Lithium Deficiency Syndrome
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All seaweed contains lithium, but Hijiki seaweed has 0.0000034 grams of lithium per gram.
0.00034% lithium in other words.
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/brte/15/4/15_4_373/_pdf/-char/en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hijiki
https://www.organicfacts.net/health-benefits/vegetable/hijiki.html
https://superfooddrinks.org/5-benefits-of-hijiki-seaweed/
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The 'Autism spectrum' is associated with the following
a) having an immediate family member with autism.
b) genetic mutations.
c) fragile X syndrome and other genetic disorders.
d) being born to older parents.
e) low birth weight.
f) metabolic imbalances.
g) exposure to heavy metals and environmental toxins.
h) a history of viral infections.
https://www.healthline.com/health/autism
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Backing up to the fork in psychology, where pharma psychiatry replaced analytical psychology in Western Europe and mostly replaced local variations of psychology in other regions.
"1908: The word autism is used to describe a subset of schizophrenic patients who were especially withdrawn and self-absorbed." https://www.parents.com/health/autism/the-history-of-autism/
So, pre WW1 there was an obscure reference to a new concept, 'autism'.
Note that 'schizophrenia' 'evolved' as a concept from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dementia_praecox
https://www.mentalhelp.net/schizophrenia/understanding/
A lot of the history of pharma psychiatry involves cherry picking trivial events from the history of psychiatry/psychology and weaving them into a narrative that supports the current popular worldview.
There were a vast number of psychological and psychiatric 'camps' in the 19th and early 20th century. Most people who know enough about psychology consider analytical psychology, or some variation of it, to be the legitimate European tradition of the study of the mind. Carl Jung wrote extensively on medieval mystery schools and similar things, and brought those traditions into the 20th century.
Any person can read his writings and decide for themselves if the research he did is correct. In other words analytical psychology has continuity as a tradition in Europe, while pharma psychiatry is more of a corporate / political project, with no real roots, which tries to frame the mind in a way that serves itself, pharma psychiatry, rather than serving legitimate science.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1009919309015
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The evidence seems to point to 'autism' and related disorders as being downstream effects of a clan's reaction to mineral deficiencies and toxicities.
There are many types of nutrients. The most basic are elements, or minerals, and vitamins.
Like minerals, vitamins are external substances that the body has found, and now requires, but which the body cannot make on its own. A difference being that vitamins have evolved along a specific path in those creatures or plants which can make them. They are basically 'complex elements' which can be created by some animals or plants, but not by humans. A human has no 'evolutionary motive' to develop the ability to make a vitamin, except when or where that population is deficient in that vitamin, for example if a human population moves from one area to another.
A person can look at the evolution of various creatures and deduce certain things about the development of a nutritional requirement for a particular substance.
Birds forked from the common ancestor with humans quite a long time ago, for example, so looking at their use of nutrients would give some information about the development of a particular substance as a nutrient. Specifically any nutritional need differences between birds and humans which evolved after the last common ancestor would give information about a lot of things.
Long before that there were simpler creatures that tolerated and/or used far fewer substances, going back to the furthest ancestor which fed off probably just a few elements.
So, a person can say that organisms develop with a tendency to use more substances, and that tolerance or use of the simpler substances, elements as opposed to vitamins, are developed in individuals quickly, while vitamins and more complicated substances develop more in groups, and over a longer period of time. In other words an individual, male or female, develops a response to a toxin and passes that quickly to his or her children.
A tolerance or use of a substance that one's ancestors had less or no exposure to must necessarily develop rapidly. In other words there has to be a species wide mechanism to quickly adapt genetically, or an early pre human, geographically isolated species would have bumped into lots of death zones as it expanded.
Also, it's clear that nutritious and toxic substances are on a flexible continuum. what is 'toxic' or 'nutritious' depends to some extent on a creatures recent evolution. For example, birds are not affected by capsaicin, chili pepper, the way mammals are http://www.thepipettepen.com/spice-is-nice-for-birds/
So, at this point item 'g' "exposure to heavy metals and environmental toxins" in the initial list of autism causes above looks like it might be important.
But autism is often diagnosed in children, so item 'd' "being born to older parents" might also be an important clue. Older parents will generally have had more exposure to all substances, including toxins, than younger parents, and item 'a' "having an immediate family member with autism" indicates the children 'caught' something from a parent. Older parents' dna would probably tend to adapt more quickly than younger parents too. A child living with their parents has little reason to adapt dna generally, and little information available for such adaptation. As a person gets older they get more exposure to new substances, more information to input.
Item 'b', "genetic mutations" is probably more useful than the other items.
