Finding sanity : John Cade, lithium, and the taming of bipolar disorder

The first biography of the ground breaking Australian doctor who discovered the first pharmacological treatment for mental illness. For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives - if they survived - in and out of asylums, accumulating life's wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind - manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle. John Cade discovered a treatment that has become the gold standard for bipolar disorder - lithium. It has stopped more people from committing suicide than a thousand help lines. 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. The first biography of the ground breaking Australian doctor who discovered the first pharmacological treatment for mental illness. 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