeuring you two hither and yon in the dogged pursuit of justice, my destiny buddies.

Power levels were dropped so low that even voice communications were difficult. Removing carbon dioxide from the air was another serious problem. Lithium hydroxide normally did the job but there wasn’t enough of it. The only additional supply they had was in the Command Module, and its canisters were cube-shaped whereas the Lunar Module’s sockets were cylindrical. It looked like the men would suffocate before they made it back. In one of the most inspired brainstorming sessions of all time, engineers on the ground got out all the kit that the crew would have available. They then improvised a ‘mailbox’ that would join the two incompatible connections and draw the air through. The air was becoming more poisonous with every breath as the astronauts followed the meticulous radio instructions to build the Heath Robinson repair. Amazingly, it worked. They would have enough clean air. But they weren’t out of the woods yet. They needed to re-enter the atmosphere in the Command Module, but it had been totally shut down to preserve its power. Would it start up again? Its systems hadn’t been designed to do this. Again, engineers and crew on the ground had to think on their feet if their friends were to live. They invented an entirely new protocol that would power the ship back up with the limited power supply and time available without blowing the system. They also feared that condensation in the unpowered and freezing cold Command Module might damage electrical systems when it was reactivated. It booted up first time. Back to Earth with a splash With Apollo 13 nearing Earth, the crew jettisoned the Service Module and photographed the damage for later analysis. Then they jettisoned the redundant Lunar Module, leaving them sitting tight in the Command Module Odyssey as they plunged into the atmosphere.

CATL and BYD in China; LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK Innovation in South Korea; and Panasonic in Japan. In 2021, these six companies produced 86 percent of the world’s lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, with CATL alone holding a one-third global share.

There’s nothing quite so invigorating, so freeing, as piloting a gasoline-powered vehicle along an open road. Years from now, when all the vehicles are electric, when tens of millions of acres of Earth’s surface have been destroyed by open-pit mining for the enormous quantities of lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper required for EVs, when thousands of new landfills have been crammed full of batteries that can’t be recycled and are leaking horrifying toxins into the water table, when thousands of square miles of windmills have made extinct hundreds of species of birds with disastrous environmental effects, I will still—always, always—remember this special and exhilarating night,

Anna Fels. “Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?” The New York Times (Sept. 13, 2014).

Gasoline has eighty times the energy density of the best lithium ion batteries.

Years from now, when all the vehicles are electric, when tens of millions of acres of Earth’s surface have been destroyed by open-pit mining for the enormous quantities of lithium and cobalt and nickel and copper required for EVs, when thousands of new landfills have been crammed full of batteries that can’t be recycled and are leaking horrifying toxins into the water table, when thousands of square miles of windmills have made extinct hundreds of species of birds with disastrous environmental effects,

One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement. Obviously, they are not the same sort of inventions: the solar panel (and its cousins the wind turbine and the lithium-ion battery) is hardware,

How do you know? You said lithium didn’t work for some people. It’s not working for me!’ ‘Till the end of the month,’ Dr Stefan said evenly. ‘If there’s no change by then, we’ll try cutting the dose.’ ‘That’s another ten days! What do you care – you’re not the one taking it! That means I have to endure another ten days of hell, walking around like an idiot, bumping into things, forgetting the end of my sentences, feeling only half-alive! How am I supposed to believe this is going to work if it makes me feel like this? Why should I believe a word that you say?’ Dr Stefan smiled slightly. ‘Because, Flynn, this is the most animated I’ve ever seen you. I would venture to say that you’re beginning, just beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel.’ Flynn narrowed his eyes in contempt. ‘Well if that’s the case, then, to quote Robert Lowell, it must be the light of the oncoming train.’ Dr Stefan threw his head back and roared with laughter.

sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium

Lastly, I’ll need a charger. The same vendor on AliExpress that I got my BMS from, Greentime, also sells chargers. I’ll select a 42.2 V charger, as that’s the appropriate voltage for my 10s li-ion battery. An aluminum shell charger rated for 2 A charging will do nicely. That should give me about 5-6 hours for a full charge. Plenty of time for my needs. If I wanted a faster charger though, I can choose anything up to 4.5 A, as my cells are rated for around 1.5 A each for charging current. I don’t want to push them too hard though, so 2 A total is fine for me. And that’s it! That’s all I need to

As Ben Parker said, “with great power comes great responsibility”. You’ve been given the knowledge,

It is fair to say the attendees of the carnival-like conference just outside Miami took little note of McNabb’s consternation. Investors have in recent years been able to buy niche, “thematic” ETFs that purport to benefit from—deep breath—the global obesity epidemic; online gaming; the rise of millennials; the whiskey industry; robotics; artificial intelligence; clean energy; solar energy; autonomous driving; uranium mining; better female board representation; cloud computing; genomics technology; social media; marijuana farming; toll roads in the developing world; water purification; reverse-weighted US stocks; health and fitness; organic food; elderly care; lithium batteries; drones; and cybersecurity. There was even briefly an ETF that invested in the stocks of companies exposed to the ETF industry. Some of these more experimental funds gain traction, but many languish and are eventually liquidated, the money recycled into the latest hot fad.

