Written By Will Grant
 

Lithium. Anyone who had a heartbeat in the 90s knows that Nirvana song backward. Speaking of, Rod’s claim to fame is meeting Kurt Cobain and the boys but that’s a story for another time. The lithium we speak of today is the light, flammable, silvery white metal found naturally in nearly all rocks. It rose to fame as the star ingredient in the first man-made nuclear reaction. But lithium is no one-hit-wonder.

Lithium is also a medication that helps to stabilise the moods of millions of people with bipolar disorder. How the heck did anyone discover that? Did someone take the term “eat rocks” literally?

Well, in the early 20th century, lithium was seen as a bit of a "cure-all". It was even in the original 7-Up recipe! But when it comes to using lithium to treat bipolar, the credit must go to Dr John Cade. Born in country Victoria in 1912, as a young boy, Cade actually lived in a number of asylums. He wasn’t a patient though. His father was a doctor who worked in the Mental Hygiene Department so the whole family lived together on campus. 

Every single day, he observed mentally ill patients and Cade eventually studied medicine and became a psychiatrist. However during World War II, while serving in Singapore as a surgeon, he became a prisoner of war for three and a half years. During this time, he obviously endured a brutal existence, but he also made some very interesting observations. 

See, up until that point, the standard wisdom was that serious mental illness was caused by a poor upbringing, bad morals and the like. Too much grunge music perhaps. But what Cade observed during those harrowing years in the POW camp, was that serious mental illness can be caused by biological changes. So upon returning to Australia, he got to work. 

Cade had a theory that mania and depression were caused by excess and deficiency of a naturally occurring substance in the body. The solution was of course… urine!

Being the supportive woman she was, Cade’s wife, Jean, started accumulating jars. Buttloads of them. Cade convinced her that if his research came to nothing, they could use them for pickling. Sooo many pickles. And yes, she stored them in the fridge. Eww.

Then, Cade got a bunch of guinea pigs and injected the urine into their abdominal cavities. Sadly, they all died. He thought perhaps the two toxic substances in urine, urea and uric acid might work in tandem to make the urine of manic patients more toxic. He just needed some way to convert urea into a substance that he could more easily manipulate. Enter lithium. 

Now, Cade needed to check if lithium was causing any confounds, so he injected the guinea pigs with a lithium carbonate solution. They didn’t die. In fact, they became docile and super chill. So he did what any dedicated scientist would do. He tested it on himself. 

In 1948, after not dying of lithium poisoning, Cade decided it was safe to give 10 of his patients the same treatment. One of his patients had been psychotic for more than 30 years and after two months of treatment, he walked out of the asylum back to his old job, perfectly sane. In fact, 5 out of the 10 people Dr Cade treated had improved enough to return to their homes and families. Nothing had been seen like it in mental health before. 

But what about side effects? 

Unfortunately, Cade was unaware that too much lithium is toxic and his pioneering patient died in 1950 due to lithium toxicity. Devastated, Cade abandoned his experiments with lithium, passing the chill pill over to psychiatrists Mogens Schou and Poul Baastrup to characterise its safety profile. Thanks to them all, this ubiquitous element, easily processed into medication and never patented by pharmaceutical companies, remains both cheap and invaluable as a treatment for troubling mental health diagnoses.

In 1980, Dr Cade died with many honours, including medical units, fellowships, and awards being named after him. 

 
 
 

  • [00:00:00] Will: Yeah. Goodday listener.

    [00:00:01] Rod: It's my fault we couldn't do a recording this week because I had to go and visit my marmalade Manufacturing interests in Teneriffe

    [00:00:08] Will: Nice, good marmalade, bad marmalade?

    [00:00:10] Rod: All good, but different kinds of marmalade, and you can't do that remotely. A Zoom call does not help you test the textures and the flavors of the marmalades. So instead, listener. We are giving you a recast of an episode that is basically every Venn diagram of everything we're into. So it's got medical experiments,

    [00:00:28] Will: Uh, yeah, urine

    [00:00:29] Rod: Urine injections. Nice, nice some, uh, animal experiments, but in a really nice way.

    [00:00:36] Will: Nirvana lyrics,

    [00:00:37] Rod: Nirvana lyrics. Mental health.

    [00:00:39] Will: Australian scientists,

    [00:00:40] Rod: Slightly historical but not too far back

    [00:00:43] Will: And a weird, weird quirk that the fact that one of the most effective, uh, drugs for depression is the third smallest element you can get. Like, that just blows my mind.

    [00:00:55]

    [00:01:05] Rod: I am gonna begin as I begin pretty much all my lectures

    [00:01:08] Will: at the beginning.

    [00:01:09] Rod: Yep.

    [00:01:09] Will: In the beginning was the word

    [00:01:11] Rod: And the word in this instance is of course, spoken word. Is this what I do? Yeah, of course. And I know you know this about me, but you know, non-regular listeners may not, you may or may not recognize this. I'm so happy cuz today I found my friends, They're in my head. Oh, I'm so ugly. That's okay.

    [00:01:27] Will: Oh yes, of course. It's Nirvana, because so you are, did you meet that band?

    [00:01:30] Rod: I'll get to that. Oh my god. Broke our mirrors. Sunday morning is every day for all I care and I'm not scared. Like my candles in a day. You, I've just gotta say you, you are rendered. Rendition is beautiful. It's better than spoken word, but there's, okay. Yes, it is spoken word because I found, God

    [00:01:47] Will: What?

    [00:01:48] Rod: I'll get to the next bit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it goes on. So as you recognize it's from the Hindu prog rock band Nirvana. do you recognize the song? What's it called?

    [00:02:04] Will: I look in, in my defense. In my defense, I put back in the day when I listened to a lot of it was on the cd. Now I listened to it on the Apple Music.

    [00:02:13] Will: And I would put a CD in and that would be, songs would play. I think that is track. It's number three. That's how mean to, yeah, it's Track four songs don't have names. Unless they say them over and over again in the chorus, and then I'm like, ah, yeah, I know this one.

    [00:02:26] Rod: So it's the song Lithium.

    [00:02:28] Will: Oh, there you go. That's I love. Yes.

    [00:02:30] Rod: And so basically I'm just gonna, you've, I know you haven't heard this before. I'm just gonna tell you about how and I, when I hung out, when I met Nirvana. Cause I know you've never heard that before and you love it when I do. But when I finished with that, we're gonna talk about lithium.

    [00:02:43] Will: Welcome, welcome to the wholesome show science stories for you. If you maybe set up the back of the class, if you are more like you know, you like to learn Yeah. But maybe you don't wanna be seen like one of those suck up next to the teacher. No. And if you're a suck up and you're here to That's cool. That's cool. We love you too. Just

    [00:03:17] Rod: we don't love you in a weird way though. We love you respectful.

    [00:03:20] Will: Yeah, sure, sure. But experiment with being the dead shits up the back of the class who like to crack jokes, you know, they pass messages, smoke a bong. Exactly. Those people up the back of the class. This is the podcast of Science for you.

    [00:03:33] Rod: And we ask the questions that those people would ask so that all you who set up the front don't have to.

    [00:03:38] Will: The wholesome show is me, will Grant,

    [00:03:42] Rod: and me Dr. Roderick Griffin. I met Nirvana and you didn't Lamberts let's talk about lithium.

