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 ..."
Where they spike the water to cure aggression in people? It doesn't end well.
Where they spike the air to cure aggression in people? It doesn't end well.
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.
It is not widely promoted since it can't be patented. This is not a conspiracy theory (even if it sounds like this), see it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_pharmacology
(Hey, it worked for Inconvenient Truth. :P)
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
That there are no suicides in Bolivia?
Sig this!
0% of people who commited suicide in the last year drunk water with Lithium in it.
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.
Evidently it is fading for you ;-)
They are talking about lithium ions in water (from salts like lithium chloride), not dumping metallic lithium in the reservoires ;-)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
That's the idea; if you drink exploding water you can't commit suicide.
Perhaps the bigger problem is this: I once dated a young woman who had lithium treatments for bipolar disorder and, as a result, had to constantly get her blood tested to make sure it wasn't at toxic levels.
Yes, in certain amounts, lithium helps, but in larger amounts, it is toxic to the human body. If we put it in something like water, how are we going to explain to people that drinking too much water might cause bone loss, kidney damage and seizures? This is not to mention the problems lithium can cause on the unborn during pregnancy. What, are we going to add tap water to things women shouldn't ingest when pregnant?
lithium can cause cardiac birth defects when taken in the first trimester, so unless they're going to put pregnant women on a separate water system this is probably a bad idea. http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/154447-overview
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.
Araaag, drugs drugs drugs drugs. How about addressing the core problem of making life not SUCK so much?!
Putting mood stabilizers in water. Fuck, that's a creepy thought. I mean ... damn, isn't that supposed to be the realm of Coast to Coast AM?
Mr. President, we cannot allow a lithium gap!
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
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.
According to Epocrates, Lithium has side effects
Common Reactions:
tremor
polyuria
diarrhea
vomiting
drowsiness
muscle weakness
arrhythmias
anorexia
nausea
blurred vision
dry mouth
fatigue
Serious Reactions:
coma
seizures
ventricular arrhythmias
bradycardia, severe
syncope
goiter
hypothyroidism
hyperparathyroidism
pseudotumor cerebri
Raynaud's phenomenon
diabetes insipidus
FYI, lithium is not a heavy metal. It's the lightest metal, and 3rd lightest element, just behind hydrogen and helium.
That said, yes, it is quite toxic at the higher end of the therapeutic range, but the bottom end of the dosing range is about 5 orders of magnitude above the highest levels found in this (assuming an consumption of average of 3 litres per day), so I would think the toxic results from the naturally occurring lithium would be negligible.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
In fact, it's the complete opposite: depressed people are much more complacent than not. Depression is not "being sad."
If you'd ever met a bipolar person you'd know what I mean. In their manic phases they'd go fight an army by themselves, they don't care about rules and retribution. In their depressed phase they can't get out of bed, let alone rebel against the established social order.
Oxygen atoms have a larger nucleus than hydrogen atoms, so in water, the shared electrons spend more time on average near the oxygen end of the molecule than the hydrogen ends. Because of this, the oxygen end has a negative and the hydrogen ends have a positive electric charge. Consequently, nearby water molecules will form networks, with one of the hydrogen atoms in one molecule being attracted to the oxygen atoms in another. This attractive force keeps the molecules partially bonded to each other, the state we call "liquid", in surprisingly high temperatures relative to water's molecular weight.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
as a person who took lithium for years, i would like to point the kind readers to Lithium toxicity. regular blood tests are highly recommended to prevent your blood from going toxic and killing your ass.
while lithium bicarbonate worked well for me for several years, the side effects got worse and the drug became ineffective.
the toxic levels for lithium are close to the therapeutic levels.
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
Lithium is the third element in the periodic table, and the first metal. In other words, it is as far from being a heavy metal as it is possible to get.
Warning: The intelligence of this post may be larger than it appears.
I resemble this remark. Fortunately for me, there is a mineral hot spring LOADED with lithium an hour away from me.
So, ah, I'm curious. Who else here has this problem, and how bad? I'm cyclothymic, which is a pretty mild version of bipolor disorder, and I've been keeping it (mostly) under control with sertraline.
I've had suicidal ideation, mainly as a teen, but no actual attempts. Mostly, I just get totally manic about a project for a month or two, and have a hard time sleeping, eating, or focusing on anything else. Then a couple weeks of normal. Then a month or two of eating too much and not being able to focus on anything, then a week or two of normal again.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton