Download Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind AudioBook Free
A riveting memoir and a fascinating investigation of the annals, uses, and controversies behind lithium, an important medication for thousands and thousands of people fighting bipolar disorder. It commenced in Los Angeles in 1993, when Jaime Lowe was just 16. She ceased sleeping and eating and commenced to hallucinate - demonically cackling Muppets, encounters lurking in glass windows, Michael Jackson delivering messages from the Neverland Underground. Lowe published manifestos and math equations in her journal and drew infographics on her bedroom wall. Eventually hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar, she was prescribed a medication that emerged in the form of three red pills - lithium. In Mental, Lowe shares and investigates her account of episodic madness as well as the steadiness 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 destruction. Mental is eye-opening and powerful, tackling a sickness and medication that has handled an incredible number of lives yet remains shrouded in sociable stigma. Now, while she adjusts to a new drug, her pursuit of a stable life persists, as does her curiosity about the annals and knowledge of the secret element that formed the way she sees the earth and allowed her generations of sanity. Lowe travels to the Bolivian sodium flats that maintain more than half of the world's lithium reserves; rural America, where lithium is mined for batteries; and lithium spas that are still touted as a tonic to cure all ills. With unflinching credibility and laughter, Lowe allows a clear-eyed view into her life and an arresting inquiry into one of mankind's oldest medical mysteries.