    [00:03:48] Will: Lithium, yeah. Tell me about it.

    [00:03:49] Rod: Because who doesn't love a metal?

    [00:03:51] Will: It's a metal.

    [00:03:52] Rod: It's the lightest metal of the periodic.

    [00:03:53] Will: I knew it was light cuz hydrogen, helium, lithium. like atomic element number three. I got em memorized all the way up to three,

    [00:04:01] Rod: so it's yeah, atomic number three. Lightest of the solid elements.

    [00:04:04] Will: So, so, it's not a gas, it's just light. It's light metal.

    [00:04:08] Rod: Yeah.

    [00:04:09] Will: but you can make like a tin out of it. You can make a metal object out of it

    [00:04:13] Rod: outta pure lithium. It would have a tendency to burst into red flame if it came, if it was pure and got anywhere near heat and stuff.

    [00:04:21] Will: Okay. You're right.

    [00:04:22] Rod: So it's a little reactive.

    [00:04:23] Will: So in a vacuum you could do this.

    [00:04:24] Rod: Yeah. Or you just mix it with shit. but it's basically found naturally in anything like rocks, soil, bodies of water. So it's around. Okay. Yeah. It's, but it's only point. Oh, we go 0.0, zero, zero.

    [00:04:36] Will: Let a guess wait percent. Oh no, I was gonna guess

    [00:04:38] Rod: you were gonna say seven.

    [00:04:39] Will: I was gonna, I was gonna say seven. Yeah,

    [00:04:41] Rod: it's soft, silvery white. As I said, it's highly reactive, flammable. Flares into a bright crimson. So it's pretty, it's good in fireworks and stuff. Okay. But you've gotta store it in a mineral oil, otherwise it goes poof. So you can have a tin, but you'd have to have a, your tin have, yeah, it's a mineral oil around the tin. Yeah. Like standard tin or a rucksack.

    [00:04:56] Will: Yeah. So you put the tin in like a Tupperware container Yep. With mineral oil. Yep. And so yeah, you can put your baked beans in there, but it's not that useful.

    [00:05:03] Rod: That's how you do it. That's how I've always, that's how I carry baked beans when I'm carrying 'em with me. I'm sure. Apparently. Along with hydrogen helium.

    [00:05:12] Will: That is number one and two just if anyone's doing the count here.

    [00:05:16] Rod: Apparently hydrogen, helium and lithium are the only elements created at the birth of the universe. I know, But according to the Big Bang theory, or however you wanna word it, the universe should hold three times as much lithium as can be accounted for, at least in the older stars.

    [00:05:28] Will: So there's missing lithium.

    [00:05:30] Rod: Yeah, it's missing lithium. Oh, it seems. Yeah. Anyway, so the Brazilian naturalist and statesman and I know you know the name, but I'll tell others.

    [00:05:39] Will: Yeah. Cool. Cool.

    [00:05:43] Rod: Jose? Yeah. He discovered the mineral petite. Or patite. I assume it's petite. Yeah. But petite sounds far more exotic other than patite with the pecan sauce. And that's actually lithium allies, silicon, something. It's long, it's a lot in it.

    [00:06:01] Will: It's a more chemistry thing. So some sort of mineral.

    [00:06:04] Rod: Yeah. And he found on a swedish island in the 1790s, the island of Utö

    [00:06:08] Will: I like the reverse colonialism there, that yeah. Someone from the colonies has gone and mined Mindd Europe at that point.

    [00:06:13] Rod: Yeah, they backed that shit up in 1817. So a little bit later. Swedish chemist, Johan August Arfwedson

    [00:06:21] Will: yes.

    [00:06:21] Rod: He discovered that patte or petite container, previously Unknown element.

    [00:06:26] Will: Oh, did he?

    [00:06:27] Rod: But he couldn't quite isolate it perfectly. He only got one of the salts out the lithium by triple salt.

    [00:06:34] Will: Yeah. Salty lithium.

    [00:06:35] Rod: Salty lithium. Yeah. So it was first isolated and best I could tell either in 1821 or 1855. One or the other.

    [00:06:43] Will: You know what that is? You know what that is? Is 1821, they did it 1855. They did it as well, but they did the lit review after they did the work and they're, oh fuck God,

    [00:06:53] Rod: whoopsy. Oh, well just claim it.

    [00:06:55] Will: Don't tell your supervisor. Don't tell your supervisor.

    [00:06:56] Rod: Well, one of them is Robert Bunsen. One of 'em is Robert Bunson, the chemist. And he's more famous

    [00:07:00] Will: inventor of the burner.

    [00:07:02] Rod: Yeah. No, he, yeah, he invented of the Robert, so they electrolysis alleged lithium chloride to separate it out. Okay. So we flash forward 1923 in Germany. They started commercially producing lithium

    [00:07:15] Will: to do what?

    [00:07:16] Rod: Commercial stuff. For example. first fully man-made nuclear reaction was based on lithium transmutation of lithium atoms into helium in 1932.

    [00:07:25] Will: Oh really? There you go.

    [00:07:27] Rod: you also can use lithium utero, which comes from this transportation, in fuel for staging therma nuclear weapons. The first major application of lithium was in high temperature lithium greases.

    [00:07:39] Will: Well, of course in lithium grease. Got any lithium grease? High temperature. Lithium. I need some li Is this for cooking your sausages super quick?

    [00:07:45] Rod: Yes. And lubricating aircraft, engines and shit in World War ii. Okay. during the Cold War, the demand for lithium dramatically increased because, you know, nuclear fusion and stuff, the US became the prime producer of Lithium in the late fifties. Cool. And up into the mid eighties. So lithium ion batteries. Increased demand for lithium quite a lot in the

    [00:08:03] Will: Ah, they do too.

    [00:08:03] Rod: Yeah. Near two thousands. So lithium ion became very popular. You've probably heard of it.

    [00:08:07] Will: I have, I've got a battery that is lithium ion.

    [00:08:10] Rod: Do you? Yeah. Do you keep it in a cabinet so that no thieves can steal it?

    [00:08:13] Will: I keep it inside my things

    [00:08:16] Rod: apparently in nowadays chili in Australia produced the most lithium in the world. But I don't wanna talk about any of that. I wanna talk about lithium and health.

    [00:08:23] Will: Thank fuck Lithium and health.

    [00:08:27] Rod: So many people have thought of, you know, they believe in the curative properties Of metals. Mineral waters. Metals, yeah. Yeah.

    [00:08:33] Will: Eats some metal.

    [00:08:34] Rod: Yeah. You need more iron in your diet. They don't mean like eat a car.

    [00:08:38] Will: Well, there's that French guy that did. And a plane.

    [00:08:42] Rod: He got to a plane?

    [00:08:43] Will: He got to a plane. I gotta tell you, listener, I looked up this guy to do a wholesome show episode on that, and then I got to the end, I was like, There's no story except a sad guy that spent his life eating metal

    [00:08:54] Rod: and bombed engine parts for the rest of his days.

    [00:08:57] Will: And and like he did it for entertainment and he probably had an okay life. I don't think he died of it. But

    [00:09:05] Rod: This is a very broad definition of entertainment. I'm bored. I'll eat a plane.

