Slashdot Mirror
Lithium In Water "Curbs Suicide"
SpuriousLogic writes "Drinking water which contains lithium may reduce the risk of suicide, a Japanese study suggests. Researchers compared levels of lithium in drinking water to suicide rates in the prefecture of Oita, which has a population of more than one million. The suicide rate was significantly lower in those areas with the highest levels of lithium, they wrote in the British Journal of Psychiatry. And I was only worried about fluoridation affecting my precious bodily fluids before ..."
Concidering that Lithium is used to treat a number of mental illnesses like bipolar and depression that should be expected. Here in the US there are many living with undiagnosed depression and we are seen as a tollerant and accepting society in regards to mental health. In Japan there is far less social acceptance (at least when I lived there, maybe its changed) so I would expect and even higher percentage of non treated people.
The idea that "scientists" are going to be spiking water supply with Li+, a freaking powerful mood stabilizing aka mood altering drug for the "Greater Good"?! My wildly successful but bipolar Boss took this stuff to deal with his manic lows, and it he would become a zombie. Everything he accomplished as a businessman he did BEFORE taking lithium. I would rather see funding and energy expended to reduce suicides without "stabilizing" the humanity into a calm herd.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
for its ability to suppress suicidal urges. It's significantly more effective at suicide reduction than any other drug available. For this reason, it's still commonly used for treating people with bipolar. Ironically, it's also one of the more toxic drugs and easy to commit suicide with.
Having drugs that reduce the incidence of suicide is extremely important especially for bipolar. Post diagnosis, there is approximately a 15 to 20% suicide rate for bipolar patients. I was almost in that 15 to 20% I know very clearly why people try to end their lives and I also know that if they're not terminally ill, it can and should be prevented.
If a friend or family member is seriously down, withdraws from social circles (and not just because they're on a bataan death march coding project), start giving away belongings or are talking about how it hurts too much to stay alive, ask them these three questions.
Do you have a plan to kill yourself? (Ask how)
do you have the materials to kill yourself with?
Do you have a place/time for killing yourself?
A single yes means stay close, call mental health in the morning. Two yeses or more means get the person to the emergency room and tell the doctor about these questions and responses. If the person will not go with you, call the emergency room, tell them what's going on and they will send emergency personnel to help.
Almost all people thinking of suicide will give you signals and, even though they may not show it, want someone to stop them. Most importantly, if you try and they kill themselves anyway, don't blame yourself.
I'm usually not much of a grammar Nazi, but you should probably realize that prescribe and proscribe are almost antonyms.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
So can we ethically allow mind-altering substances that are naturally present to exist in the water supply? It's a tricky business the moment you cease drinking water from rivers or springs and start piping it anywhere. The people piping it suddenly have an ethical obligation regarding its contents.
This study was to identify potential NATURAL contaminants that alter emotional disposition. Nothing about changing the water supply. It is potentially interesting, in that it may change our understanding of suicidal behaviour from place to place, and our understanding of something as simple as the water supply's varied social effects.
When you drink tap water, you (presumably a healthy person) are consuming a substance that may or may not have mind-altering substances just naturally. Almost all chemicals have some negligible effect on the mind, some moreso than others. Your region probably hasn't been analysed for lithium concentrations; you could be in a naturally higher region for all you know. Are you being given a mind-altering substance without your consent? Quite possibly.
Or to put it another way... There are more shades of grey than there are in your morality.
People, please stop tagging every study on Slashdot with correlationisnotcausation. I know it's standard here to believe this community is somehow more enlightened than all others, but do you really think that researchers became researchers without being able to ask simple questions? In fact, in an idealized study, it's not even a relevant question!
Moreover, this moronic practice is especially stupid for this story because the neurological effects of lithium salts have been explored for decades. This is not a revolutionary study by any means. So unless years and years of studies have gone horribly wrong, then yes, in this case, correlation does, in fact, imply causation.
Funny thing about living through stressful difficult times is you learn to be content with what you have. I live in the third world under an undemocratic government and have a much lower standard of living than you guys, but I'm quite happy.
I'd say, its the old problem of the more you have, the more you want. Happiness has nothing to do with material wealth or possessions. Its a state of mind.
I have determined that my sig is indeterminate.
It's a song called Lithium written by a guy who killed himself... not too offtopic, really.
Patent? Lithium? It's an element on the periodic table. How could it possibly have ever had a patent filed against it?
Because the actual drug isn't the only thing you can get a patent on. There's a fair bit of technology behind the manufacture and operation of pills and other drug-delivery systems. If a manufacturer managed to come up with a better way to deliver a clinical dose, I'd think it could be patented. And maybe you can't patent an element, but I suspect (given the USPTO's penchant for issuing marginal if not outright bogus patents lately) you could patent that element as a treatment for a specific ailment. Don't confuse what should be unpatentable for what actually isn't. Not anymore.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.