[KrisAndrew]

Lithium is not like you describe. I've taken half a dozen SSRI's, which at times made me feel totally empty and without motivation. I've taken one antipsychotic (risperidone) and it made me feel like an utterly stupid zombie, so much so that I stopped taking it against my doctor's orders. I was put on lithium and I found that I'm completely capable of feeling a full range of emotions, but what I don't experience is the accelerated spiraling of emotions that can send me into depression or mania. Compared to more recent psychotropic medications, lithium is pretty mild in terms of unwanted side effects; the only drawback is that if you're on a high dose, you have to stay hydrated to avoid lithium toxicity. That's a pretty small price to pay to stay level.

[dragonwriter]

Quite a lot of psychiatric drugs affect different people in different ways; I would be very unsurprised if the people the grandparent post recounts describing it as "turning into a soulless robot" are fairly describing their own experience, while the parent post fairly describes that poster's experience.

One probably should avoid hastily generalizing one's own experience to what the drug's effects are like generally.

[KrisAndrew]

We'll agree to disagree then. I've heard several complaints about lithium but none of them was "it turns me into a soulless robot." The way lithium works is by stabilizing mood, not by inducing a different mood like other medications (i.e. antidepressants). So I'm going to be facetious and say the people making those claims were soulless robots before taking lithium.