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nothing seemed to help him until he was given lithium. And he did this for five times on Barbara Walters' TV show and got tremendous, tremendous response, hundreds of telephone calls, tremendous letters. Dr. Fieve had to put on two telephone operators to answer the calls. I sat, in the was next to someone who said that he had felt suicidal, and had turned on this program and seen and heard Josh Logan, and he happened to know him and he called his wife and went to the doctor, and the doctor had helped with lithium. so this was a real reaction, to a relatively undangerous drug.

Tell me what the drug is.

It's lithium, a lithium salt. It's an element. It's not a -- it's so cheap that it's put out a favor by Pfizer. They can make nothing out of it. It's not a compound.

How did you happen to get interested in it?

I've always been interested in mental illness, and depression is a form of mental illness. I was interested in the various anti-depressives that were developed, after -- marsilid, which was the first one, was shown to take people out of severe depressions where they couldn't even think and had to be hospitalized in state hospitals. But people never realized that there was anything that could be done for them -- you know, when they were walking about.

Is it a course of treatment or does it have to be a continuous thing?

You have to stay on it, lithium.