You know things are bad when scientists are suggesting that we latently medicate everyone with antidepressants via our drinking waterhttps://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/24/18010592/future-perfect-podcast-lithium-drinking-water-suicide …
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this is not an argument for adding more on purpose, though.
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Sure it is. And on practical grounds, adding is better than subtracting for experiments: typically much easier to implement and creates larger effect sizes. It's also the more justifiable one ethically: available evidence points to it helping, and subtracting hurting.
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I think mass medicating populations is unethical. We might just have to agree to disagree on that one.
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And I think standing by & potentially depriving entire populations of critical micronutrients, literally driving them into insanity and death, without doing the simplest experiment indistinguishable from what Nature is already inflicting on people to find out if so, is unethical.
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Frankly I think it's a BIT melodramatic to say that not adding more lithium to the water supply is "literally driving them into insanity and death"



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I'm not sure why. I mean, that's literally what the claim is. Quite literally, that's what the possible causal effects would be.
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Pretty sure I won't go insane for lack of enough lithium in my water. Mlso, maybe there's an underlying cause for all this depression we should be treating rather than mass-medicating everyone. Just a thought. Medication without treatment of root causes is useless.
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The 'root cause' is often just genes or infections or nutrient deficiency. There was no 'root cause' for goiters/retardation/rickets: the 'medication' of adding iodine or iron or vitamin D to random stuff like salt to 'mass-medicate' was in fact the least useless thing possible.
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Interesting, I didn't think of that. Do you know how much change in lithium or other chemicals these processes cause?
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The differences just from natural groundwater variation are enormous on their own. You can easily get anywhere from ~0 to 0.54mg/l, to take Fajardo et al 2018's Texas range (analogous to going from distilled water to fancy mineral waters).
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Could this lithium experiment be run just by looking at historical lithium changes and historical suicide rates?
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I think that's exactly the methodology of the study quoted in the article, albeit with the variance being geographic not historical
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