Poetry often gets a bad wrap for being inaccessible. But there are some topics that just can’t be captured prose. After reading Shira Erlichman’s collection of poems “Odes to Lithium”, I’m convinced that mental illness is one such topic. Shira is a multi-talented artist who has put out albums of music and published a children’s book she both wrote and illustrated. 

And who better than a singer/poet/musician/artist and teacher to put into words the experience of a disease like Bipolar Disorder? 

“Odes to Lithium” chronicles Shira’s relationship to her medication, Lithium, as she herself negotiates family, friends and adulting with this diagnosis. The poems walk you in and out of the ordinary beats of a life - buying ice cream, dinner with friends, calling a plumber. The poetic mechanics allow Shira the room to play with the reader’s own sense of what is real and what might be a hallucination, ultimately revealing a greater truth about the disease and those who live with it. 

If you’re a doc, start with the first poem in the book - “Snakes in Your Arms”. The struggle of someone having to describe the indescribable will break you. If you want to ease your way in before reading some of the more experimental poems, read “The two things I remember from freshman physics class.” Who knew a story of cockroaches at Christmas could also teach you something about Lithium? I love how “Barometer” makes use of strikethroughs in the text to both visually and literally show the revisions of the healing process. And “Dear Dr. Stone” is a gut-punch of the stigma and doubt patients face from clinicians far too often.

I wish I could clone Shira and make more of her genius to sprinkle across the world. But short of that, I wish more patients could find as powerful a way to describe their own experience with a disease. With every beat of her life that unfolds in these poems, Shira brings a wit and a startling remix of words and images that let you see her mind at work. Especially in the field of behavioral health, where we still know precious little about the brain and diagnoses are still heavily stigmatizing, we simply need to elevate more of the patient voices that can and do share their stories (Shira’s got a list of some great ones on her website). The linguistic and imagistic dots she connects, paired with her cutting observations of how we the mentally ill, gives us vital data and insights from the frontlines of this disease.

Get the book. Stan Shira.Your mental health will thank me later.