Rules for the Gracious Acceptance of Lithium into Your Life

Posted on December 10, 2005 in Psychotropics Reading

Excerpted from Kay Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind:

1. Clear out the medicine cabinet before guests arrive for dinner or new lovers stay the night.
2. Remember to put the lithium back into the cabinet the next day.
3. Don’t be too embarassed by your lack of coordination or your inability to do well the sports you once did with ease.
4. Learn to laugh about spilling coffee, having the palsied signature of an eighty-year-old, and being unable to put on cuff links in less than ten minutes.
5. Smile when people joke about how they think they “need to be on lithium”.
6. Nod intelligently, and with conviction, when your physician explains to you the many advantages of lithium in leveling out the chaos in your life.
7. Be patient when waiting for this leveling off. Very patient. Reread the Book of Job. Continue being patient. Contemplate the similarity between the phrases “being patient” and “being a patient”.
8. Try not to let the fact that you can’t read without effort annoy you. Be philosophical. Even if you could read, you probably wouldn’t remember most of it anyway.
9. Accomodate to a certain lack of enthusiasm and bounce that you once had. Try not to think about all the wild nights you once had. Probably best not to have had those nights anyway.
10. Always keep in perspective how much better you are. Everyone else certainly points it out often enough, and, annoyingly enough, it’s probably true.
11. Be appreciative. Don’t even consider stopping your lithium.
12. When you do stop, get manic, get depressed, expect to hear two basic themes from your family, friends, and healers:
• But you were doing so much better, I just don’t understand it.
• I told you this would happen.
13. Restock your medicine cabinet.