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In the fall of 1986 I fell apart. Whether it was the stress of coming up for tenure, or the tensions of five years of marriage, or the anxiousness attendant on entering my thirties, one day I just went to bed and did not get up for days. Always a reader, I thought I could read myself out of this anguish, and I called for books in bed that would illuminate my illness: William Styron's memoir of his madness, Darkness Visible-, Kay Redfield Jameson's memoir of manic depression, An Unquiet Mind-, and of all things the poetry of Robert Frost. There was, I'd always felt, a bipolarity to Frost's poetics: thrills of swinging birches measured against a dying hired hand. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. Unshaved and undesired in that autumn, I found his "November Guest" and saw her come to me.
My sorrow, when she's here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
And so, on sodden Princeton streets, I found a psychiatric pharmacologist who promised to dismiss my sorrow with pills. He prescribed lithium. For about a year, I took the pills, went weekly to the hospital to have my levels checked, and wandered around covered in a mineral crust against the world.
Nobody really knew why lithium controlled mood swings, or why lithium carbonate, of all the compounds, worked the way it did. Stories circulated about spas and hot springs where the lithiated water had a calming effect on the clientele, or about some ancient cultures where such lithium-based minerals as spodumene or petalite would leach into the groundwater, making the townsfolk easygoing (were these, I wondered, the same ancient townsfolk who would be routinely pillaged by invading armies - hosts hopped up on alcohol, or opium, or ergot, or some other powerfully un-lithium-filled drug). Whatever the old history may have been, it was not until the mid 1940s that an Australian doctor started experimenting on guinea pigs, injecting them with the urine drawn from manic-depressive patients (what possessed him to do this is beyond me-did he think that there was something in those...