"When one identical twin has autism, there is about an 80 percent chance that the other twin has it too. The corresponding rate for fraternal twins is around 40 percent" https://www.spectrumnews.org/news/autism-genetics-explained/ In other words, when two identical twins have autism it manifests differently in each, and the extent to which the fictional disease is diagnosed is less than 80%.
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Despite the fact that:
a) Lithium is recognized as an essential mineral in the human body https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_the_human_body
b) Lithium helps the brain grow and regenerate https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27882645/ and is 'neuroprotective' https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2889681/
c) "The use of lithium as a therapy for 'mental illness' goes back to at least Greek and Roman times, when people soaked in alkali-rich mineral springs to soothe both ‘‘melancholia’’ and ‘‘mania.’’" https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/28/magazine/i-dont-believe-in-god-but-i-believe-in-lithium.html
Pharmapsychiatry presents lithium as 'its' invention or creation https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freud-fluoxetine/201908/lithium-carbonate-the-penicillin-psychiatry
Researchers are clearly intimidated by 'pharmapsychiatry' from the thought of doing even the most basic common sense research that would simply show what is already known about lithium, because it would discredit a major part of pharmapsychiatry.
Lithium used as a bath salt, as it was in the centuries before pharmapsych hid that aspect of lithium by claiming it was their psychiatric drug discovery, would reduce numerous social problems, just as lead in drinking water increased them.
Should scientists do honest work on an important and widely ignored nutrient, lithium, or should they yield to pharmapsychiatry, at the expense of many people?
The question is very similar to the question of drug rehabs for addicts.
Drug rehabs do not work. That has been conclusively shown again and again. There is a clever industry built around fudging rehab statistics to make them appear effective, in part because it is a lucrative industry, and in part because many people believe addicts are morally deficient and should be 'mentored' in an environment such as a rehab. Most rehabs assess prospective clients, and try to determine if they are about to stop using drugs on their own. Those that are about to quit on their own, along with those who have above average financial resources, usually receive preferential admission.
Alcoholics Anonymous, on the other hand, is widely known to have real effectiveness, but it is not as much an industry, there is no profit anywhere in it.
Should the public be told that Drug Rehabs do not work and are entirely cash cows?
Should the public be told that lithium is an essential nutrient, and its deficiency is much more widespread than the public is led to believe?
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One interesting thing about lithium taken in bathwater is that it is the only 'medicine' that tranquilizes a person without any impairment on the rationality of the mind. In this regard it is more like magnesium which has a longer term sedating sort of effect, also without any effect on the rational part of the mind. All other 'medicines' which tranquilize a person have a foreign effect on the body. Despite this and many other indications lithium is an essential nutrient, it is portrayed as a 'psych med', which discourages any research on minimum healthy levels of lithium for non psychiatric people.
If you find a person with melting pot genetics, a typical person, and their lithium level is very low, that person will have obvious deficits. The important thing to find first though is the lithium pathway. Measuring lithium blood levels is like measuring vitamin c levels in the shoelaces to determine if it is deficient.
In Progress
Note that the so called 'neuroprotective' aspect of lithium is scientific mumbo jumbo to hide the fact that lithium is a nutrient. Many or most essential vitamins and minerals are 'neuroprotective'. If you are too deficient in almost any nutrient you will suffer organic damage including to the brain. Lithium's primary pharmapsychiatric use is in lending credibility to pharmapsychiatry. Lithium is the only 'psychiatric medication' that is present in all people to some degree, and has been used therapeutically, as hot springs baths for example, for thousands of years. The most offensive part of the scam is in promoting lithium as a pill or capsule, an oral medication, when it is most therapeutic, and least toxic, as a bathing salt. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4063497/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_in_autism
https://oxbowacademy.net/educationalarticles/autism_spec/
https://www.verywellhealth.com/autism-timeline-2633213
A 'Freudian' psychologist opposing the new weltanschauung? Bad Career move https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bettelheim
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Eisenberg
Shift from 'resolving' using psychology, to housing, using jails https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1600-0447.2010.01544.x
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Kanner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_autism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragile_X_syndrome
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_toxicity
https://www.thoughtco.com/worst-elements-on-the-periodic-table-3989077
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15226514.2019.1633258?journalCode=bijp20
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0061932
Once an organism has adapted to accumulating a substance, a use will eventually evolve for the substance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hyperaccumulators
Note that a lot of the research that leads to a paradigm which contradicts pharma psychiatry is done by Chinese researchers https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15031017/
https://journals.ashs.org/hortsci/view/journals/hortsci/55/6/article-p858.xml
https://sfamjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1462-2920.14478
A lot of research has shown that nutrition is a major factor in mental illness, but it is largely ignored
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28163777/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31081672/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2248201/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23144350/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19702498/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12427294/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28202095/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3046018/