Pound for pound, the best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline.

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Batteries: The Key to a Renewable Future Modern civilization depends upon a constant, reliable stream of energy. However, renewables such as wind and solar are notoriously intermittent; wind depends on the whim of nature, and solar power dries up as the sun goes down. Batteries solve this problem by storing excess power generated throughout the day and supplying it in the absence of sunlight or wind. In addition, batteries respond well to high electricity demands, help lower energy costs, and ensure reliability. They are the most crucial components in any clean power future. Power storage is a much more difficult technological problem than power generation. From lithium ion to rechargeable flow, inventors and developers have experimented with many new ideas. There is not yet a magic bullet to solve our power storing needs. The good news, however, is that in the past decade, batteries have made great strides in capacity and lower prices. This is due in part to the electric vehicle industry, which relies heavily on efficient lithium ion batteries. In 2016, Tesla Inc. began manufacturing its Powerwall and Powerpack energy products at its Gigafactory, currently the world’s largest lithium ion battery factory. The goal of the plant is to drive down the cost of the company’s electric vehicle and energy storage batteries while also spurring innovation. Doing so, according to the company, will make renewable energy storage a more accessible and viable option.

Using the standard model of elementary particles, we know how to follow the course of nuclear reactions in the standard "big bang" theory of the universe well enough to be able to calculate that the matter formed in the first few minutes of the universe was about three- quarters hydrogen and one-quarter helium, with only a trace of other elements, chiefly very light ones like lithium. This is the raw material out of which heavier elements were later formed in stars. Calculations of the subsequent course of nuclear reactions in stars show that the elements that are most abundantly produced are those whose nuclei are most tightly bound, and these elements include carbon, oxygen, and calcium. The stars dump this material into the interstellar medium in various ways, in stellar winds and supernova explosions, and it is out of this medium, rich in the constituents of chalk, that second-generation stars like the sun and their planets were formed. But this scenario still depends on a historical assumption-that there was a more-or-less homogenous big bang, with about ten billion photons for every quark. Efforts are being made to explain this assumption in various speculative cosmological theories, but these theories rest in turn on other historical assumptions.

While he recognized that you were unhappy and unwell, I think he couldn't help but feel that there was some part of you, some part bound inextricably to your illness, that everybody could do with a little more of. Not the melancholy, of course, or even the capacity for quips and one-liners ("Give me lithium or give me death," remember?). Perhaps it was just what he more than once described as a mixture in you of acuity and romanticism that made most other people's versions of sanity appear hollow compromises, or evasions.

GGMM E5 has built-in high capacity rechargeable lithium-ion battery that supports 15 hours of playtime at 20 Watts output.

that a lithium ion battery stores 0.54 megajoules of energy per kilogram, while body fat stores 38 megajoules, and kerosene contains 43 megajoules

Krissa had since learned a great deal about the drug Lithium and was now aware of how controversial it was.

Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?” The New York Times (Sept. 13, 2014).

akkuformal.com - Notebook-Akku Asus A32-K72, Lithium-Ionen (LiIon), 48Wh , 10.80 V, Farbe Schwarz, passend für A32-K72.

Non c’era tempo da perdere. Iniziai a correre per il vicolo che portava alla strada del college. Avrei solo controllato il suo stato, una controllata veloce e poi… poi me ne sarei andato. Andato per sempre stavolta. St. Jillian non era più casa mia e mai più lo sarebbe stata. Dovevo solo essere certo che lei fosse viva, solo che lei… lei… Due fari accecanti. Una frenata assordante. Mi girai automaticamente. Le mani contro il parabrezza bloccarono l’avanzata del maggiolone verde. I suoi occhi. I suoi occhi. I suoi occhi.

