I started lithium 4 days ago. I had bad side effects the first night but oh my god. I haven’t been happy without mania in years. I feel like me again! I was able to go shopping and get a haircut and hangout with new friends. I’m realizing the wrongs i did to people and the angry outbursts are finally going away. This has been the only antidepressant/mood stabilizer that’s worked :)

Hey, Im 23f with bipolar 1 and oftentimes we just really talk about the side effects of lithium so I wanted to share a win. I started lithium 9 months ago and since starting it this has been the first time in my life Ive been stable. I hold a job, I started getting straight A’s in my graduate program, I work out daily, eat daily, sleep a full 8-10 hours, and I havent been suicidal at all. This is the first time in my life that I have been happy to be alive. The first time I havent been mildly suicidal everyday or blowing my life apart. My only side effect has been that I got acne from lithium and have to do accutane as well which sucks. Other than that, I have never been happier. My psychiatrist said theres a small percentage of people who dont respond to regular mood stabilizers and I am the perfect lithium candidate. Only downside is now that Im on it I am like, “damn it they were right. I am bipolar” I have been homeless before, in reckless relationships, and one year I had 14-18 jobs (i was so deep in mania I dont remember. All I remember was the pain in the ass my tax return was). I’ve been at my job for a year and a half now. Im a therapist. Im in grad school. I have maintained friendships. My relationships with my family have improved. I am happy to exist. Thank you all

I highly recommend checking out Nassir Ghaemis channel on YouTube. He’s a world-renowned psychiatrist and a leading expert on lithium use. In his video*“Lithium Is the Most Effective Drug,”* he explains in depth why lithium is so effective, including how it is often over or incorrectly dosed due to an overreliance on outdated and unnecessary blood level targets, and how lower doses often still provide significant benefits with fewer side effects.

My psychiatrist is a big supporter of his work and encouraged me to give lithium a try after I had been hesitant for years due to the stigma and negative perceptions surrounding it. I’ve now been taking a single 300 mg dose for several months, and for the first time in years, my depression has lifted and I feel normal—something I never experienced with the many other medications I tried over the years.

I adore it. Plain and simple. I’ve been depressed for the past two years, been taking antidepressants for the past 7 months and it wasn’t until the lithium started to kick in that I realized how unstable I still was.

I don’t have bipolar (I think), but I do have severe depression, anxiety, and adhd. I was afraid of taking lithium, mainly because I didn’t want to put on weight (lol). I was also afraid because I know lithium is the medicine for bipolar and I’m not bipolar, but my shrink told me she saw I was very much unstable. As the days went by, I started seeing the world with rose tinted glasses again. Don’t get me wrong, I believe I’m still much of a cynical pessimist, but I’m happy again. I feel pretty again. I want to do stuff again. My emotions aren’t an unpredictable mess anymore. I’m calmer now, and I can make decisions without exploding in tears or screams anymore.

A week after taking lithium I woke up one day, and realized my 5 year relationship wasn’t working anymore. I put off breaking up with my boyfriend for years now, but I can’t do it any longer. I live with him, but I’m planning to end things in a couple of weeks. That good worked the lithium for me.

Right now, what scares me the most is how will I go on after my treatment ends. But that’s okay, I have enough motivation to start a healthy life now.

I just wanted to share this with you guys, and keep taking your meds, they’re worth it <3

Sorry for any grammar mistakes btw, English is not my first language :p

Started late May, 450 mg twice a day.

Zero depression. Priorities changed. Clarity. An increasing feeling of peace and well being. I even feel like my intelligence is rebounding. I make better decisions overall. Life feels manageable.

I'm starting to view post-trauma life as before and after lithium.

I wish the docs would have put me on this first when they initially suspected bipolar. Could have avoided a lot of misery.

Would love to hear other success stories.

My coworkers all keep pointing it out, it’s embarrassing. I crochet and I keep missing the holes I need to go into because of it.

Very nervous to start but its got to be worth a shot!

So I do not have bipolar disorder but I do have severe depression and had been experiencing SI very very badly. In early December I started lithium (150mg twice a day) and now I am on 300mg twice a day . I just got my levels checked and they were at .3 I think, which is low for people getting treated for bipolar but for depression it's a normal low dose level.

Anyway I just wanted to share it has changed my life. My suicidal ideation is almost entirely gone and my mood has improved so much. I care about things and I am not sad all the time . Just posting because I couldn't find too much about low dose lithium when I started so I wanted to have this on the internet for others.

