| i do believe in Gd, but i do not believe in lithium.

Please, everyone, let's stop talking such nonsense and missense. There's a framing error at play here, at a very fundamental level, and a whole field has gone down this rabbit hole for far too long. There is no such illness called "manic depression"; there is a symptome called "hope-despair spectra dysregulation disorder". The phrase "manic-depression", like the word "harassment", is a confusing misnomer almost deliberately invoked by a langauge switcheroo, mostly by professionals who are never trained in the original humanisms from which the word originated and is imparted and imported. As with harassment, which is more clearly expressed as "exhaustion", the term "mania" is more clearly expressed as an assessed "unreasonable and/or extreme hope, leading to reckless energy or cognitive chain investments or behavioural drivers". The term "depression" is simply a prolonged despair, wherein a person is seen to be desperate for air. Psychiatrists and psychologists who speak of manic depression as something more than a persistent "hope-despair dysregulation" are usually, in my experience, blowing smoke, and owe a duty to assess whether the hope-despair complex is the result of illogic, illmotion, or both, and whether that illogic, illmotion, or both is exogenous or endogenous. The postulations in the DSM are not credible, as the Director of NIMH, the National Institute of Mental Health, asserts in pointing out that the field of psychiatry is terrible at identifying causes, and dresses up symptom complexes and symptomologies to look like mechanical medical dis-eases. There are very few diagnoses that psychiatrists can do, and calling "hope-despair spectra dysreg disorder" (or, manic depression, as the DSM calls it) a diagnosis is, in my humble opinion, a fraudulent claim. It's not a diagnosis... it's a symptosis, or [symp]tomosis.

It's also completely imprecise and inaccurate, rather like saying, "@phren0logy has a cough", rather than saying "@phrenology has a rhinovirus" .

Hope-Despair Dysregulation Disorder (HD3), from....
Manic = A state of prolonged hope
Depression = A state of prolonged despair

It's only natural that We should have evolved, have had revealed, been given, and overwritten and at times, overridden environmental and social expectancies, and that those should altar the pattern of our hope and despair. The persistence of these patterns can, in the eyes of another, be seen as "abnormal" and an "unwanted deviance from socially integrated expectancy patterns". The response pattern from terrapists is to feed a salt pill to the patient as a placebo, in the place of a more obvious sugar pill, so that the patient returns regularly for talk therapy sessions or has a few weeks to stabilize their native sense of the statistics of life, wearing out their own misweighting of cued and observed probabilities. But... this same effect would happen if they were to be fed NaCO3, or NaCl. Lithium, i posit, has no effect other than as an off-grid placebo pill to give terrapists time to try to figure out the root cause and failure modes in cognition. i do not believe the statistical effects of natural experiments yet; i have not come across a convincing study yet, and it's my belief that study non-publication bias for disconfirmations on lithium's environmental effects will explain the rest.

As for what to do with people who are thinking about survival rather than thriving, and considering survival failure, tell them they are on the hope-despair dysregulation spectra, and ask them to consider how many years left they have until they reach 100 years old, and set that as their new age. 22? Your real age is not Your chronological age (cage) of 22; it is Your survivor age (sage) of 78. Reinforce it by teaching them the Periodic Element that their Steam Age corresponds to, in this case, Platinum, or Pt, and ask them to go for physical therapy by going out for a long run with a friend, or, if they have legal woes instead of psychiatric woes, arrange for them to speak with whoever it is that is the cause of their woes in a safe space, rather than aggravating or papering over the lack of ethical calmunity care.

Lastly, read Seligman's Flourish with them, and other works of positive, social, and cognitive bias psychology. The attempt to use diagnostic langauge in a root-cause-agnostic is fraudulent; please stop doing it. It causes far more damage than psychiatrists and other psycholory specialists take responsibility for, particularly as families, calmunities, and institutions abuse the indeterminacy, soft, nearly unfalsifiable nature of psychiatric labels as a means of social control for those they consider inconvenient gadflies suffering from too much institutionally-wrought despair.

Also, the DSM Criteria are foolish to apply against certain classes of the population. For instance, with hope-despair dysreg, one of the symptoms is written up as "Flights of Ideas", with some modifiers. Intellectuals and designers cultivate the capacity to undergo "flights of ideas". That's what these people do. Why would You count that as a bullet point toward psycholore.ical sympagnostics, when it is part of their professional duties? That just weakens the whole meaning of the sympagnostic for that whole sector of the population.

Those are my 2 calming sense on the problem. PERMA, Exercise, Resiliency Training, Socialization, Uninterrupted Purpose, Daily Progress all add up to an end to depression; talking to a blank face of a false friend with no power to convene the social world to determine and test the reality described may help tune, slow, or stop survival fail, but only for a time. Inverted ages (Pb-Ar) and Fundamental, sustained purpose mixed with calming human life stage activities will stabilize most, on a complete review of their ethics, i.e. their character. Lastly, if there's loneliness or a reflective solitude involved, You'll want to review and perhaps fix that as well, as the case requires.

Best wishes, everyone. Let me know if You're ever in need of a call to point out how many Years You'd be sacrificing should You go "Canary" prematurely. Reach out to me; i can help you Flag Sentinal instead of losing Your life to self-organized survival fails.