![]() Rebecca Strawbridge, review co-author and mood disorder researcher at King's College London, said places with higher levels of trace lithium in tap water generally had lower suicide rates. Those results inspired a whole range of similar studies around the world.Ī UK team combined data from 15 of those studies and published the results in a review in The British Journal of Psychiatry in 2020. Those levels may influence rates of suicide, violent crime and even dementia.Ī study in Texas in the early '90s was one of the first to find a link between high lithium levels and lower suicide rates. Not only does lithium show up in mineral springs, it's also naturally found in drinking water at varying levels around the world. It's now thought that there may be some truth to the medical benefits of mineral springs due to the presence of lithium salts.Īnd lithium may still be improving our wellbeing behind the scenes. "Soranus of Ephesus, a medical doctor from the second century, prescribed mineral waters actually for people who were manic and had other psychiatric problems," Professor Brown said. ![]() 2 Caffeine is a non-selective competitive antagonist for adenosine A1 and A2A receptor, 1 with arousing effects that depend on its ability to counteract the inhibition of adenosine on ascending arousal. ( Supplied: Gatton & District Historical Society)Īnd while the element of lithium itself was yet to be discovered, those cultures would attribute healing properties to the mineral springs. Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in the world, 1 with behavioural effects that include increased psychomotor activation, arousal and reinforcement. Read her other IBPF posts here.Helidon Spa, in southern Queensland, is one of Australia's natural mineral water springs. Read more from Virginia at her personal bipolar blog, as well as her motherhood blog. But get to it, your fans are waiting for you! So you keep on moving, my friend, and keep making it happen. You are a survivor, and that makes you a real life, honest-to-God rock star! You live because you know that despite all the chaos and mess, despite all the anger and suffering, life is damn beautiful. You live because you know that you can’t miss what might happen later or tomorrow. You do it despite the illness, not because of it. Because of this God forsaken illness, your life carries with it endless possibility to help someone else.īecause you know just what it takes to survive and you do it every day. You have a purpose: to teach others, to inspire, to motivate. You know what matters is not the intrusive, ruminating thoughts you had all day not the voice telling you how no one likes you or that you’ll never be able to accomplish anything. You crave another moment of the sand in your toes, for the way you felt when you looked into your child’s eyes. You don’t give up because you know the sunshine you felt on your face this morning is what’s real. And this life you were given? This struggle and unpredictability? This pain? The isolation, the creativity? Do you know what it means? It means you are alive! You are breathing! You’re here! You have no idea how brave you are because you get up and put one foot in front of the other when every cell in your body is telling you “screw it, just give up.” Not you though. I know that some days you feel like you just can’t handle another person telling you to just “be happy ,” and maybe there are some of you that are still trying to grapple with the diagnosis. The meek, the bewildered and the ones on top, too. The lost, the mighty, the sullen and poor. And also to the one that rode it into the ground. I’m talking to you over there, the one who worked 80 or more hours a week thanks to mania and made your company a success. Or perhaps you’ve seen the highest of the high and had many a conversation with God or been him yourself. You’ve seen and felt the deepest and darkest of the underneath of everything. I know you’ve gone through hell and somehow, someway, were able to scrape off the remnants of that last episode or breakdown to come back. I know that you’ve seen the edges of the earth. Because, you see, I know what you have seen. My father/mother/brother/sister/entire world hates me!” Nope. I suck, I don’t have anything to show for my life, I don’t even have a girlfriend (or boyfriend). Listen, I know what you’re saying, “What? I’m not a rock star. Or when you’re so beneath the darkness, you feel like the light might burn your retinas if it appeared. I want you to think about this when you are so caught up in that hamster wheel you just can’t make it stop. I want you to remember what I am about to tell you. I’m talking to the ones who are facing hospitalization even as we speak. I am talking to you guys over there as well, family and friends, who care for and about all of us. I’m talking to the one that thinks about dying more than living, and who struggles some days even to get out of bed. The one that wonders what happened in their life to deserve this wretched beast of an illness. The one that constantly looks down on themselves and wishes they were someone else. Hey! Hey you! Yeah, I’m talking to you over there.
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