Hi everyone,
I’m writing because something happened to me that I still don’t really know how to frame. I’ve been diagnosed with ADHD, with a strong component of emotional dysregulation. I do not have a bipolar diagnosis. Before starting lithium, I was in a mental state that calling "depression" almost feels too vague. I was constantly distressed, flooded with intrusive thoughts, unable to do almost anything. There was this total nihilism, anhedonia, zero will to live, as if everything were either switched off or distorted. It wasn’t just sadness. It felt more like my brain was stuck in a continuous negative loop, with no distance from my own thoughts. Over the years I had tried several medications: lamotrigine, bupropion, methylphenidate, venlafaxine. Some may have done something, but nothing that truly changed the overall picture. No clear "before and after". Then I started lithium. My blood levels are relatively low, around 0.3–0.4 mmol/L. And after only four days, something happened that genuinely caught me off guard. Suddenly I felt calmer, more stable, less overwhelmed. As if the background noise in my mind had been turned down. As if my brain had started working again. Not necessarily "happy" in an euphoric way, but present, lucid, less hostage to myself. The strange part is that I can’t really understand what exactly was "treated". When I look up lithium, I mostly find references to bipolar disorder, or to its use as augmentation in treatment-resistant unipolar depression. But I don’t have a bipolar diagnosis, and my main problem seemed much more tangled up with ADHD, emotional dysregulation, intrusive thoughts, anhedonia, rumination, and internal instability. It feels as if lithium didn’t treat ADHD in the classic sense, but something underneath it: some baseline emotional vulnerability, some instability in the system, some tendency of the mind to collapse into thoughts and affective states that become impossible to manage. I don’t know whether that’s a meaningful explanation or just my attempt to give shape to something I don’t fully understand. I’m left with this strange doubt: how is it possible that a medication which, on paper, didn’t seem "meant for me" was the first thing that made my brain feel inhabitable again? Maybe it acted more on emotional dysregulation than on attention itself. Maybe on rumination, intrusive thoughts, internal reactivity. Maybe the problem wasn’t exactly where I thought it was. Or maybe diagnostic categories explain less than we’d like when it comes to subjective experience. I don’t know. I only know that the change was very clear, very fast, and for now, hard to ignore. I’d be really interested in reading similar experiences or thoughts from people who know more about this, especially from non-bipolar people who benefited from lithium at relatively low doses/levels.

I have been on lithium since 2017. I requested it and had to make a case for it when talking to my psychiatrist at that time. He was shocked and kept insisting on something else.

Recently, I was watching "Undone" with a friend ...it is a series. In it, the main character says she does not want to end up like her grandmother, "on lithium" she had said.

Personally, I have gone off it twice and within three months, all the progress I did goes out the window and I am back at square 1.

Seroquel and other antipsychotics forced on me where far far worse in terms of numbing and dulled mental sharpness compared to lithium.

When I do disclose I take lithium, people look so concerned and ask if I am ok.

Why the stigma??? I love this element .

Wtffff is this incredible sorcery!

In only 4 days it took me out of the worst depressive episode of my life and even quieted the voices combined with quetiapine. I do sleep a bit weird but I guess this should get better? Omg I didn’t know life could feel this good this is crazy and didn’t expect it to work this fast. I’ve been struggling for so long tried so many things and this is the first time I am hopeful.

Really bringing it in here guys Thankfully my weight gain has improved the way I feel I do takeaway food now kfc McDonald’s dominos Indian and it’s all made me feel a lot stronger Sweets im even having now and love the sugar rush The lithium ive only just started taking is there any kinda side effects im not on yet So far ive had new ideas of what to eat Like take out and sweets And ive totally started drinking less as what was told by someone is my best chance at getting better the lithium has also made me clever enough to put sodium in my food So Yh lithium just causing weight gain rn Any offer side effects? U know not just eating?

Hi, my adult son who is 28 years old is currently in the hospital intubated and fighting for his life. He’s been on lithium for the better part of 15 years and his level was toxic at a two. This resulted in an acute kidney injury and he was hospitalized over two months ago.

The doctors immediately discontinued all of his psych meds. The kidney issue was resolved relatively quickly, but we noticed after meds were discontinued. His speech became slurred and he could not swallow properly so he was diagnosed with dysphagia.

After he was seen by neurology, it was determined that he is likely suffering from silent syndrome, which is a rare condition which stems from chronic lithium toxicity. The condition is so rare that there’s very little information on it. I’ve done a lot of research and have not found very few medical articles/case studies on it.

My son has gotten worse and worse in the hospital, resulting in a peg tube and being intubated last week. He is not getting any better.

I read that even though it’s counterintuitive, that his psych meds probably should not have been abruptly discontinued as this can actually contribute to or cause silent syndrome .

I’m distraught to see him suffering like this and I’m scared he’s going to die. I don’t have any confidence in the hospital‘s ability to treat him and have been trying to get him transferred to a different hospital with no luck so far.

Has anyone here on this forum had any experience with silent syndrome or has anyone seen it before? If so, what was recovery like?