    [00:09:10] Will: I'm bored. I'll watch someone eat a plane. Like

    [00:09:13] Rod: I see that. That makes sense. Cause it's on television. It's on a screen.

    [00:09:17] Will: It took him two years to eat the plane. So it wasn't like he sat down like cookie monster and crunched through plane in like four seconds. Mean that we eat passenger that I would really watch, I really watch that.

    [00:09:32] Rod: That's one of the stories I'm not doing today. Yeah. so mineral waters have been something that people are into for years for millennia.

    [00:09:39] Will: Are they actually, I mean, I know, I thought it meant like of like from a mineral spring or something. Yeah. A mining water. Yeah. From mines.

    [00:09:46] Rod: Well, yeah. Things what bubble up. Yeah. And so they've been, a lot of them would have naturally occurring lithium salts in the groundwater and so it would congeal in these mineral springs.

    [00:09:55] Rod: Okay. So the ancient Greeks, Romans Native Americans would bathe in mineral waters and they would attribute healing properties to the mineral springs. Yeah. Which likely contain lithium as well.

    [00:10:04] Will: Health spas.

    [00:10:05] Rod: Yeah. Man, Soranus of Ephesus, who was a medical doctor from the second century. He prescribed mineral waters for people who were manic and had other psychiatric problems, but also for shitloads of other things. Yeah, so stuff

    [00:10:18] Will: but like, like all doctors of the second century, they had one, one remedy and they said, use that for everything. Use this. Yeah. Take lesions.

    [00:10:26] Rod: Yeah. You nearly sprained your fingers during those air quotes. That was a big one. Doctors. Ow. So in the late 19th and into the early 20th century, lithium was basically seen as a cure all. And it was

    [00:10:36] Will: so they knew it was lithium that was in the health spa water?

    [00:10:39] Rod: Or else it was, I mean, one article I read called it the turmeric of the late 18 hundreds. So unless you're listening to this well into the future, turmeric's quite popular in health conscious circles.

    [00:10:52] Will: Do they bathe in it though?

    [00:10:53] Rod: No, this is drinking it now. This is consuming it. So they'd add it to pretty much everything. So it was common for companies, of course, to bottle spring water, et cetera. But my favorite was lithium citrate.

    [00:11:04] Will: Oh, which is in your lemon juice.

    [00:11:05] Rod: Oh, kind of. It's in an indigestible salt form. It was in the original 7-Up recipe.

    [00:11:11] Will: Really the soft drinks we have now all came from these ultra wacky pasts.

    [00:11:16] Rod: Yeah. Cocaine, lithium, whatever. Yeah. Yeah. This one's got heroin and live pigs in it. You know, it's great swallow live pig with your bubbles. I also love, it was originally called when it was first marketed, 7-Up was called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda.

    [00:11:31] Will: Yeah. I get why they changed that.

    [00:11:32] Rod: Imagine the ad you got the woman in the bikini as they used to have a 7-Up ads. Come and get your Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda,

    [00:11:39] Will: bib label.

    [00:11:41] Rod: I don't know. I just don't know.

    [00:11:46] Will: Do you think it was a long committee meeting where they decided to change, or really short or the new name?

    [00:11:50] Rod: I've got a name done. Well, Tron says 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. They knew they were gonna call it soda and then five people got to add a word. That was launched in 29, 1929. In 1948, they stopped adding the lithium citrate. So it was until then, anyway, it was sort of was a health drink.

    [00:12:09] Rod: Now I confess, a chunk of the stuff I'm gonna tell you about comes from a piece in news.com. I'm not proud, but it was a review of a book by someone who actually has a brain. So this is not all that, that only comes from there.

    [00:12:20] Rod: But, so lithium is a, as a cure, at least as a treatment for a particular, you know, particularly depression and bipolar or what used to be known as manic depression is still a thing, but where did it begin? So it begins in 1912 in Country Victoria.

    [00:12:35] Will: Really?

    [00:12:36] Rod: Australia.

    [00:12:37] Will: Are you serious?

    [00:12:37] Rod: Yeah.

    [00:12:38] Will: I thought it was Freni Fisher's, murder mysteries, and not much else in country Victoria in 1912.

    [00:12:43] Rod: Yeah. No. But you thought it was gonna be a Swedish island with Spaniards?

    [00:12:46] Will: I did , or at least the Germans who were very happy to experiment with things in the 1920s, I thought.

    [00:12:51] Rod: Yeah. They weren't the only ones though, to be fair. So doctor, we wasn't a doctor then. John Cade was born in 1912. His father was a gp, and when he was little, his father bugged it off to World War I, served in Gallipoli and in France. So he got the good stuff. Yeah. When he came back, he was suffering from what they were calling war weariness.

    [00:13:11] Will: You're a bit tired, mate. That's what it is. You probably didn't have enough sleep during the war. Yeah. Maybe if you have a bit more sleep now, then you'll be fine.

    [00:13:19] Rod: How much would you like? I'd like infinity, please. Oh no, he didn't kill himself. but he had difficulty continuing his GP practice, so he ended up working.

    [00:13:26] Will: Ah, I was just thinking about the ways that they didn't treat ptsd, after that war. Yeah. And it's not like they're better after more recent war. Yeah, I know. But at least they acknowledge it and know. I know that we're still dealing with a lot of, not dealing with that after Afghanistan and things like that.

    [00:13:42] Rod: We are dealing with not a lot of, not dealing with that. so his father's soldier, his practice and he got a job with the mental hygiene department. I love that.

    [00:13:50] Will: That's a great name.

    [00:13:50] Rod: You're a mentally dis hygienic. So over the next 25 years, he became the doctor, the dad, Cade Sr. Became a medical superintendent at a bunch of Victorian mental hospitals.

    [00:14:01] Will: Okay. So he got over his war weariness enough at least enough that he can have a job.

    [00:14:05] Rod: And help other people and his family would, they'd live on campus as such. They'd live on the campuses of the hospitals. so as a young boy John Cade would go from asylum to asylum as this is how it was written.

    [00:14:15] Will: That's a cool upbringing. That's so cool.

    [00:14:18] Rod: No, and apparently so. He would see mentally ill patients every day of his life, at least as a child says a psychiatrist who is an author of a book about him.

    [00:14:26] Will: and I know that they did vary enormously, like those sorts of institutions. Yeah. You could have a, they did a good, benevolent well-meaning director. Or you could have other

    [00:14:35] Rod: you could also have a good and benevolent, well-meaning director who did terrible things. Cause Yeah, no doubt. I thought they doubt were doing the right thing. But remember, this is like pre 1940s. This is not a great time to be mentally ill. There never is a good one. But that would've been worse. So, yeah. According to the psychiatrist guy called Greg DeMoore, who wrote a, book about John K Lithium, et cetera and he said, look, basically to Cade as a child, instead of being objects of curiosity or people to fear the mentally ill that he saw, he regarded them as friends. He became used to them and they were people

    [00:15:01] Will: Oh, cool. That's nice.

    [00:15:03] Rod: Which is cool. Yeah. That's why he was actually

    [00:15:04] Will: certainly normalized. Yeah. Not the common attitude of the time. Yeah.