The weightless rhetoric of digital technology masks a refusal to acknowledge the people and resources on which these systems depend: lithium and coltan mines, energy-guzzling data centers and server farms, suicidal workers at Apple’s Foxconn factories, and women and children in developing countries and incarcerated Americans up to their necks in toxic electronic waste.2 The swelling demand for precious metals, used in everything from video-game consoles to USB cables to batteries, has increased political instability in some regions, led to unsafe, unhealthy, and inhumane working conditions, opened up new markets for child and forced labor, and encouraged environmentally destructive extraction techniques.3 It is estimated that mining the gold necessary to produce a single cell phone—only one mineral of many required for the finished product—produces upward of 220 pounds of waste.4

We pulled into a wooded lot and parked next to a bulletin board that said 'We Are a Clothing Optional Resort.' The springs steamed behind wet steps. Kiosk notices alerted us to internecine management conflicts, meditation workshops, the healing power of lithium. Women walked by with breasts that left you feeling conflicted. Testicles dangled. I had never even been to a hot spring with bathing suits. The grower went to the bathroom while I purchased day passes with my SAT earnings. 'It's explained in the guidebook, but these are holy waters,' said the guy at the front desk. He had a half-shaved head and a t-shirt that said 'Question Male Privilege.' He handed me a guidebook as thick as a course packet. 'So we prefer you not speak, eat, or engage in sexual congress. No passion in the pools.

By 1900, electric delivery wagons, trucks, buses, ambulances, and taxis were roaming city streets across the country.

Today, cell phones use lithium-ion batteries, which aren’t subject to the same confusing requirements. You can safely recharge them at any time, regardless of whether they’re partially charged.

The battery was a lithium thionyl chloride nonrechargeable. I figured that out from some subtle clues: the shape of the connection points, the thickness of the insulation, and the fact that it had “LiSOCl2 NON-RCHRG” written on it.

the fewer times you charge the phone, the better, because the lithium ion batteries in phones, laptops, and other devices will start to wear out after a few hundred charges.

U.S. scientists said they have invented a cheap, long-lasting and flexible battery made of aluminum for use in smartphones that can be charged in as little as one minute. The researchers, who detailed their discovery in the journal Nature, said the new aluminum-ion battery has the potential to replace lithium-ion batteries, used in

A Note About Hunger It is almost impossible to describe the hunger caused by many bipolar disorder drugs. It is virtually insatiable—just as thirst can be insatiable with lithium. There are few things you can do about it. Weight gain is often inevitable, even when you eat less and exercise more. This is because some medications appear to change metabolic rates—how fast your body burns calories. Reducing caloric intake helps, but for some people it’s often not a very successful option, especially with antipsychotic drugs and mood stabilizers such as Tegretol and Depakote. It is not abnormal for someone to gain fifty pounds on these drugs. Then there are some who do not gain weight at all and simply stop eating. It is a very complicated issue. The important thing is to not blame yourself. If

one of the dirty little secrets of the green revolution is that it requires some very grubby mineral extraction. Rare earth metals, cobalt, lithium, and other minerals are essential to batteries, magnets, and other advanced industrial applications. If the future of tech is green, it’s also red.

A true shift to a carbon-neutral power system would require the capacity to camel not hours, but months of electricity for the seasons that are not as windy or sunny. We don’t know everything about the world of energy, but we know for certain that there is not enough lithium ore on the entire planet to enable a rich country like the United States to achieve such a goal, much less the world writ large.

Early on, advocates of big bang cosmology realized that the universe is evolutionary. In the words of one famous cosmologist, George Gamov, “We conclude that the relative abundances of atomic species represent the most ancient archaeological document pertaining to the history of the universe.” In other words, the periodic table is evidence of the evolution of matter, and atoms can testify to the history of the cosmos. But early versions of big bang cosmology held that all the elements of the universe were fused in one fell swoop. As Gamov puts it, “These abundances …” meaning the ratio of the elements (heaps of hydrogen, hardly any gold—that kind of thing), “… must have been established during the earliest stages of expansion, when the temperature of the primordial matter was still sufficiently high to permit nuclear transformations to run through the entire range of chemical elements.” It was a neat idea, but very wrong. Only hydrogen, helium, and a dash of lithium could have formed in the big bang. All of the elements heavier than lithium were made much later, by being fused in evolving and exploding stars. How do we know this? Because at the same time some scholars were working on the big bang theory, others were trying to ditch the big bang altogether. Its association with thermonuclear devices made it seem hasty, and its implied mysterious origins tainted it with creationism. And so, a rival camp of cosmologists developed an alternate theory: the Steady State. The Steady State held that the universe had always existed. And always will. Matter is created out of the vacuum of space itself. Steady State theorists, working against the big bang and its flaws, were obliged to wonder where in the cosmos the chemical elements might have been cooked up, if not in the first few minutes of the universe. Their answer: in the furnaces of the very stars themselves. They found a series of nuclear chain reactions at work in the stars. First, they discovered how fusion had made elements heavier than carbon. Then, they detailed eight fusion reactions through which stars convert light elements into heavy ones, to be recycled into space through stellar winds and supernovae. And so, it’s the inside of stars where the alchemist’s dream comes true. Every gram of gold began billions of years ago, forged out of the inside of an exploding star in a supernova. The gold particles lost into space from the explosion mixed with rocks and dust to form part of the early Earth. They’ve been lying in wait ever since.

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I’m not fucking anyone else at the moment, so why not?” Ryder grinned. “That was the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me.