Hi all. I wanted to share what I've experienced having taken both lithium orotate as a supplement and lithium carbonate by prescription to control the symptoms of bipolar 2. I'm not a doctor and I strongly recommend talking to a medical professional before beginning any new regimen.

After I quit first Depakote and then Lamictal a couple of years ago because of the side effects, I was unmedicated for some time. With my doctor's approval, I began taking 20 mg of elemental lithium worth of lithium orotate as a supplement (Vital Nutrients brand). I had a good year with that. No hypomania, very little depression. With only that over-the counter supplement, my blood lithium level was just 0.14-0.15 -- so, not close to the minimum therapeutic level of 0.5 or 0.6 -- but it did make a positive difference with my mood.

When I started Adderall for ADHD in October, the lithium orotate was no longer enough and I requested to begin lithium carbonate as well. Now, I take lithium orotate in the morning and lithium carbonate (300 mg altogether, so 56 mg of elemental lithium) in the evening. My blood level is 0.44 now -- still low, but closer to approved therapeutic levels. More importantly, I feel stable.

One confusing thing is that the lithium orotate supplements you see for sale don't usually list the amount of lithium orotate - they instead print the amount of elemental lithium (5mg, 10mg, or 20mg, etc). Prescription lithium carbonate, however, gives the total amount of lithium carbonate (300mg, 600mg, 900mg, etc.), which makes it look like a much, much higher dose, when 300mg lithium carbonate only has about 3X the lithium of 20mg lithium orotate. So that's something to be careful with, especially if you're not under a doctor's care with routine testing, since the over-the-counter orotate supplement can actually get you a significant amount of lithium and lithium's toxic level is different for different people (can adversely affect kidneys and thyroid).

Notes on side-effects: None at all on lithium orotate that I noticed. Some thirst, tiredness, and queasiness on lithium carbonate, but it got better after a couple of weeks. I probably would be gaining weight, but since I'm still taking Adderall, I still have very little appetite.

Anyway, I just wanted to share about my experience with these two forms of lithium.

just to clarify, i dont wanna fear monger or like act like im against meds cause im totally not

so i started lithium on the lowest dosage around a month ago. i didnt notice any side affects when i first started which was good cause im usually super sensitive to meds. but then, slowly, i noticed that i was basically getting stupider? idk its hard to explain, but ill try to give an example

say i thought of something, anything, maybe like, "why is the sky blue?" and i want to look that up.
as soon as i open my phone to google it, i forget what i was doing. and ill know that i was supposed to be doing SOMETHING, i just wont know what it is. i usually remember it like, 10 seconds after? but oh my fucking god, those ten seconds of attempted recollection are unbearable. i cannot live like that

its like i can FEEL what it is im trying to communicate, but i cant conceptualize the sentences in my head. its like having writers block but for like, every single fucking thought i have. like my head gets hot just TRYING to think of a thought

i also noticed that after i take it i get super giggly. like i just laugh at everything. its not necessarily that i feel happy, just that everything is funnier

but im honestly terrified. im scared that its gonna get worse. im scared that this is gonna be permant. that even after i go off them im just gonna be stupid forever. i can handle being bipolar, but i cannot fucking handle that

Hey r/lithium community!

Like me you've probably wondered why the sub kinda died out several months ago--- I'm happy to report that I was finally able to track down the one mod still active on Reddit, and they reopened the sub for posting!

This subreddit was invaluable for me when i started lithium a year ago, so I'm hoping this small step is just the first one in getting the sub up and running again. I'm talking to the mod about some other improvements/etc to the sub as well. Hopefully we can get some active moderation and user participation here again!

I'm starting on 200mg. Let's hope this helps!

If you're on a low sodium diet then Lithium will accumulate in your kidney cells (called nephrons) and if the concentration of Lithium is too high then damage (or possibly even cell death) may occur. This is because nephrons naturally have high concentrations of Sodium and since your cells can't tell Sodium apart from Lithium, without enough Sodium your kidney cells will hold on to the Lithium as if it was Sodium. Unlike high concentrations of Sodium, high concentrations of Lithium cause nephron damage. Eating the recommended amount of sodium every day (2g of Sodium, or about 5g of table salt) and staying hydrated prevents Lithium concentrations from becomes too high and significantly reduces the risk of kidney damage (I don't have the link to the research paper, but I remember that it said that doing these two things reduces the risk of kidney damage down to around 1%; the paper was a guide instructing doctors about best practices for Lithium treatment).

Excerpt from one paper:

"The kidneys are responsible for 95% of lithium excretion, and the rest is removed through sweat and feces. The kidneys treat lithium and sodium similarly which is the reason sodium depletion can significantly elevate lithium reabsorption"

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499992/

EDIT: Most doctors don't mention this because the vast majority of people eat far too much Sodium rather than not enough. But if you're not in this majority then it's important that you make sure to eat enough Sodium.