    [00:15:07] Rod: so he studied med medicine at university of Melbourne. He became a house officer at St. Vincent's Hospital. I assume that means resident doctor. Then he went to the Royal Royal Children's Hospital, and then he became severely ill with bilateral and pneumococcal pneumonia. That's a lot of Pune. While he was convalescing, he fell in love with one of the nurses called Jean. And in 1937, they got the married.

    [00:15:28] Will: But this is very much a 1930s story, isn't it? You're convalescing in a hospital, you fall in love with the nurse. Yeah. That's just what you do.

    [00:15:33] Rod: It's the English patient. So they fell in love, loved each other. Married in 1937, he became a captain in the Australian Army Medical Corps of the aif. What is it? Australian Infirmed Forces. Infantry Forces. Anyway, July, 1940, he was posted to the a field ambulance unit, and he was trained as a psychiatrist, but he served as a surgeon and wander off to Singapore in 1941.

    [00:15:56] Will: Uhhuh.

    [00:15:57] Rod: So that went well. He was captured, oh, and a prisoner, a war in Changi for three and a half years.

    [00:16:01] Will: That's horrible.

    [00:16:02] Rod: So anyway, he was the only psychiatrist in that area, and they set up a little kind of medical thing, the Australians in the British, within, within the prison camp. Which is a surprise. So he started up a mental health unit. And until now, basically the standard wisdom was serious mental illness was because you had a poor upbringing or bad morals, et cetera. It was the forties. Yeah. On average. That was the position. So Cade started observing patients and folk, I suppose really everyone in Changi was a patient in some way. And they had similar symptoms to the ones he'd treated and seen before the war.

    [00:16:34] Rod: And he started thinking, wait, I think there's something else going on here. And what he observed, according to his biography, was that serious mental illness could be caused by biological changes, like changes in the chemistry or the structure of the brain.

    [00:16:44] Will: Not just bad upbringing.

    [00:16:46] Rod: Yeah. Or wicked morals. Yeah. Believing in the wrong God or the wrong version of the same God,

    [00:16:49] Will: but instead it can be something chemical.

    [00:16:51] Rod: Yeah.

    [00:16:51] Will: Okay. They didn't think that before?

    [00:16:54] Rod: I mean, look, I think this is fairly important. And to be fair, the biographies that we're talking about this guy written by Australians, this guy's an Australian God, so I think there might have been, A little liberty. The word hagiography did come up. Okay. Fair enough. but, so that's what it seems on the whole, that wasn't un, that wasn't common to think of mental illness as being anything other than, you know, dirty, naughty things.

    [00:17:13] Rod: So he would do autopsies on the patients of people who died and had problems and he'd find physical causes like blood.

    [00:17:18] Will: This is while he's still in Changi?

    [00:17:19] Rod: Yeah, still in Changi. So he'd find blood clots and stuff in the brain and kind and go, okay, this one was particularly messed up. And they behaved weirdly and they got blood clots.

    [00:17:27] Rod: Okay, this is organic, this is biological. And he started thinking that illnesses like schizophrenia and manic depression might actually have organical physical causes.

    [00:17:36] Will: That's an amazing thing to think. I mean, like, don't, like there's shift in thinking. Get that. We are very much okay with that kind of thing now. Like, like that there's some sort of chemistry going on and you, your chemistry can be unbalanced.

    [00:17:48] Rod: And so as it's been put, this idea took root and it incubated while he was still not back in Australia.

    [00:17:55] Will: He didn't publish any journal articles while he was in Changi?

    [00:17:57] Rod: Yeah. The Changi journalist.

    [00:17:58] Will: I would've thought you should three and a half years, you get a couple out.

    [00:18:01] Rod: Yeah. I would've thought Lazy. Not a real academic, oh, not going anywhere. So 1946, as he, he came back to Australia and it was, as it was put, he was on a mission. And later in life he wrote about this time, "I returned from three and a half years as a p o w of the Japanese mourning the wasted years and determined to pursue the ideas that are germinated in that time"

    [00:18:19] Will: I have not been in a prison camp, yes, there would be things I'd want to do when I come back, but mostly I'd be thinking, I want I'm thinking of the delicious meal. Yeah. And I'm thinking of not being beaten. Having an awesome shower would be nice. Oh God. Get career aspirations are coming coming back, but I'm not sitting there going, you know what? You know what? I want to

    [00:18:39] Rod: dude on a mission.

    [00:18:40] Will: Good on him.

    [00:18:41] Rod: This guy was into it. So, at the time, you'd be amazed here in 1946, there weren't really any effective treatments for people with severe depression or bipolar conditions. Amazing, right? Who would've thought? So basically going into an asylum was the only option, which wasn't cool. And the biographer who writing about Cade said, look the patients would often remain frozen, weird and locked up in their depressive states for quite a while until the symptoms may be thawed or they return to normalcy.

    [00:19:04] Will: put 'em there and see, let's see what happens. I, what's the worst getting happen? We'll, you know, lock 'em up for a while, they're protected? And then maybe they'll just get better on their own.

    [00:19:11] Rod: Yeah. it was after A year they imagined they'd get better and that it was, he added the addendum if they survived that year. If so, so it wouldn't go well.

    [00:19:18] Will: Oh, did they have an attrition rate that was above zero per year?

    [00:19:22] Rod: It was above zero. Cade thought that mania was caused by an excess of a naturally occurring substance in the body. He wasn't sure what it was. and depression was caused by having a deficiency of the substance. So after the war broke out, he worked at the Bundoora Repatriation Mental Hospital near Melbourne and there, there was with the ex soldiers who were incarcerated with their mental illness. I love the word incarcerated. But they were locked up for with their mental illness stuff. But of course at the time there were no imaging devices to look at the structure and size of the brain when talking 1946.

    [00:19:52] Rod: Doing a bunch of blood tests is pretty intrusive and gross but also they didn't really know what to look for. Yeah. So he had to find a way to look for this hypothesized substance man. So the solution was pretty obvious. Obviously he turned to

    [00:20:13] Will: magic

    [00:20:14] Rod: urine.

    [00:20:15] Will: Of course. Of course.

    [00:20:17] Rod: It's me. He turned to piddle.

    [00:20:21] Will: What can we get out of people easily?

    [00:20:23] Rod: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And they even, no matter how sick you are, you tend to do the wee wees. So Cade reckoned that if mania was due to an excess of a chemical circulating in the body, then maybe some excess of that would be piddled out and he could measure it.

    [00:20:34] Will: Well, wouldn't that be the problem though? If you're weeing out too much of it?

    [00:20:37] Rod: you widdle out too much to an on mania. So, he thought, well, I can get the wee wees and I can measure it and see what it might be. So his wife Jean says she remembers the start of his husband's experiments. He came to me and he said, " I've gotta do some research on why these patients have got different illnesses. I'd like to find the melancholia first depression and other illnesses as they were referred to the Melancholies. I've got an idea that might come to something if I save a lot of jars."

    [00:21:04] Will: We need, we'll be needing the prune jars.

