Mental: Lithium, Love, and Losing My Mind
Author: Lowe, Jaime
Brand: Blue Rider Press
Color: Multicolor
Edition: Illustrated
Format: Illustrated
Number Of Pages: 320
Details: Product Description A riveting memoir and a fascinating investigation of the history, uses, and controversies behind lithium, an essential medication for millions of people struggling with bipolar disorder. It began in Los Angeles in 1993, when Jaime Lowe was just sixteen. She stopped sleeping and eating, and began to hallucinate—demonically cackling Muppets, faces lurking in windows, Michael Jackson delivering messages from the Neverland Underground. Lowe wrote manifestos and math equations in her diary, and drew infographics on her bedroom wall. Eventually, hospitalized and diagnosed as bipolar, she was prescribed a medication that came in the form of three pink pills—lithium. In Mental, Lowe shares and investigates her story of episodic madness, as well as the stability she found while on lithium. She interviews scientists, psychiatrists, and patients to examine how effective lithium really is and how its side effects can be dangerous for long-term users—including Lowe, who after twenty years on the medication suffers from severe kidney damage. Mental is eye-opening and powerful, tackling an illness and drug that has touched millions of lives and yet remains shrouded in social stigma. Now, while she adjusts to a new drug, her pursuit of a stable life continues as does her curiosity about the history and science of the mysterious element that shaped the way she sees the world and allowed her decades of sanity. Lowe travels to the Bolivian salt flats that hold more than half of the world’s lithium reserves, rural America where lithium is mined for batteries, and tolithium spas that are still touted as a tonic to cure all ills. With unflinching honesty and humor, Lowe allows a clear-eyed view into her life, and an arresting inquiry into one of mankind’s oldest medical mysteries. Review "Lowe writes with verve and rhythm and willed forthrightness about her endless search for stability and sanity, and about wondering which self—stable or unstable—is the real one, worthy of love." —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker “[ Mental is] a provocative journey that deepens your understanding of mental illness and what it’s like to depend on just the right pills.” —Annaliese Griffin, Brooklyn Based (Favorite Books 2017) "Part lacerating confessional, part ruminative and occasionally clinical memoir, and part contemplative historical document of manic depression throughout the ages." —Brandon Soderberg, Baltimore Beat "I love intense, messy, self-aware stories about humans and all their brokenness and fallibility; I love books that intermittently make me laugh and cry; and most of all, I love when those stories in those books are emotionally written, and make me think about and remember them for days. Jaime Lowe's new memoir of mental illness delivers all of this.... Through it all, there's honesty and steady-handedness, humor and beauty, reflections on, and a coming to terms with, what it means to be vulnerable and different walking around this world." —Jennifer Romolini, Shondaland.com "A sweeping, expansive survey of the history of bipolar disorder, of psychiatric and pharmaceutical attempts to treat it, and — especially — the history of lithium itself.... Lowe uses all those stats and data points to supplement her account of experiencing her first manic episode in high school, and to document what she sees as the nigh-miraculous power of lithium to return her to herself.... She grapples with questions of identity: Who is she, without the mania? Where does her personality end, and the condition begin? It's heady stuff, but told with a sardonic humor that keeps things grounded.... Mental gazes inward, an exercise in rigorous self-assessment driven by a keen and inquisitive mind." —Glen Weldon, NPR.org "There are few memoirs about mental illness that are as honest and raw as Jaime Lowe’s Mental.... Lowe’s openness about her disorder is refreshing, and works to end the stigma attached to mental illness." —Evette Dionne,
Release Date: 03-10-2017
Package Dimensions: 9.0 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
Languages: English