It's mostly the kidneys that get damaged, not so much the liver. It also has a massive amount of benign or merely annoying side effects. Lithium might even be the drug with the largest overall amount of side effects. It's certainly a weird one.
High-dose lithium is extremely hard on your kidneys and may well lead to kidney failure in a decade or so. Medium-dose lithium is a lot more gentle but still requires monitoring. Many people can go down in dose after initial treatment, and good psych prescribers will attempt to do this after a while. (Or patients will request it, after the other side effects of lithium become noticable after the bipolar has settled down.) Low-dose lithium is much harder to study and may well be pretty safe. May.
It is not quite true that people have no idea how it cures bipolar disorder. It's definitely affecting the ion channels (sodium, potassium, etc), just like many other anticonvulsant drugs also used for treating bipolar. So the mechanism for action is not totally insane and unique. Now, why the ion channels are the place to go for certain people, that's an open question....
High-dose lithium is extremely hard on your kidneys and may well lead to kidney failure in a decade or so. Medium-dose lithium is a lot more gentle but still requires monitoring. Many people can go down in dose after initial treatment, and good psych prescribers will attempt to do this after a while. (Or patients will request it, after the other side effects of lithium become noticable after the bipolar has settled down.) Low-dose lithium is much harder to study and may well be pretty safe. May.
It is not quite true that people have no idea how it cures bipolar disorder. It's definitely affecting the ion channels (sodium, potassium, etc), just like many other anticonvulsant drugs also used for treating bipolar. So the mechanism for action is not totally insane and unique. Now, why the ion channels are the place to go for certain people, that's an open question....