Mental : : Lithium, Love, and Losing my Mind

Locations
Call Number: 616.89 Lo, Adult Book / Nonfiction / Health & Fitness / Mental Health / Lowe, Jaime
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	616.89 Lo	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Nonfiction / Health & Fitness / Mental Health / Lowe, Jaime	4-week checkout	Due 05-13-2024

Paint the ceiling with me and I will show you the secret tunnel to neverland -- Admittance -- If Nazis don't get you, the moccasins will -- Fat and blood and circular insanity -- Clean needles now, asphalt volleyball ... nevermind -- Rabid mutant squirrels, frontal lobe, beast in the attic -- Irreconcilable differences and the omnipotent Dr. Viscott -- "It's time to start livin'!" -- The facts of life -- Reach for the sky -- Midnight cowgirl: 1: House & garden: 0 -- Sex 'n' egg 'n' cheese -- Hysterical metamorphosis -- Taper meds, Thanksgiving in Maine, Kyrgyzstani man -- And now for a psychotic break ... or that time I almost got married on top of the World Trade Center -- Cheeking meds, bartering for utopia, and the Passover cruise -- The corner of Sixth Avenue and Garfield: coping skills 1. Improv, and the sad clown -- Coping skills 2. Chopping mushrooms badly -- The big bang, the third element emerges, hosts alien life ... maybe? -- Lithium's lore and the transition to depakote (take 1) -- The calm waters of bad kissingen -- When in Rome and the lithium reckoning -- Depakote (take 2), lithium tapering -- Epilogue: Hope springs eternal.
"A riveting memoir and a fascinating investigation of the history, uses, and controversies behind lithium, an essential medication for millions of people struggling with bipolar disorder. It began in Los Angeles in 1993, when Jaime Lowe was just sixteen. She stopped sleeping and eating, and began to hallucinate--demonically cackling Muppets, faces lurking in windows, Michael Jackson delivering messages from the Neverland Underground. Lowe wrote manifestos and math equations in her diary, and drew infographics on her bedroom wall. Eventually, hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar, she was prescribed a medication that came in the form of three pink pills--lithium. In Mental, Lowe shares and investigates her story of episodic madness, as well as the stability she found while on lithium. She interviews scientists, psychiatrists, and patients to examine how effective lithium really is and how its side effects can be dangerous for long-term users--including Lowe, who after twenty years on the medication suffers from severe kidney damage. Mental is eye-opening and powerful, tackling an illness and drug that has touched millions of lives and yet remains shrouded in social stigma. Now adjusting to a new drug, her pursuit of a stable life continues as does her curiosity about the history and science of the mysterious element that shaped the way she sees the world and allowed her decades of sanity. Lowe travels to the Bolivian salt flats that hold more than half of the world's lithium reserves, rural America where lithium is mined for batteries, and to lithium spas that are still touted as a tonic to cure all ills. With unflinching honesty and humor, Lowe allows a clear-eyed view into her life, and an arresting inquiry into one of mankind's oldest medical mysteries"-- Provided by publisher.
"A riveting memoir and a fascinating investigation of the history, uses, and controversies behind lithium, an essential medication for millions of people struggling with bipolar disorder, stemming from Jaime Lowe's sensational 2015 article in The New York Times Magazine: "'I Don't Believe in God, but I Believe in Lithium': My 20-year Struggle with Bipolar Disorder.""-- Provided by publisher.

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