The American poet Robert Lowell already had a reputation as a “mad artist” from his school days. So much so that he was nicknamed “Cal” after Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, “who was half man and half beast,” as Sam Keen writes in his book The Disappearing Spoon and Other True Stories of Madness, Love, Contests and Adventures from Periodical tables of chemical elements. The book has just been released by Katoptro and has been translated and edited by Panagiotis Delivorias and Alexandru Mamalis.

Lowell didn’t mind showing up every night at his friends’ houses, claiming to be the Virgin Mary.

In the 1950s and 1960s he became an award-winning confessional verse poet. At the time, some believed that “his madness was due to the divine touch of some insane muse.” However, today it is known that he suffered from bipolar disorder.

In 1967, while Lowell was in a psychiatric hospital, “the first effective mood stabilizer, lithium,” was released in the US. Lowell agreed to be treated. His anger and depression were drastically reduced. He never became “normal,” but he could now see that his “old way of life, full of fighting, drinking, and divorce, had caused misery to countless people.”

She didn’t mind showing up at night at the homes of her friends posing as the Virgin Mary.

Of course, some say that he never wrote any more notable poetry after that. Lithium cured a man but killed a poet? According to a friend, after being given lithium, Lowell “looked like a stray animal in a zoo.”

Magic lithium – even if it’s not an essential trace element. Its pharmaceutical version, a salt called lithium carbonate, works not at the peak of an attack (by then it’s too late), but by catching the next episode before it happens. In essence, it “resets the body’s circadian rhythm – its internal clock.”

If in a normal person mood cycles depend on sunlight, then in bipolar people they are independent. “During the euphoric phases, their brains are constantly flooding their bodies with stimulants, never turning off the faucet when it gets dark. This situation has been characterized as “pathological arousal”.

Keane rightly quotes one of Lowell’s most heartbreaking confessions (to his editor Robert Giroud): “It’s a terrible thought, Bob, that all I have suffered and all the suffering I have caused others could have been due to a lack of simple salt in my brain.” .