Old Jamie wasn’t the type to duck and run, she confronted things head on. Then again, old Jamie would have been face down and ass up within twenty minutes of meeting a guy like Ryder.

Quinn’s dad narrowed his eyes at Javi, and Javi smirked. He could see the disgust in them. He wondered how he’d react if he knew Javi was the one to break his daughter’s hymen.

All that stuff will come when the time is right. You can’t rush the climb.” “Did you just quote Miley Cyrus, motherfucker?

Otherwise, I’m great with kids.” “Hmm, you do like cereal, cartoons, and video games.

There were two types of women in the world: ones who drank expensive cocktails at restaurants that boasted local and organic produce, and ones who took their whiskey neat and ate pussy like porn stars. Jamie Manning was firmly and resolutely in the second category.

We should get you cleaned up,” he smirked, oddly proud of the fact that his semen dripped down her thighs. “You’re not sorry,” she grinned, “fucking, possessive asshole.” “You’re right, I’m not.

Javi: So what time should we be there? CT: In the amount of time it would take Ryder to fuck his wife’s “vagina” three times. Javi: Five minutes…got it.

Kensie wasn’t risking a future with Trey for the great love of her life, she was risking it all for a drummer with a big dick.

I have to admit I like this cocktail much better than the one made of Prozac and lithium.

This brief account of controlled fusion efforts would not be complete without going back to 1989. Early in that year came (in a press conference and in a brief paper in the Journal of Electroanalytical Chemistry) a radical departure from the decades of news concerning advances in the quest for controlled thermonuclear power. Two physicists at the University of Utah, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, claimed they had succeeded in fusing deuterium nuclei at room temperature in a test tube. Electrolysis of a lithium salt solution led so many deuterium atoms to absorb into a palladium electrode that some of their nuclei appeared to fuse, producing net energy (above that supplied for electrolysis), as well as neutron and gamma ray emissions, clear signs of a process previously attainable only under starlike conditions, and proof of what the press soon called cold fusion.

Kensie was fucking her boyfriend’s-brother’s-fiancée’s-brother. There had to be an episode of Jerry Springer in there somewhere.

On lithium a woman who had been manic every May for the past thirty-five years, and suicidally depressed every November, stopped cycling and remained stable for the three years she was under my care.

Lithium ion anodes have been developed that use lithiated carbons to temper the reactivity of lithium metal

The Keeling Curve is a useful reality check, one that cuts through all the noise and confusion of the climate and energy debates. Unlike the slopes of the huge volcano on which it is measured, the initially gentle upward curve gets steeper the higher you go. That means that the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is steadily increasing, from roughly 1 ppm in the early years to about 2 ppm annually today. There is no visible slowdown, no sudden downwards blip, to mark the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, still less 2009’s Copenhagen ‘two degrees’ commitment or the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015. All those smiling heads of state shaking hands, the diplomats hugging on the podium after marathon sessions of all-night negotiating – none of that actually made any identifiable difference to the Keeling Curve, which is the only thing that actually matters to the planet’s temperature. All our solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, lithium-ion batteries, LED lightbulbs, nuclear plants, biogas digesters, press conferences, declarations, pieces of paper; all our shouting and arguing, weeping and marching, reporting and ignoring, decrying and denying; all our speeches, movies, websites, lectures and books; our announcements, carbon-neutral targets, moments of joy and despair; none of these to date have so much as made the slightest dent in the steepening upward slope of the Keeling Curve.

The other major domain of cultural learning is food. Animals learn from each other what to eat, and what not. Parent crows that fly daily with their offspring to the local garbage dump to look for tasty morsels instill in them a life-long preference for such sites, whereas the crow family that survives on natural foods will have offspring that carry on the same tradition when they get older. Food aversion is similarly transmitted. This was first noticed by a German rodent-control officer who set out poisoned bait, killing wild rats in large numbers. After a while, however, the remaining rats began to avoid the bait, and their offspring would do the same. Without any direct experience with the bait, young rats would eat only safe foods. An experimental psychologist, Bennett Galef, tested this in his laboratory by feeding rats two diets of different texture, taste, and smell. He then laced one of the diets with lithium chloride, which makes rats sick. This procedure led the animals to avoid the contaminated diet. The question now was how the rats' offspring would react after removal of the contamination. Both diets were again perfectly okay to eat, but adults fed exclusively on only one diet due to their bad experience with the other. It turned out that the pups acted like their parents. Of 240 pups given a choice of both diets, only one ate any of the food that adults in its colony had learned to avoid.

The main products include various types of crushing and shredding, sorting, recycling equipment, etc. Additionally, we provide comprehensive system solutions, such as recycling of waste plastics, disposal of waste appliances and automobiles, treatment of waste lithium batteries, pre-treatment of refuse-derived fuels (RDF/SDF/SRF), and industrial solid waste resource utilization.