    [00:21:06] Rod: Come on. Yeah. We need a lot of jars. And she said at first she didn't know why he needed them. So anyway, he started accumulating jars. Like he traveled to Melbourne and buy buttloads of bulky glass jars like buttloads apparently. His wife Jean wasn't particularly stoked and she would say to him, first, we don't have any money, dude. And I kept telling him, we don't have any money while you're buying these jars. His reply was, we might be able to use them afterwards for pickles.

    [00:21:27] Will: Oh, geez. Ooh.

    [00:21:30] Rod: So as soon as he had enough jars, which is N jars, he started to fill them with urine he got from his patients. And he didn't have a lab at first. So he is working out of his garage and in the backyard

    [00:21:39] Will: Come into my garage and take yeah.

    [00:21:41] Rod: Are you taking the piss? No, I'm keeping it. Eventually he moved to an empty pantry and a new ward that was built just behind the hospital,

    [00:21:48] Will: I would've thought he would be doing it closer to the hospital. But anyway

    [00:21:51] Rod: well, he was close. He's only a hundred meters away from the hospital. Oh, okay. All right. So there was an empty pantry, and so no one was using the ward. He moved into the pantry. Everyone used to call this lab the shed cuz Australia. to get from his house to the shed. It was a short stroll. He'd go through the back fence, pass a chook pen, along a gravel path. Boom.

    [00:22:06] Will: That is very Australian science.

    [00:22:09] Rod: A thousand percent. But he needed one more thing before he could do his stuff properly, which was something to keep the wee cold. So he started using the family fridge?

    [00:22:20] Will: No.

    [00:22:22] Rod: So he, each patient's urine was decanted into screw top bottles and jars numbered and shelved. Every time anyone from the Cade family opened their fridge door, there would be a whole bunch of jars of twinkle.

    [00:22:35] Rod: Oh, that's saying like, oh fuck, mate. The stored jars of twinkle of several dozen mentally ill men would confront them

    [00:22:42] Will: I don't know if it's better if it's your own. Or a family member,

    [00:22:47] Rod: your own urine?

    [00:22:48] Will: Yeah. I'm trying to process here. No, there's a little bit of me that says if it's mine, at least I'm respo, you know, know where it came from and if it's within the family, it's like, okay that's gross. We know the source material, but like a strangers urine is somehow worse for me.

    [00:23:02] Rod: I don't, oh, I don't know. Maybe not knowing helps me.

    [00:23:05] Will: No, it doesn't help me.

    [00:23:07] Rod: I can imagine it's something else.

    [00:23:09] Will: All right, so flip this around. Okay. So desert island? who's pee are you drinking? Are you drinking a strangers or are you drinking your own? Or are you drinking a friends and you've monitored their diet?

    [00:23:18] Rod: Mine first.

    [00:23:19] Will: There you go. Okay. Who's second

    [00:23:20] Rod: because I figure it's already been in me. It must be fine.

    [00:23:23] Will: Yeah. There you go. Are you drinking a family members or are you a strangers?

    [00:23:26] Rod: Thank Christ, most of my family are dead. All right. Look, by the time I'm screwed up enough to drink urine, I don't think I'll give a shit

    [00:23:33] Will: I don't want strangers wee in my fridge. I don't want anyone's wee, but strangers is worse.

    [00:23:37] Rod: Well, apparently Jean and his two sons became quite used to it said it was standard behavior. You pushed side a bottle or a couple of bottles of urine in to get to the cheese.

    [00:23:44] Will: You can get used to anything, can't you?

    [00:23:46] Rod: You can. Well, the quote from one of the sons was to us it was all normal. We wouldn't have known whether everybody else did or didn't have urine in their fridges at home

    [00:23:53] Will: you wouldn't have known. No. Yeah. Don't look. Why is your fridge so empty of the yellow jars? Like our fridge has heaps of them.

    [00:24:01] Rod: Where do you keep your dad's piss? Yeah. So, okay. He's got heaps of piss now. He's got heaps of wee wee. What now?

    [00:24:09] Will: I don't know. Do some science on it. Like, oh, shouldn't he have started doing science like straight away? In fact, oh no. He wanted to have enough. Why do you need to store it for age? Just before? Why don't you get it from the gentle man or gentle woman? Take it to your lab. Yeah, do the science on it and then tip it out.

    [00:24:23] Rod: So he doesn't have a lab. He's got the pantry in

    [00:24:24] Will: so he's just storing at the moment

    [00:24:26] Rod: well, you gotta be ready. So he had no equipment to analyze a urine and even if he didn't know what he was looking for. So he did the obvious thing.

    [00:24:35] Will: Start looking for anything.

    [00:24:37] Rod: Oh no. Even more obvious, he got a bunch of Guinea pigs from a nearby Monta Park Asylum. You visited that too. Well, we're talking there's are real Guinea pigs. Yeah. Real actual Guinea pig little creatures that the south American countries eat. And he caged them up in his newly acquired lab, the pantry.

    [00:24:52] Will: And is he gonna make them drink some?

    [00:24:55] Rod: I'll get to that. So his son David, still treasures the memory of walking into the pantry and seeing his father with all the Guinea pigs.

    [00:25:02] Will: Dad, you covered in Guinea pigs.

    [00:25:03] Rod: What a great day. I love my childhood. His quote "the Guinea pigs were in cages, but we also had some at home. They got through a lot of kitchen scraps. I remember dad hand handing one of them on his left arm and stroking it. They were tame from constant handling. They were good looking. Sure. Tan, black, white. My favorite was a tan and brown one."

    [00:25:22] Rod: That's one of the sons. His wife Jean Reminisces. "We had Guinea pigs in the shed. Lots of Guinea pigs. As they died, we'd get some more. He was good to them. He'd call 'em darling and he'd say, don't you mind me doing this as he injected them"

    [00:25:36] Will: with,

    [00:25:37] Rod: so he would hold them on their backs carefully and inject the urine into their ab abdomens.

    [00:25:42] Will: No. Why? This isn't science

    [00:25:45] Rod: to help people.

    [00:25:46] Will: It's not science.

    [00:25:48] Rod: You don't seem Well, I'm gonna inject piss into this Guinea pig. You'll be fine.

    [00:25:52] Will: You gotta have a big correlation diagram too. Like, well, you know, very pig. Yeah. It's like, patient Gary Guinea pig Chelsea. And then and then we put a bit of Griselda into, Keith

    [00:26:04] Rod: what colored Guinea pigs too. I mean, that's probably gonna be important.

    [00:26:07] Will: So you're not mixing, you're not, you know, you know, putting a couple of people into

    [00:26:11] Rod: a little bit of bill, a little bit of Sadie.

    [00:26:13] Will: Why are we injecting it? You can make Guinea pigs drink stuff.

    [00:26:16] Rod: that's gross. So he was experiment to see if the urine from manic patients might affect Guinea pigs differently to urine from other patients.

    [00:26:25] Will: Okay, so, so we've got some controlled Guinea pigs and some controlled urine.

    [00:26:29] Rod: Finally there's some science. Yeah. Okay. Still this is from a maniac. This is from someone else. I wanna put this one into this one to that one. Let's see if they behave differently. one by one, regardless of the diagnosis of the patients, the Guinea pigs started dying

    [00:26:40] Will: well, yeah.

    [00:26:41] Rod: So he did postmortems on every damn one, and as they died, he got more animals and he just kept on going.

