UK to doctor the water to improve 'mentality?'

It's an old theme, even by the standards of science fiction - a repressive government that's reduced to drugging it's citizens.

That concept served as the starting point for 1978's 'Blake's 7' and recently revealed itself as the conspiracy at the heart of the awesome Joss Whedon movie 'Serenity.'

Well, life is now imitating art. The BBC have reported that studies have revealed the positive affects of adding lithium to drinking water - a considerably lower rate of suicide.

Now governments, including ours, are thinking of adding the silver-white alkali metal to our drinking water to 'improve the mood' of the population.

In sci-fi, of course, this sort of plan never ends well. In Serenity, the sinister 'Alliance' added a drug to the atmosphere of a terraformed planet to curb aggression - instead, it killed 99.9% of the population and turned that last tenth of a percent into homicidal cannibals and rapists known to terrified neighboring planets as 'Reavers.'

Similarly, adding lithium to the water is not without risks. While lithium is used with considerable success in the treatment of depression and mental illness, therapeutically useful doses ( 0.6 to 1.2 mmol/l) are only slightly below levels considered to be toxic (>1.5 mmol/l).

Side effects include muscle tremors, twitching, bone loss, high blood-pressure, kidney damage, nephrogenic diabetes insipidus and seizures.

"Any suggestion that lithium should be added, even in tiny amounts, to drinking water should be treated with caution and researched very thoroughly," Sophie Corlett, external relations director at Mind, said, but nevertheless, the idea "certainly merits investigation."

Personally, I think the entire concept is terrifying. I can understand adding supplements like fluoride to water, as they alleviate physical problems like tooth decay... But lithium?

When you talk about adding a chemical that changes people moods - essentially alters their personality - then you have to start worrying.

"It's the Pax. The G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate that we added to the air processors. It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Well, it works. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, they stopped breeding, talking, eating. There's 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die."

Dr Caron, Serenity