Actually, they just want to look into the possibility.

Alexander Berger of Givewell writes:

In the past you’ve written a couple posts about GiveWell’s research, and we’ve recently posted something else that I thought might be of interest to your audience: an expression of interest in research on the impact of trace lithium on suicide rates.

The basic story is that there a number of non-experimental studies that find that higher levels of trace lithium in water is correlated with lower suicide rates (see footnote 1 for citations), and there’s strong evidence that much larger doses of lithium reduce suicide in some psychiatric populations, but the non-experimental studies don’t have strong causal identification and there don’t seem to have been any population-level experimental studies. Our rough back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that if either of the models in Kapusta et al. (2011) or Blüml et al. (2013) are roughly correct, a small increase in the amount of trace lithium in drinking water in the U.S. could prevent thousands of suicides per year.

We’re interested in talking to researchers about what it would take to do a more sophisticated study—with the idea that we might eventually fund it—and I thought your audience might include many people who’d be qualified to weigh in. I also thought this might be of interest to you personally given some superficial similarity to the work you’ve done on radon.