    [00:26:46] Will: Is he thinking that maybe they don't need someone's urine in their whereabouts is it landing in their abdomen?

    [00:26:52] Rod: I don't know. Just abdomen. There's not a lot of it, but yeah. In the gato region? So apparently he was also a quote from his biographer. He was well aware that what he was doing was remarkably crude. So at first he kept quote about his work, telling only a few people. That's cool. Who needed to know?

    [00:27:07] Will: I'm doing some secret shed science. Like serious.

    [00:27:10] Rod: What's you doing in there? I'm in. Look, it's not like I'm injecting pedal into your Guinea pig guts. That'd be crazy. I'm making a bomb. Okay, cool.

    [00:27:21] Will: Look, just as a warning sign listener, if any member of your family is first of all, storing urine in their fridge. In your fridge. In your fridge, yeah. And then they're doing secret experiments in the shed that they can't tell anyone. It's not really science. It's

    [00:27:35] Rod: and there's a mountain of dead Guinea pigs out in the back slowly accruing. He at least pretended it was science. He has been doing it anyway.

    [00:27:42] Will: He's writing it. He's at least writing things down.

    [00:27:44] Rod: Yeah, he's writing notes. Although later later on it said his notes might not have been too easy to replicate the experiment. Yeah. So early experiments suggested the urine from manic patients was more toxic than urine from other patients and killed more Guinea pigs.

    [00:27:58] Rod: But it turns out that wasn't really true. Okay. So the urine from a manic patient was no more likely to kill a Guinea pig than any other sort of urine. So he started thinking,

    [00:28:06] Will: what if I did something different?

    [00:28:08] Rod: No. What's in urine?

    [00:28:10] Will: Well, yes. What did we not know?

    [00:28:13] Rod: Well, urine's probably too crass. Maybe he needed something more refined.

    [00:28:15] Will: Okay. Yeah. Okay. Alright.

    [00:28:17] Rod: urinite, urine, extractive urine.

    [00:28:20] Will: What's he gonna do here?

    [00:28:21] Rod: So there's two toxic substances that were of interest, urea and uric acid. Not the same, both in urine. So they're both breakdown products. They're part of a body metabolisms, blah, blah, blah. And he was thinking maybe one of them is the chemical toxin he was looking for. So maybe there's more urea in manic urine than in urine patients with other mental conditions but when he tested the idea, he found manic urine, had no more urea than any other urine

    [00:28:47] Will: I'm gobsmacked. I'm gobsmacked. I really thought this would be the thing. Troubling. the urine was too uriney.

    [00:28:53] Rod: Yes. You have too much wee. Too much piddle in your twinkle. So then he thought maybe uric urea and uric acid might work in tandem to make the urine of manic.

    [00:29:02] Will: This is the most classic, you know, the, you know, the, it's, I think it's an Irish proverb. Why was the drunk man for his keys under the light post? And he said, well, I can't see anywhere else. Yeah, exactly. Where else would I look?

    [00:29:13] Rod: is where it starts to get interesting. So, He wanted to make up different strengths of uric acid that he could convert into a substanent that he can more easily manipulate. All right, but on its own uric acid doesn't dissolve in water, so he added lithium to it.

    [00:29:29] Will: Look, obviously listener, you know, the end, end as well. Like, like Jesus, what a lucky fucker. Like he just took, oh no. At one moment in his life, he took, well, why don't I randomly add the thing that's gonna help? Seriously I'm gonna play around in someone's poo, basically. Okay? It's not that poo, but not far off. I'm just gonna play in the paddling pool of poo.

    [00:29:49] Rod: It stinks a bit so I can put some rosewater under my nose. Rosewater is the magic.

    [00:29:54] Will: It's like he, he accidentally interjected antibiotics into the poo, and it's like Jesus Christ.

    [00:30:00] Rod: And he was using it as a catalyst.

    [00:30:01] Will: Oh my God. I like, look I will, in his defense, I'm assuming he documented this enough to then go, I have made a discovery. And that's a legitimate discovery. Definitely not Jesus. What a playing around in your poo way to make a discovery.

    [00:30:14] Rod: Oh, there's a few more steps. They weren't perfect. So he added lithium that gave him lithium urate. And of course cuz he was adding new stuff. He's a scientist. He had to check if lithium was causing any confounds. So he didn't check.

    [00:30:26] Will: He put it in a Guinea pig.

    [00:30:27] Rod: Yeah. He'd put lithium alone in and lithium carbonates solutions into the Guinea pigs as well as lithium urate.

    [00:30:31] Will: And they all died again?

    [00:30:33] Rod: So he'd put it in the pigs, the Guinea pigs, and they become more docile. Okay. And he said in one description he simply lifted one Guinea pig, one of the Guinea pigs. He turned it over, placed it gently on its back after he'd injected it. And instead of fighting to stand up and basically get outta this entirely vulnerable position, it just kind of went, that's cool.

    [00:30:49] Will: It's just blissing out.

    [00:30:50] Rod: Just lay there. Yeah. All right. And he did it again and again. He got the same results. So his quote was, they would lie on their backs staring with soft eyes while he gently prodded them with a stub of the index finger. He'd never seen them behave like this before. They seemed alert, but they were calm.

    [00:31:05] Will: Hang on. Does, is he missing like a chunk of his index finger?

    [00:31:08] Rod: No, this is described as stub. I assume they just mean,

    [00:31:10] Will: I was just kind of visualizing him as a Oh, he only one hand as well.

    [00:31:14] Rod: He had a limp and he spoke like a pirate. Didn't I mention that?

    [00:31:18] Will: You should have done, I thought some crazy shit happened during the war and he's just got stubbed fingers to do his science with most people listener. If you have stubbed fingers, that's awesome. I'm celebrating stubbed fingers. I just like to visualize this.

    [00:31:31] Rod: You're celebrating stubbed fingers.

    [00:31:32] Will: I am. Not that I do it myself. I'm just saying

    [00:31:35] Rod: God, you're a diverse person.

    [00:31:36] Will: I'm just saying that he's, if he's prodding with just the one knuckle of, and he's doing all his science with one knuckle.

    [00:31:42] Rod: Yeah. Look, if that is the case, it didn't come up, which you'd think it would, it should. So the next step to him was obvious and the quote from his biographer because he was a man of great honor and he was very religious. So he was worried that he couldn't do this to humans. So he started swallowing Lithium himself first,

    [00:31:58] Will: did he?

    [00:31:58] Rod: For a few weeks.

    [00:32:00] Will: Okay. So he wants to check if it's got negative side of effects,

    [00:32:02] Rod: he's gonna fuck people up. So the quote is, and he didn't die, he didn't curl up in a ball in the corner and he didn't have fits. So he decided it was okay to give to patients and he knew who his first patient would be.

    [00:32:13] Will: Oh, really?

    [00:32:13] Rod: Yeah. Bill Brand,

    [00:32:14] Will: obviously he's got some sort of Guinea pig looking patients.