Even the cost of commodities necessary for renewable energy—like lithium and copper—will sharply rise as the price of fossil fuels skyrockets, a phenomenon dubbed greenflation. Supply chains that depend on fossil fuels will strain to keep goods moving. Shortages will proliferate.

The lithium-ion battery was first invented in an Exxon laboratory in the mid-1970s, during a time when it was thought that the world would run out of oil and Exxon would need to find another way to stay in the mobility business.

China already manufactures almost three-quarters of the world’s lithium batteries. The electric car also fits into a larger vision of an electric transportation network inside China—high-speed electric rail connecting cities where people move around in electric cars, or on electric buses and electric bicycles. By the end of 2017, over 50 percent of China’s city bus fleet was already electric.

It’s also thought that mineral springs in France have unnaturally high amounts of lithium. More lithium in the waters, less need to medicate people because they’re getting small doses every day. Lithium may be the true reason why the French can sit in cafés for hours, eat cheese, and sip coffee slowly. They may, in fact, have a natural lithium chill embedded in their geography.

Researchers now have come close to identifying why lithium functions as a mood stabilizer—it affects the levels of serotonin that act as a messenger regulating aspects of the nervous system such as sleep, memory, appetite, mood, sex, endocrine function. And studies have found that when lithium is prescribed chronically (for more than three weeks), the increase in serotonin is focused in the hippocampus rather than scattered all over the brain.

Fraulein Löwinsky took possession of herself.” Else, like many others, committed suicide. It was hard not to look at the buildings, the properties, the places she had been and be struck with sadness. I wanted to cry. But Dobie was so gracious and on track and helpful; no need to deal with a sobbing American coming to terms with genocide. I wondered if Else suffered from mental illness before the war or because of it. War, it seemed, was a collective mental illness. We are never not at war—with each other or with ourselves.

In 2014, Dr. Anna Fels wrote an op-ed titled “Should We All Take a Bit of Lithium?” for the New York Times. And sometimes I think, yes, we should. There would be less aggression, suicide, and a calmer state of mind. Some experts have heralded lithium as the next fluoride, especially after scientists found that suicide rates were lower in areas where the drinking water had higher concentrations of the element. In the October 4, 1971, issue of the New York Times Magazine, a feature was published called “The Texas Tranquilizer,” in which University of Texas biochemist Earl B. Dawson claimed that El Paso had lower rates of suicide and crime and fewer admissions to mental hospitals than Dallas because their water supply was heavily laced with lithium. For

Bad Kissingen was just one of many spa towns in Europe and the United States at the turn of the century. In an October issue of the Lancet from 1894, a doctor examined the effects of lithium-rich waters in the Welsh region of Llangammarch, concluding that the water was certainly therapeutic, if not curative for a variety of illnesses. At the turn of the century therapeutic waters were all the rage.

I’m not sure what I thought I could absorb from sitting there on yellowed grass and in minimal shade—a return to a Roman time when melancholia and mania was first thought of and considered? Or just a sense of the reliance and importance that this society once placed on relaxation? It used to be a sign of empirical strength to be able to build such an enormous and architecturally complicated complex devoted to leisure, to calming the mind.

When he was young, Angst picked up his father’s entomology hobby, and noticed that butterflies that came from different altitudes had different wing patterns. He experimented by taking low-altitude butterfly larvae and birthing them in freezing temperatures in the refrigerators of the city slaughterhouse. The result: a high-altitude wing pattern. That was the beginning of his belief that health—including mental health—was a holistic issue, affected by environmental factors that shifted the expression of genes.

said. We talked about how we have ways of measuring the heart, blood pressure, ways to map the body with numbers and guidelines—I explained that from my experience it seemed like tracking mood was impossible. Dr. Angst countered that he and others had developed a series of questions—the Hypomania Checklist, a thirty-two-question self-assessment survey. I thought back to my adolescent self-assessment and was wary. If you are manic, you are likely to answer delusionally. And what could a survey really show? And that seemed to be the crux of why treatment is so hard—there’s no way for a doctor, especially a doctor just meeting a patient for the first time, to be able to identify what is manic for one person versus manic for another. For all Dr. Angst knew, I was not a writer, not working on a book at all, and that I was in the throes of an episode, interviewing experts as part of a manic episode. And maybe I was? I was eating barrels full of pasta, talking to random strangers, and I was here for a slightly bizarre and complicated purpose, almost grandiose.

even if you could measure mental illness, you couldn’t define normal based on statistics. An individual is much more complex.

Hippocrates urged physicians to make frequent visits with their patients and directly inquire about their situations without intermediaries, laypersons, or nurses interfering. This effort was to inspire confidence among patients so that they would feel comfortable trusting their doctors. Because once again, how do you know if medication is working in mental illness? You don’t, you only know when it’s not working.

