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Finding Sanity [electronic resource] : John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder

Moore, Greg de2017

eAudioBook

Summary

For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives – if they survived – in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them.In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind – manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle.John Cade discovered a treatment that has become the gold standard for bipolar disorder – lithium. It has stopped more people from committing suicide than a thousand help lines.Lithium is the penicillin story of mental health – the first effective medication discovered for the treatment of a mental illness – and it is, without doubt, Australia's greatest mental health story.