Finding Sanity: John Cade, Lithium and the Taming of Bipolar Disorder, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2016
The first biography of the ground breaking Australian doctor who discovered the first pharmacological treatment for mental illness. For most of human history, mental illness has been largely untreatable. Sufferers lived their lives – if they survived – in and out of asylums, accumulating life’s wreckage around them. In 1948, all that changed when an Australian doctor and recently returned prisoner of war, working alone in a disused kitchen, set about an experimental treatment for one of the scourges of mankind – manic depression, or bipolar disorder. That doctor was John Cade and in that small kitchen he stirred up a miracle. John Cade discovered a treatment that has become the gold standard for bipolar disorder – lithium. It has stopped more people from committing suicide than a thousand help lines. (blurb)
The book is reviewed for Honest History by Janet Wilson. Greg de Moore talks on the ABC. Nicola Harrison writes for the ABC’s Life Matters. An extract on News.com. A review on Newtown Review of Books by Bernard Whimpress. A review in Fairfax by Gail Bell.