I asked Angst what he thought drove that special kind of creativity, and he said something I had heard before: “You are deviant in your thinking, you leave that normal pathway to jump somewhere else in your thoughts, and that is creative. Being unconventional in your emotional jumps, you go away from the usual in a positive sense.” In Setting the River on Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison wrote about how Robert Lowell’s madness was inspiration for his poetry and then later braided his experiences into his work when he was lucid enough to actually write.

Being on the mild end of the spectrum of bipolar allows for this kind of wishful thinking. “The diagnosis is a label, directions for treatment,” Angst said. “But the whole human being, the patient himself is a whole complexity of other phenomena which has to be taken into account. He has to be considered as a whole.

There were relatively few options left for me. I am a classic case of bipolar 1 with symptoms that are primarily expressed as mania as opposed to depression. Most of the other medications used to treat bipolar disorder are geared toward bipolar 2, which leans more toward depression than mania. Lamictal, Seroquel, Abilify won’t stop the manic.

What’s happened is that most psychiatrists have no clue that ER is better than DR, and many prescribe generic DR. And because it’s been off-patent for several years there’s no economic incentive to educate doctors on how to use Depakote effectively.” He explained that Abbott launched Depakote DR first and Depakote ER second. He said most psychiatrists were just unaware of Depakote ER’s improvements over the first formulation. It lessened the side effects and made the pill easier to tolerate. But Schwartz had prescribed ER and yet the pharmacy doled out DR? Sometimes, that happens for insurance reasons, sometimes it’s just a lack of information, sometimes it’s a mistake, he said.

In 2008 when George W. Bush signed the Mental Health Parity Act into law, it required all insurers to cover behavioral health the same way plans covered any other type of medical treatment; but insurance companies found loopholes and ways to circumvent coverage. Years later, when Obamacare was implemented, in a significant move toward parity, it forbade health plans from rejecting people with preexisting conditions—including mental illness and addiction. “We have made progress expanding mental health coverage and elevating the conversation about mental health,” President Barack Obama said in a statement. “But too many people still do not get the help they need.

Many therapists—psychiatrists, psychologists, and those in behavioral health—won’t take private insurance, exchange plans, or Medicaid plans because they don’t pay providers well, which means outpatient care is still an issue. Covered treatment becomes an emergency room issue and is reactionary rather than preventive. And, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, in our contemporary mental health crisis, people are more likely to encounter police than get medical help. “As a result, 2 million people with mental illness are booked into jails each year. Nearly 15 percent of men and 30 percent of women booked into jails have a serious mental health condition.

For mental health coverage and the study of it to advance at all, physical health needs to be regarded as something that encompasses both body and mind. Angst and his holistic approach to psychiatric health remain the gold standard. But health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industrial complex don’t seem remotely interested in pursuing a health care system that would actually contribute to overall health. In fact, the labyrinthine process for reimbursement, coverage, rules, and regulations for both doctors and patients amplifies mental illness and anxiety. Every time I’m put on hold or puzzle through a pharmaceutical query, my back tightens, my jaw locks, and I have to calm myself down and coach myself through it. Most of the time I give up.

Much of the key equipment was of Russian design—the recycling systems, for instance. He had big generators called Elektrons that could produce oxygen from water distilled from his urine. Drinking water was recovered from humidity in the air. There was a system of scrubbers called Vozdukh that removed carbon dioxide from the air. He had a backup oxygen generator system based on the use of “candles”—big cylinders containing a chemical called lithium perchlorate that, when heated, gave off oxygen. He had emergency oxygen masks that worked on the same principle. And so on.

described PTSD to me as “someone’s stress response system or view of the world essentially hijacked, and it has to do with how memory works. PTSD is a disorder where people can’t forget, and it becomes a physiological response. There are intense feelings of horror and panic. When you bring back a memory, you are essentially experiencing it again.” There are times when my brain feels hijacked by panic and agitation, and I imagine for the women centuries and millennia before me who didn’t even have the benefit of diagnosis, it felt even worse.

mania is more like unbridled dizzying love or the first sparkling spring day when daffodils are bursting and everything is coated in warm rays and looking like a rainbow paradise, prisms of iridescence beaming.) Being bipolar meant I had access to the other side. But there were still functional kinks to work out—living with daily tasks was sometimes a challenge.

One of the first examples of hysteria was observed by Thomas Sydenham in 1681.

Freud’s innovation was to explain why hysterics swooned and seized. He coined the term ‘conversion’ to describe the mechanism by which unresolved, unconscious conflict might be transformed into symbolic physical symptoms. His fundamental insight—that the body might be playing out the dramas of the mind.

