Evidence category
Lithium, valproate, and other mood stabilizers — bipolar disorder evidence.
Lithium and valproate work comparably for acute mania (no head-to-head difference), lithium shows superior maintenance versus valproate, suicide prevention evidence is contested (early meta-analyses significant, Riblet 2022 not significant), lamotrigine prevents depressive but not manic episodes, and the folk models—lithium as miraculous or lithium as toxic relic—both overclaim what opened trials support.