    [00:32:18] Rod: He's got multicolored skin, quite furry. Bill Brand, he was a psychotic who'd for more than 30 years, he was a patient at the asylum in Bandura for most of the 30 years that they knew him. He used to rummage around in rubbish bins at the asylum. He was manic. He'd tried to spend all the money he had, he'd abscond if he got anything. So he was a flight risk. His life was the quintessential life of a seriously mentally ill patient. He'd cut off the tips of two fingers while working as a laborer.

    [00:32:43] Will: Stubs.

    [00:32:43] Rod: Yep. Not Cade though. He was disowned and alien alienated from his family and he'd just been left in the asylum cause they didn't know what to do with him. So the guy was fucking sick. Yeah. He was not a well guy. So in March of 48, 1948, Cade put brand on some lithium.

    [00:32:58] Will: He didn't put it in some urine first and then injected into Yeah.

    [00:33:01] Rod: Guinea pig urine though to balance it out. So I quote from the biographer, a man with a strong moral compass. Cade felt this is the ethical thing to do. What to give this guy a lithium because the guy was almost certainly gonna die a miserable death alone. There was nothing much to lose cuz he was already having a shit life.

    [00:33:21] Will: Oh

    [00:33:21] Rod: yeah.

    [00:33:21] Will: God sure.

    [00:33:22] Rod: It's fucked anyway.

    [00:33:22] Will: Sure. Yeah, exactly.

    [00:33:24] Rod: So let's just fuck it faster. Maybe. There are no ethics committees back then, so he is only answerable to his own conscience.

    [00:33:30] Will: Ah, look and I don't there are still, situations in society where someone is sectioned and they can have medicine Yeah. Given to them without their consent because they're not able to give some sort of consent and

    [00:33:41] Rod: supposably.

    [00:33:43] Will: Yeah. What are you gonna do? He I got a barrel of Guinea pig urine here. What am I gonna do with it? Yeah. It's gotta, it's gonna get somewhere.

    [00:33:53] Rod: Yeah. Might as well give it to this guy. So he made a liquid lithium solution and over, over three weeks as he fed it to him, brands started to get better. So his speech stopped being manic. He stopped rummaging in the bins.

    [00:34:04] Rod: So apparently after about two months brand our buddy from the psychotic walked outta the asylum back to his old job. Perfectly sane.

    [00:34:11] Will: Two months. Wow.

    [00:34:11] Rod: Two months. And they said, look, basically nothing like this has been seen in,

    [00:34:16] Will: and his old job was the rummaging through the bins?

    [00:34:18] Rod: No, that was a laborer where he'd lost a couple of fingers.

    [00:34:20] Will: Oh yeah. Okay. Yeah.

    [00:34:22] Rod: But the psychiatrist who wrote this biography said, in many ways, Bill's, stories, archetypal of many mental health sufferers. So he returns for his whole job cuz he's well, Because he is, well, he decide and

    [00:34:33] Will: he's well forever now.

    [00:34:34] Rod: Well, that's it. He said, well, I'm well now, I don't need the medication. Oh, this happens a lot. , so he gets sick again, gets bipolar again, gets, goes back to hospital. So when he gets back, Cade goes, well, fuck me, lithium worked. Let's give you more and more. To get him back to normal. Yes. But too much lithium is toxic.

    [00:34:51] Rod: And so in the late forties, they didn't know what the correct dose would be cause it's experimental. Sure. So brand got lithium toxic, basically ind died in 1950.

    [00:35:00] Will: Ah, all right.

    [00:35:01] Rod: Yeah. Which really fucked Cade up. So Cade was really freaked him when I don't like this anymore. And he wasn't sure about whether it wasn't

    [00:35:07] Will: it was a pretty big hint though that something went right and I get that brand was having a bad life and it ended badly, no doubt.

    [00:35:14] Rod: And it says, look, so in parallel with brand, or maybe brand was the first I'm not sure it wasn't clear, but Cade had treated 10 people with mania. And he wrote this up. He actually did publish something. There you go. So in late 1941

    [00:35:27] Will: Journey's into Guinea pig wee

    [00:35:28] Rod: Yeah. Fridge piddle I've kept, yeah. in September. He reported these dramatic improvements and he put it in the Medical Journal of Australia. There you go. September, sorry, 1949. The majority of the patients had been in and outta Bandura for a number of years, but now five had improved enough to return home to their families. So that was good. Five outta 10. Which is better than none.

    [00:35:52] Will: Okay. Well, you know, half of them and also they'd been in and out already. Yeah. So like, and five of them continued with the in and out

    [00:36:00] Rod: you, in your facts and your knowledge and your actual observations of reality. True though. But yeah, five, five out of 10 is better than none out of 10 and none out of 10 was more common. Okay. So, 50% improved, which is, it's great. But the paper went largely unnoticed. And in 1950 he abandoned lithium experiments.

    [00:36:18] Will: Oh, did he really?

    [00:36:19] Rod: Yeah. He just went, oh, fuck it. It's too dangerous. I killed a dude. I don't like it. No one liked my paper.

    [00:36:24] Will: No, I get that. I get the, I killed a dude

    [00:36:26] Rod: and no one gave a shit about my paper, so whatever. But he, so he started experimenting with salts of rubidium, sirium strum, uranium strums, radioactive, yeah. Rather. But none of them apparently proved to be therapeutic.

    [00:36:38] Rod: I'll get to the end of the moment, but as an aside, Cade, much later in his life, he said he realized that the Guinea pigs were probably coming calm because it was a side effect of toxic amounts of lithium. Anyways, his passive lying around, so, oh, yeah. Okay. Even then, it was likely that maybe the reason it seemed to be working was, oops as well. All so much oops. So anyway in the 1960s, his discovery was actually heralded as something really good.

    [00:37:07] Will: How'd this happen?

    [00:37:08] Rod: I'll wander into it. So I'll get to the, where lithium is today to close this out. But he did this amazing thing, but he was very quiet about it. So his biographers, he wrote a book on the history of psychiatry after he retired, there was a chapter on lithium, and he didn't mention that he was the individual who discovered the miracle of lithium and how it could help people with bipolar.

    [00:37:24] Will: That is weird.

    [00:37:25] Rod: It is weird.

    [00:37:26] Will: That's weird. Yeah. It's like,

    [00:37:29] Rod: maybe he was still like, I kind of did. All right.

    [00:37:32] Will: Maybe he's feeling a bit guilty. But don't write the chapter if you're feeling a bit guilty.

    [00:37:35] Rod: Well, maybe I was lucky and it was a history of psychiatry, so he's just like, look, it works now. Yeah, he didn't do it. Allegedly. Again, he was a humble guy. So he died in 1980, November, 1980. And the heaps of honors, like, so there, there's a psychiatric areas are around the hospitals in Australia named after him. There's a national health and medical research council. Couple of grants called the N H M R C, John Cade Fellowship in Mental Health Research. 750 grand a year for two of them.

    [00:38:04] Will: The Guinea Pig Society.

    [00:38:05] Rod: Yes, the Guinea Pig Society

    [00:38:06] Will: and the Urine Appreciation Society. What do they say?

    [00:38:09] Rod: They get a photo of him. It's like the Rotary Club and the picture of the Queen. That's what they're like.

    [00:38:12] Will: Urine keepers anonymous.

