Lithium is everywhere, especially in salt lakes. A long time ago I met someone whose family ran a mineral extraction company, of which there are many around Salt Lake City. They take the lake water and evaporate it. The main non-water ingredient in the concentrated brine was lithium.

(Though the guy was drinking the stuff as a supplement, which probably affected his personality a bit)

That tidbit about drinking it is the most interesting part of this whole thread!

Are they the same lithium salts that are prescribed as medication for certain psychological disorders?

Yup!

Dunno if modern medications may also include other active-ingredients to compliment lithium, but lithium itself is pretty much the same thing as sodium or potassium in terms of its simplicity as a chemical species.

Since lithium has a +1 charge as a cation (positively charged ion) in salt, it needs to be balanced with an anion (negatively charged ion), so the exact salt can vary in solid-form. But once it dissolves in water, such as in the body, then it's not really bound to the anion anymore and so the exact anion it was originally ingested with isn't particularly important.

Apparently some people used to drink [mineral water with lithium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithia_water).

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_(medication)

I grew up in Lithia Springs. They still bottle and sell the water from the spring.

No, the drug lithium carbonate is just that. It’s literally a powder that comes in a capsule.

The first thing recovered from salvaged batteries will be the cobalt and similar materials in the electrodes. Those are much less plentiful than lithium.

Elements tend to not degrade quickly outside of nuclear reactors as a general rule.

lithium recovery: https://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3421...

Seems possible; not sure of economic value at this particular point in history. There's a bunch of recent headlines about trivial extraction of lithium from seawater, so might get less economically feasible if those techs pan out. OTOH, even if it's not obviously worth it, you could try burying it all in one place and then 'mine' it once the economics swing towards recovery.

There is only a tiny bit of lithium in lithium batteries, afaik.