AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'In 1948, there was no medication for bipolar illness. Sufferers from the illness would live their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums accumulating life's wreckage around them. But late in 1948 that changed, when an Australian doctor, John Cade, discovered a treatment that has become the gold standard for bipolar illness - lithium...John Cade changed the course of medicine with his discovery of lithium; yet today most doctors have never heard of his name. His discovery has stopped more people from committing suicide than a thousand 'help' lines, yet few counsellors know of him. And it has saved hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs - enough to rival a nation's economy - but you can bet that no politician has the slightest idea of who John Cade was...Lithium is the penicillin story of mental health; the first effective medication discovered for the treatment of a mental illness; and it is, without doubt, Australia's greatest mental health story.' (Publication summary)
Notes
-
Received Screen Australia funding for an book-to-film adaptation. (Source : Books + Publishing News 22 November 2018)
Affiliation Notes
-
Writing Disability in Australia:
Type of disability Bipolar disorder. Type of character Secondary. Point of view Third person.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
-
Crooked Path
2016
single work
review
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 386 2016; (p. 66) 'Edward sits on Sydney Harbour Bridge, considering jumping. It is 1948, and he has written several times to George VI about building a new naval base in the waters below, and not hearing back, begun to build it himself. Edward was manic depressive, suffering from what is now called bipolar disorder. Greg de Moore and Ann Westmore begin their book Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder with Edward; they end it with the patient upon whom lithium was pioneered in the early 1950s, Bill Brand. Where Edward came down from the bridge and returned to the peaks and troughs of bipolar life, Bill entered a tortuous triangle of treatment and suffering with the Australian psychiatrist John Cade and that soft, white, lightest of metals, lithium, before finally dying of lithium poisoning.' (Introduction)
-
Crooked Path
2016
single work
review
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 386 2016; (p. 66) 'Edward sits on Sydney Harbour Bridge, considering jumping. It is 1948, and he has written several times to George VI about building a new naval base in the waters below, and not hearing back, begun to build it himself. Edward was manic depressive, suffering from what is now called bipolar disorder. Greg de Moore and Ann Westmore begin their book Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder with Edward; they end it with the patient upon whom lithium was pioneered in the early 1950s, Bill Brand. Where Edward came down from the bridge and returned to the peaks and troughs of bipolar life, Bill entered a tortuous triangle of treatment and suffering with the Australian psychiatrist John Cade and that soft, white, lightest of metals, lithium, before finally dying of lithium poisoning.' (Introduction)
