"Ive been guinea pigged with literally dozens of drugs, some of which knocked me out so flat that I could barely lift a spoon," poet and singer-songwriter Shira Erlichman told The Huffington Post.

When she finally found one that would assist in clearing the fog that clouded her mental state -- a tendency towards depression that ran in her family for generations -- "clarity ensued."

She's beyond grateful, and wanted to include the drug in a series of odes she wrote for powerful yet unseen or unnoticed objects. She laments that drugs such as lithium weren't available to her grandmother's generation, but hopes destigmatizing them today will help those who would benefit from them.

Below, she discusses her poem, "Ode to Lithium #1," which she performed live above.

What inspired your Ode to Lithium series?

It began with an exercise where I instructed myself to write a love poem to an everyday object that often goes unnoticed, one that even might be difficult to love. The idea was to stand in awe of this object, to see it as if for the first time. Inevitably where there is love there is also humility and so the poem is built entirely of questions.

Its a statement, and a worthy feat, to bless the barely lovable. But within the specific context of mental illness, there is even more nuance to this feat. Love for lithium? Grenade. Not a word youd casually drop at a party. A serious drug. Three wild syllables. Boogeyman to a cowering public. It just so happens to be the drug that works for me.

Ive been guinea pigged with literally dozens of drugs, some of which knocked me out so flat that I could barely lift a spoon or shit; some changed my vision so I saw triple; some added fifteen pounds to my small frame. When I finally found lithium (See? Doesnt this already sound like a love story?) it was as if my head was emptied of fog and an internal gentleness/clarity ensued.

For other patients that I know, lithium was a no no, a terrible lover, a horror. A friend of mine joked Oh, lithium? No, hated that. Lithium is not my boo. She cursed it, as if it were an unmentionable ex. This is important. Id love to hear her hate mail to lithium. Or lovegush to Zoloft. Or whatever it is thats true for her. Its all vital to expanding the conversation. We need more than the medias narrow portrayal. We need the personal, specific and real.

The poem was originally titled Pill. A mistake. As if I could write one, definitive poem about this drug I take twice a day and therefore interact with 730 times a year! Those 730 times are each round, particular moments! Those moments are poems! Not to mention all the moments my medication comes into play in daily life that has nothing to do with swallowing it. The more we describe an experience in one fell swoop, [or] across the board, the more we miss its particular topography, its humanness, its flawed shine.

The mentally ill, already so underserved, misrepresented and misunderstood, cannot afford this.

After about two years of sitting with the poem as Pill, the series snuck up on me. It was a revelation. Now there is "Ode to Lithium #9," #27, #107, #63, and so on. The odes unfold mostly as tiny prose pieces, revealing situations in which lithium and I bond. They are grounded in my daily life, though at times turn surreal. There is the time lithium and I first kissed, and the time my dead grandmother (who also suffered from mental illness) comes to my kitchen on a Sunday to watch me take my dose.

As the odes tumbled out I caught whiff of Pablo Nerudas influence. In his late forties Neruda committed to writing an ode a week, ending up with 225 odes in all. He sought to bless it all, the simple as well as the complex, with rigor and patience and humor. I have always respected his expansive and undiscriminatory gratitude. I feel a defiance toward my first misconception, my wrong titling. To create a series insinuates that there is no one experience, one way to love; I am a person having a daytoday, complex, shifting, beautiful, tenuous relationship with an element that is changing my life for the better. I hope to write 730.