Lithium in the Treatment of Other Psychiatric and Nonpsychiatric Disorders

The Lithium Ion: A Foundation for Psychopharmacological Specificity

“…After it was introduced into clinical use, lithium was used for a variety of conditions, ranging from pure bipolar disorder to atypical forms, schizoaffective disorder, treatment refractory schizophrenia, impulse control disorder, substance abuse, and different forms of aggressiveness (Schou 1979). It has shown mild benefits in some of these conditions, but it was most effective in typical forms of bipolar disorder, and, indeed, has had a major impact on the treatment of this disorder (Solomon et al 1995).…”

Treatment of Schizoaffective Disorders

“…For example, it has been suggested that a good therapeutic response to lithium or antidepressant drug treatment may be a criterion for differentiation of primary affective illness from other types of psychiatric illness (Forssman and Walinder 1970;Sicignano and Lichtenstein 1978). Other investigators have discussed and usually rejected this possibility (Noack and Trautner 1951;Kingstone 1960;Wharton and Fieve 1966;Goodwin, Murphy, and Bunney 1969;Shopsin, Johnson, and Gershon 1971;Dunner and Fieve 1978;Schou 1979;Braden et al 1982). Should established therapies of affective disorders fail to be of clinical value in the treatment of schizoaffective depression, schizoaffective mania, or both, this would provide some indication that the latter are either not related to affective disorders or that they are s very distinct subtypes of affective disorders with an important discontinuity in the area of treatment response.…”

Therapeutic Experience with Lithium in Childhood Aggressivity

“…The different psychotherapeutic methods (behavior al, family and individual) endeavor to eliminate these aggressive behavior models, while the medical treatments attempt to achieve results by influencing the affectivity or putting an end to emotional hypersensitivity or at least diminishing it [21,22,31,39], As neither of these methods has brought about radi cally successful results, a repeated effort must be taken towards finding newer ones or combining the previous methods, the more so, because the various antiaggressive drugs may often cause undesirable side effects (phenothiazines and butyrophenones, for instance, may cause dys kinesia, or damage the liver and the blood-producing sys tem, or may even cause epileptic seizures). Furthermore, when in certain cases psychostimulant drugs are indi cated, the danger of developing addiction in the patient demands special care [4,39,41], Taking all this into con sideration influenced our decision to use lithium carbon ate in cases of hyperaggressive children who had not reacted adequately to the traditional pharmaco-and psy chotherapeutic treatments [19,[28][29][30]43]. The advan tage of the lithium treatment lies in the fact that the dif ference between the therapeutic and the toxic blood levels is relatively greater, and in case of continuous medica tion, the possible side effects arc usually not irreversibleif the control is adequate [2,10].…”