[scythe]

There's a danger in tabbing back to the comments page after the third paragraph. A few paragraphs lower, you would have seen this:

>So he and his colleagues turned to the scientific literature for ideas. A handful of American studies had suggested that lithium might prolong the effect of sleep deprivation, so they investigated that. They found that 65% of patients taking lithium showed a sustained response to sleep deprivation when assessed after three months, compared to just 10% of those not taking the drug.

[aidenn0]

too bad lithium is such a hard drug to administer (it's psychoactive at doses very close to harmful doses, so usually there needs to be monitoring of the levels of lithium in the blood)

[mislankanova]

Long term use of lithium may also lead to kidney problems[1][2]. Monitoring of kidney function is also needed over a long time[3].

[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/25735990/

[2]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S008525381...

[3]https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/bipolar-disorder/treatment/#li...

[noir_lord]

My mother has bipolar and takes lithium, it's scary stuff, the effective dose is so close to the toxicity dose that she has has to get her bloods checked every couple of weeks.

The stuff works for her though, well enough that she sometimes feels she doesn't need it because she's OK, historically things have gone bad when that happens.

Scary disease especially as they still unsure of the cause, we took part in a medical study 20ish years ago as they wanted siblings with a parent with bipolar so they could look for genetic causes/pre-dispositions.

[kaffeemitsahne]

Sounds like:

- induce mania by sleep deprivation

- take lithium to counteract the mania

[hateduser2]

Sustained sleep deprivation by lithium doesn’t sound any better than sleep deprivation by literal lack of sleep.

[blueprint]

wow that's so much better