This practice—of doctors and midwives massaging female clitorises—carried on for centuries. Physicians didn’t consider women capable of orgasm, which is why the treatment described was so clinical, without even a reference to sexuality. By the early twentieth century, doctors began complaining about their fingers hurting from the therapeutic practice which, combined with the invention of electricity, led to a new invention: the vibrator.

The researchers found that a history of sexual abuse is associated with an increased risk of a lifetime diagnosis of multiple psychiatric disorders and that medical literature has long reported an association between sexual abuse and psychiatric symptoms. A study published in 2016 by the British Journal of Psychiatry found that childhood traumas were linked with later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and that people who are bipolar are 2.63 times as likely to have experienced some type of abuse. What this means, in theory, is that the disease is not purely genetic; it is environmental as well.

Lithium allowed me to function, but during this breakdown, breakup, or whatever was happening, Noodle Pudding saved me. The food, the people, the wine, and having a place to go cannot be underrated in the realm of treatment. In The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben writes about how forests act as a family, pooling resources and protecting each other, sending messages and nutrients through an elaborate roots system. Noodle Pudding was like that—a forest made of pasta. I lived alone, Randy (a regular who lived upstairs) lived alone, Fredo seemed alone in this world, alone in his kitchen. There were times when the isolation felt awful. But at Noodle Pudding, we were alone together.

An estimated 50 percent of the world’s lithium supply lies beneath the Salar de Uyuni in southern Bolivia. The increasing global demand for lithium has prompted many proclamations, including claims by Bolivians that the landlocked socialist country will become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.” The danger of relying on any natural resource for national income is known as the “resource curse.” It seems like an almost too easy and obvious parallel to my dependence on lithium.

Tom Waits’s song “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” a coal miner’s croaky anthem to regression, to the freedom of inhibition and youth. I think in a lot of ways, breakdowns are both a resistance to growing up and an acceleration of maturity.

Outside the doors of Bedlam were two carved figures—statues that represented melancholy and mania. Victorian literature had a habit of sequestering mad women from society, stashing them in towers or attics, where they might chew at the wallpaper, itching and wailing into the night. Just think about Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which the heroine of the narrative is introduced to the “lunatic” wife of Mr. Rochester: “What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not, at first sight, tell . . . but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face . . . The maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors.” The description is feral, animalistic, and wild—the pronoun Brontë uses is it, not her, as if the person is no longer present.

In 1887 the journalist Nellie Bly, a pen name for Elizabeth Cochran Seaman, published an account of her undercover experience as a patient at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum,

from 1909 to 1979, California had a state law that authorized forced sterilization of people judged to have “mental disease, which may have been inherited.” The researchers who uncovered the eugenics program (in my own state! still happening in my lifetime!) found that people were sterilized at very young ages, as young as seven. The average age of sterilization was the low teens—many of those sterilized were the same age I was when I was hospitalized. Maybe my paranoia was not so far off?

Temperament itself is so tempestuous. One year after Jane Eyre was published, a medical oddity revealed one of the first examples of the brain’s effect on personality. On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage was blasting rock while constructing a railroad in Vermont.

The idea that the brain influenced personality and emotion wasn’t new, but it wasn’t proven either. The brain and its propensity to define and control personality and emotion was still a relative mystery. This seemed relevant to me because at the most basic level Gage represented two people, one brain. Even if I didn’t have an actual rod through my brain, I felt like something had altered my personality. Something had shifted the direction of my thinking, my impulses. I was me, but I had been not me. Maybe I was permanently a different person because of the trauma of mania, and my brain was responding and forming around that?

But I was not born in an era when the mentally ill were pitied and hopeless; I was born in an era when the medical field was beginning to understand and to treat mental illness, an era when mental illness has almost been fetishized. Doctors could identify symptoms and prescribe remedies, which was a relatively new method. Just a few months before I was hospitalized, public figures like Patty Duke, who had published her book A Brilliant Madness, were emerging to talk about and advocate on behalf of this newly recognized group of people. Wild people, tamed with pills, who were reintroduced into civilian life.

There were moments of intensity that would devolve into hysteria and my brother would chant: “Calm down, Jaime. Calm down.” Mary Karr once wrote, “In the entire history of anxiety worldwide, telling someone to calm down has worked zero times.” “Calm down” should only be used in response to watching someone win the lottery. I was not calm. Would never be calm. I would never want to be calm. Calming down was for suckers.