    [00:38:14] Rod: Yeah. So So he's well acknowledged, he's well liked, and well considered. What about lithium? Where are we at? Yeah where's Lithian end up? So an Australian source obviously called Lithium the quote, penicillin story of mental health. And I can see that because Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Accidental, oopsy poos. Let's keep trying. Holy shit. Something worked. Which penicillin, I'm summarizing, but was pretty much

    [00:38:35] Will: of a similar type like that. Collecting a whole bunch of urine and then you, and you

    [00:38:40] Rod: forget to wash your dishes, boom up and then suddenly cured things. But another source says we need to acknowledge the Danish psychiatrist, Mogens Schou, who also fought long and hard to get lithium accepted as a treatment for bipolar disorder since the early fifties. So Jona buddy found it. They got into it. They did double blind placebo controlled clinical trials.

    [00:38:59] Will: They did actual science.

    [00:39:00] Rod: Yeah, they did real hardcore science.

    [00:39:01] Will: And did they do like a little bit of Guinea pig injecting on the side? Just to just ho just keep the tradition. Like, you know, we did some proper science and some Guinea pigs

    [00:39:09] Rod: Just in case there was something Cade missed because maybe we can help animals too. So in 1970 in The Lancet, they published a paper that established Beyond Doubt that Lithium was effective for most people with bipolar. So it took to 1970. And so basically people who, Lord Cade the only guy say, look, we've gotta, we've gotta be aware of these other two dudes as well, at least.

    [00:39:29] Will: Okay, fair enough.

    [00:39:30] Rod: So thanks to them all, it's easy manufactured. The element was never patented by pharmaceutical companies, so it's cheap and available.

    [00:39:36] Will: Oh, you can't patent an element.

    [00:39:38] Rod: No, you can't. That would be rude.

    [00:39:40] Will: Well, I don't think you can. I mean, I mean, God, maybe God already holds the, or the nature of the universe.

    [00:39:45] Rod: God holds all the birds.

    [00:39:46] Will: Yeah, exactly. But God, God's a creative commons sort of guy. I think he is. It's like, I reckon you're right. It doesn't do what you like.

    [00:39:58] Rod: So lithium of course isn't perfect. There are side effects.

    [00:40:01] Will: What? It's not perfect. How could this be?

    [00:40:04] Rod: I actually, years ago worked in an area where I was interviewing a bunch of people who, for research purposes, who were suffering greatly from bipolar and deep depression. Yep. And the ones who are on lithium, the side effects particularly, it was horrible to see the women were very large and Oh, okay. A lot of 'em had thinning hair. Ah, yeah. Which is some of the side effects, like you do it's non-term. Some people pay. Yeah. But you also get, you know, like hand tremors, frequent urination, thirst, stuff like that. That's all. There you go. Common. It can cause irregular heart pain.

    [00:40:33] Will: How frequent are we talking? Because depend on the there's times and days where I'm like, I feel like I got that side effect anyway.

    [00:40:39] Rod: Well stop taking so much lithium. Yeah. There are a lot of potential side effects. Kidney disease can happen. You can get too much calcium in the blood, blah, blah, blah.

    [00:40:46] Rod: So if it doesn't work for you, it can be a problem. But if it does work for you, it's life changing. So today there's a piece in nature in 2019 that said lithium helps to stabilize the moods of millions of people with bipolar disorder today. But you have to be careful because of the side effects.

    [00:41:01] Rod: So you've gotta be very dose aware. And its mechanisms are still a mystery. That's the thing. Yeah. I love that. That's classic psychiatry. We, it works, but we have no idea why.

    [00:41:09] Will: But even more than classic psychiatry. Yeah. it's super, super simple as an element. Like it's as simple as you can get nothing to it close enough. It's like there's only two elements simpler and then it works. That is so weird. Like every other chemical that, that we have, that we take, you know, you look at those chemical diagrams, they're huge and they interact weirdly with the cells and with molecules. Yep. This thing's tiny.

    [00:41:34] Rod: This one's like, it's a really dumb, simple thing and we put it in there and it seems to mostly work,

    [00:41:39] Will: So we don't even know?

    [00:41:40] Rod: No. They speculate, oh, you know, something to do with the functioning of neurotransmitters, blah, blah, blah, blah. And here's my favorite. Which kind of brings us back to the natural spas, et cetera. So in July of last year, 2020 there was a study published in the British Journal of Psychiatry that talked about how public drinking water with trace levels of naturally occurring lithium seems to have anti suicidal effects on the population to consume it.

    [00:42:04] Rod: Yeah. So there was a system, systematic review, a meta-analysis of a whole bunch of studies from Austria, Greece, Italy, Canberra Yeah. Canberra, no, Lithuania, UK, Japan, US a lot of countries. Yeah. Okay. And it correlated naturally occurring lithium levels in drinking water samples and suicide rates in 1,286 regions or counties in these areas.

    [00:42:24] Will: See, that's a lot. Once you get a correlation that bigg you know, it's a lot.

    [00:42:28] Rod: And it shows clear a clear situation where the suicide levels are lower in those with

    [00:42:35] Will: Should we put lithium in the drinking water?

    [00:42:36] Rod: So, but there's not a lot. It's far below clinical levels of lithium. Yeah, sure. Hints.

    [00:42:42] Will: Yeah. Should we put a hint?

    [00:42:43] Rod: Yes. With the fluoride wave, some lithium fluoride. There you go. That's what we need in our water. So yeah, that's what we're looking at with lithium. It's definitely does stuff.

    [00:42:51] Will: I think it's so weird though, like, like that it is such a simple, like an atom. It's an atom. Not even a molecule. Not even this complicated thing. Yeah. And yet it does something. Yeah. I get why he's humble though.

    [00:43:03] Rod: Because he's embarrassed.

    [00:43:05] Will: It is a little bit like the penicillin story I get, you know, it's a bit dumb. It's like, yeah, look, it was, I was doing some dumb science. Oh, I love, but dumb. It's creative, dumb science. And I stumbled across something this I love as a cut. Awesome.

    [00:43:21] Rod: It's a cutting agent. It's like, you know, you don't talk about the gin, you talk about the tonic water. Oh yeah. You turned be the tonic, not the gin that was making the difference.

    [00:43:28] Will: It's just- look and awesome to contribute to the world by falling ass over backwards into discovering something that helps so many people.

    [00:43:37] Rod: Absolutely. Let's there you go. Thank you Nirvana. Who I met. Did I tell you that tell story?

    [00:43:43] Will: I did hear that you met Nirvana. Are you gonna tell the story of that? Or is that in your other podcast?

    [00:43:46] Rod: That's another time.

    [00:43:48] Will: Oh my God. You tell the story in your other podcast.

    [00:43:50] Rod: It's called The Forge. One day it will be released.

    [00:43:52] Will: Oh my God. What? You just put it out. The awesome show is this podcast. It's me Will Grant, and him Rod Lamberts this weird thing with his name. He says super long name at the beginning of the podcast and then nothing. And at the end he's like, no, you've heard my name. You can't hear it again. Reinforce, you know how shy I am to reinforce my name. So the Wholesome Show is brought to you by the Australian National Center for the Public Awareness of Science.

    [00:44:17] Rod: Guinea pigs.

    [00:44:19] Will: We're back next week, listener.

Will Grant
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