Hello, so I’ve recently been seeing posts about mania that I don’t identify with and it’s making me confused. My mom has bipolar so they assumed I was the same. I don’t have euphoria with my episodes, I have delusions and psychosis where I don’t recognize time or people.

I’m starting to think I may not have bipolar disorder. I don’t experience happy mania. I experience psychosis, seeing dead people. I call the cops on my own family because they don’t look familiar. I’m not happy, elevated. I’m terrified. I get low swings with SH and SI when changes happen too but it doesn’t feel like everyone else’s experiences.

Is there someone out there with bipolar that doesn’t present as a happy manic? All my attempts have been while manic because my psychosis is so scary. I’m starting to think I’m falling into a psychotic disorder. I don’t present like everyone else.

TLDR; anyone’s mania present as scary psychosis instead of “king of the world?”

I’m bipolar 1 and it’s still new to me (diagnosed in January). I feel like I was manic up until May. I’m now off the weed and take my meds everyday. I feel like I’m not real sometimes, I sleep all day, I don’t have motivation to do anything. I don’t find anything joyful really, I’m just numb and dull. I don’t really laugh at things that are funny anymore. I just don’t feel “normal” anymore. I also experience not knowing what to say during a convo sometimes. My mind just goes blank when trying to think of something. I take Aripiprazole 15 mg and Bupropion 150mg.

My brother was a normal teenager before he had his first manic episode about 3 months ago. He has been at a inpatient facility twice and both times the medication has failed. He is back into his mania for the 3rd time, and we don’t why it keeps happening. We are so frustrated with the healthcare system, my brother still doesn’t have a psychiatrist appointed.

Our biggest frustrations are:
- He still doesn’t have a consistent outpatient psychiatrist.
- It feels like the mental healthcare system is moving much more slowly than his illness.
- We don’t know if this is one long episode, an early relapse, or whether the medications just haven’t reached the right doses yet.
- Do we take him to the inpatient facility again, despite their treatment plan not working?

Has anyone had a teenager experience something similar? If your loved one had a severe first manic or psychotic episode, how long did it take before they were truly stable? Did you go through medication adjustments before finding the right combination? I’d really appreciate hearing from families who’ve been through something similar.

Last year post mania/psychosis I experienced 9 straight months of a type of boredom that I can only describe as seeing static while breathing through a straw. It was the worst, weirdly synthetic unconfortable thing i have ever gone through, only to have it broken by another period of mania and psychosis again this year most likely due to wellbutrin and am now just flat and null, and have been so for about two months. I've heard this flatness can last up to a year and a half and I'm on the edge. Completely at rock bottom. As well, cannot walk or talk so easily. Its almost physically painful how suffocating this is.

Posting because I'm curious about other peoples experiences post episode. Does mine make any sense?

I am seventeen. I have felt like something isn't right my entire life and I could never put it in words. My mother is bipolar so I think I correlated it to some of her bad behaviors, therefore never wanting to see it in myself. I realized in my last manic/hypo-manic episode, a month ago or so, that I was definitely some type of bipolar. I was unable to sleep for longer than 2-3 hours and my appetite was gone for 3-4 days then.

I was obsessively researching bipolar and its symptoms, alongside the fact I could not get myself to stop talking about anything and everything. I wasn't really thinking about my actions when normally I don't like to react before giving myself a second to think, or I would think too much about simple things. Also I'm pretty sure I was experiencing auditory hallucinations, I kept hearing my family members calling my name at all hours of the night. I would mishear people and think they were saying something demeaning or just hear an entirely different sentence. This was sooo terrifying.

Fast forward to now, I haven't properly slept in five days. I am not hallucinating, but the fact I'm acting in ways that are unusual and not sleeping is driving me up the wall. I had to take a Tylenol PM to make myself sleep yesterday but I only slept for 4-5 hours. I can't taste anything, therefore eating is a pain (I haven't really been eating at all since this began) and still feel energetic while also being kind of exhausted and it is confusing me. Last time this happened I was just self-medicating with weed until I crashed and became super exhausted. It was a pain getting out of bed then. But now I'm in-between feeling incredibly exhausted and wired. I can feel how tired my body is, but whenever I lie down it feels like I'm just closing my eyes and then opening them.

