Late one October afternoon in 1984, I left the grey London drizzle behind and took off on a flight bound for Aarhus, major city on the east coast of Jutland, Denmark.

Within twenty minutes the jet, appropriately called a Viking, had climbed above the turbulence of the clouds and was cruising through a serene dimension poised somewhere between the night sky, the sunset, and the purple rainclouds far below. Such a passage from turbulence into even stability is. I reflected, a familiar experience to the hundreds of thousands of people who have now benefited from tithium all over the world. But the introduction and acceptance of lithium therapy have been far from smooth, and would perhaps not have been possible at all were it not for the commitment and persistence of a few dedicated individuals.