When I asked my mom if there were ever any indications or hints at bipolar, she just laughed and said, “Well, you were a very dramatic kid.” Then went on to describe a typical scenario. At dinner, I might be kicking Matthew under the table and my mom said she would send me to my room for punishment. Outraged, I would throw my napkin on the floor and march up the stairs to my room and slam the door. Thirty seconds later, she remembered me emerging red with rage spreading across my freckled face and screaming, “AND I’M NEVER COMING BACK.” Then I would slam the door again, extra hard. About three minutes would pass and I would be back at the table eating homemade pizza. My mom said it was hard not to laugh at me, the tiny fury. “But that was just my personality, right?” I asked her. “Yeah, I mean that doesn’t seem bipolar to me, that just seemed like you.

Matt and I had one constant—each other. I didn’t have a problem being independent from my parents, but being separated from Matthew felt like a psychic wound. I think Dr. Viscott would have labeled it a regression or a psychotic break or separation anxiety.

I was crazy, I got a diagnosis, I got better. And now I was fine. Fine enough to go home. But I changed; the episode itself was traumatic. I no longer had a baseline for reality or even a way to fully trust myself.

It was hard to understand the difference between depression and not being manic, especially in the come-down of an episode. This is partly because my experience of bipolar disorder swings manic. My depressive periods are almost always in the wake of mania and almost never independent. I have plenty of anxiety, but I’ve never been deeply, clinically depressed unless it’s in response to having been manic—in which case the depression runs deep. Most people who identify bipolar tend to experience much more extreme bouts of depression. Dr. DeAntonio described mania as similar to a cocaine high. Mania is overwhelming and intense; an enormous feeling of omnipotence coated in a glossy sheen of euphoria and sex. Everything is attractive, on fire, covered in rainbows and unicorns and deluded perfection. I have to take drugs to not feel this way.

Peer counseling may even be more effective than some talk therapy, especially for teens. Adolescence is so isolating; we learned how to talk to each other and we learned how to listen.

I had no friends, but I felt communion with these characters—an innate belief in self was our shared symptom. That concept is particularly complicated for a teenager—to be told that confidence is a sign of sickness—at the very time when you are losing all confidence anyway. It’s like a double hit of shattered self-esteem. I was already cowed by adolescence and now I was hyperaware of hyperactivity, of feeling too good, too complicated, too much.

In mania I spent a great deal of money for things I didn’t need . . . flights of fancy, meaning almost delusions of grandeur. You feel euphoric, you feel nothing you do has any kind of negative consequence. You can go anywhere, say anything, be anybody you want,

I was depressed, alone, bored, but I still had fantasies. I only had fantasy. Recent studies have shown that one of the main characteristics that separate humans from animals is the ability to think and plan and fantasize about a future.

What the hell is this?” “Three hundred milligrams of lithium,” Rami said. “Half your usual dose. We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” He smiled. “I’d rather have some Valium,” Flynn said. “But I’m the doctor.” “Here’s to never wanting to get out of bed again

I almost miss it, caught up in the madness of the moment. But then I realize and slap the two clamps down onto the battery. And, even as I do it, part of me, yet again, wants to be put on lithium and told the bad dreams will go away.

The electric car was fully charged. He patted the dashboard. “How far can this go?” Her eyes lit up. “Almost four hundred miles on a single charge. It has the new Lithium-air batteries.

The hatred that I harbored for Lou and Paul faded into the background. The cold, lonely mountains which once filled my mouth and mind with the madness of Zarathustra shifted into a lithium passivity. Even Wagner was nothing more than a jester for some cathartic writing, allowing me to purge the bales of contempt that I had for the man.

Many people with bipolar disorder don’t respond to lithium, and Turner’s self-reported nonresponse would need to be verified by others, such as family and friends, who might have witnessed a change in his behavior he didn’t pick up on himself.

gas-powered cars offered something that electric cars couldn’t—decent driving range, extendable within minutes with a tin of gasoline from the general store.

The vague contention that the economy must be decarbonised via the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy is inadequate when building the new infrastructure required currently relies on continued and expanded environmental plunder, such as the mining of cobalt and lithium for batteries. Resource extraction is responsible for 50% of global emissions, with minerals and metal mining responsible for 20% of emissions even before the manufacturing stage.[36] The ‘green’ industrial revolution proposed by social democrats may end up with a carbon neutral system of production by the time it is finished, but in the meantime it would be anything but. That mankind and nature have been so profoundly alienated from each other under capitalism requires that they be reunited if the planet is to remain habitable.[37] One of the ways that this alienation has been most concretely institutionalised has been through the international prohibition and under-utilisation of the hemp and cannabis plants, the most prolific and versatile crops on Earth that were used for thousands of years before capitalism for food, fuel, medicine, clothing and construction. As we shall see, not only does hemp remain capable of providing for most of humanity’s needs, it is the key not only to reversing desertification and stabilising the climate, but also furthering technological and industrial progress. We therefore argue that saving the planet is bound up with ending this alienation and completing the transition from a labour-intensive extraction-based economy to a hemp-based fully automated system of production. A green industrial revolution must be precisely that – green.