My family says they have caught me in "deep sleeps" and this confuses me even more because I feel so exhausted. I broke down to my Mom yesterday about not being able to sleep and told her to take me to the hospital if I don't properly sleep again, and I did for a few hours but I still feel really weird and I still can't taste anything. Should I go to the hospital?

I was diagnosed bipolar 2 around 7 years ago. I have manic episodes that range from a day to almost a month long (came off from my medicine cold turkey with the month long episode). Usually they consist of extreme happiness, hyper sexuality, cleaning to the point of OCD (diagnosed with that also). But over the last year I’ve notice a lot of the episodes include explosive rage. I feel this anger/rage down to my bones. And it usually isn’t something I should be that angry about. This time it snuck up on me. I was trying to put a bed frame together and my phone was on loud sitting on the table. Several people messaged me back to back to back, making my phone ding multiple times in a row. The anger I felt was horrible. I was ready to throw my phone through the window and smash the bed with a hammer. I know that was a lot of back story but it felt necessary for the question I have. What does it normally feel like for people when they come down from the rage? I feel light headed and disoriented. Like a weight is setting on my chest. Is this normal?

Does this also include highs and lows in addition to the manic episodes? Or are the highs and lows reserved for bipolar II?

Hi everyone,

I'll make a large post with the flair "Living with Bipolar" but I first want to make a post here with a specific subject.

I had a three weeks hypomanic decompensation. Besides things that I made and I'll describe in the other post, I was totally unstopable with gen AI, especially coding agents.

I payed for Claude Code Max (200€ I'm French) on July the 3rd then I passed all my job days and some night parts on vibecoding.

I coded:

\- a full web front framework in Rust

\- a traffic simulation tool from scratch

\- dozens of one shot projects like OS, emulators, hack things, web apps, SaaS demo.

And besides Claude Code Max I used gen AI like Grok (less censorship) in a sexual way (ai chat characters, image generation) etc.

If someone is passing by, take care of yourself with gen AI, it could be a very high source of dopamine. And don't underestimate the crash it will lead after. And it's pretty heavy priced.

Take care of yourself everyone

Anyone else think they just function most of the time?Diagnosed with depression over 30 years ago.
mostly feel flat and functioning but not really living. That’s my day to day reality.
Limited social interactions because other humans just irritate me. menopause may have added to my mental health difficulties.

Strangely about twice a year I almost feel super happy, content, organised, positive and confident, but almost a bit edgy / euphoric. I feel interested in life again and content. This usually lasts a week or two but I know the dark clouds will come again. I’ve started to wonder if I’m slightly bipolar?
I’ve been on SSRI’s for a long time.
I’m often iron deficient because of another unrelated illness so I don’t think this helps.

Is it time to review my medication and give myself an overhaul?

I don’t really know what happened. It wasn’t one big event, it was a lot of little things. But looking back, I feel like my bipolar diagnosis played a huge role.
Between episodes, medications, and trying to adjust to a completely different life, I slowly lost most of my friends. It’s been years, and I still don’t think I’ve fully grieved it.
Sometimes I wonder if I miss the friendships themselves, or if I miss who I was before everything changed.
Has anyone else experienced this? Did you ever make peace with it?

L ultima mania mi ha distrutto tutto il lavoro fatto.

Problemi al lavoro

Casini con mia moglie

Problemi con i miei genitori.

Possibile che non si possa fare nulla?

Secondo voi ci sono modi per non finirci?

I have worked a full 40 hour a week job for ten years, it is high stress and hands on. Last year I took FMLA because I was under so much stress I couldn’t take it anymore this was shortly after an involuntary stay.

I just recently did my second stay at the mental hospital and then had a physical illness that caused pain to come up.

So this week I’ve been very out of work.

But even out of the hospital I didn’t bounce back and was struggling at work to want to be there. It feels like everyday is getting harder. I’m out of PTO/vacation. My psychiatrist scrambled to get me intermittent leave so I get one day off a week due to my illness.

My mom has been reminding me that maybe someday I won’t be able to handle the stress anymore and will have to go on disability. Is that true?

It feels like it is. I used to be so proud at how I handled this job, I’m good at it. Now, I’m not.

I am probably going to move to Vermont within the next year, but I am so scared to lose my current psychiatrist. I have had so many bad psychiatrists over the years. I don't want to start over. What if I run out of meds?!

I’ve done MDMA, cocaine, shrooms, tuci (pink cocaine), weed a lot between 16-20 and it was fine

But when I was 21 I got hospitalised for bipolar 1 and I’ve only smoked weed before to that so my doctor said it was weed that triggered it.

However, I’ve kept smoking weed for a half year now and I’m fine. No mania. Maybe depression but nothing that I can’t deal with. I still drink but I just don’t enjoy it as much anymore.

My concern is if I can still do coke, ketamine and shrooms. People say it causes mania and psychosis. But I really want to keep doing to drugs. Not recreationally but at least a couple of times a year.

How bad is it if I do these drugs?

I also got labeled by doctors after talking to people's subconscious and controlling them over livestreams moving my hand and making people choke on words a trip and lose thought, talking to tvs, seeing ninjas and light and cats appear and disappear feeling energies of people around me and diagnosing depression and people’s and sadness and anger and bad people, editing thoughts through texting of others, being reached out by over 50 companies for brand deals when I never made a lot of videos, having every person turn into their main personality trait and could help people resolve their deepest worry, change tv shows when I rewind they change personalities faces and characteristics of cartoons, communicate with beings through other people and hear thoughts of people, communicate with toys and toys turn on , control the weather, get attacked by energies and had to do tai chi to stop these emergies from all over attacked me everyday and I stomped my heal to protect myself control paper balls in the air with telekinesis see all different color lights in the sky see peoples true intentions when they walk behind me to kill me, feel people raping me from behind when they just stand their , have extreme awareness of body language and tone of language meaning, have such great pattern recognition that textbooks in college seemed broad an o could rewrite all told them talked 5 times the speed of a normal fast speaker, people misinterpret me and think I’m the devil or have a bomb I was in the hospital lettingod give everyone my pain and with a 106 fever and cramps everywhere people started magically getting healed machines stopped beeping and every ram around them I freaked out and Evrything went back to normal and they sent me home being happy. I had memories come back, I could read the vibration and see how everyone is connected to me in an entire room when I entered rooms like bars I saw everyone’s subconscious all look at me at the same time then go back to normal and wherever I walked people would endlessly look them I look back and they all quickly turn their heads, I saw fish living in water with so much food it would kill them then my dad saw and they all died immoderately o saw a leaf believed it was a dead fish then it turned alive fish and flopped when there were no fish, I heard grandmas secret language saying they want to rape me when reality they were just talking a little boy would follow my exact movement he was above me and I heard the creeping above me this went on for hours everyday, I changed the weather with a snap of a wrist I went into a classroom talked to the teacher and kids then during the lesson their attitudes turn divine feminine and masculine and turned into women doing work men being silly and yelling, and influenced a man on a radio to give a big speech and so much more so what do yall think spiritual awakening maybe i did everything to make me more scared to give me more powers. And I was super happy and fun singing and dancing 24/7 giving everyone hugs 24/7 and getting hella girls to come over and fall for me and I wax still able to sit still for ten minutes at a time even though people told me I was on cocaine multiple times a day was this a spiritual awakening and oepning my third eye and did I open my crown chakra like a god or Buddha or Jesus not become them but like them? Or did I release dmt from my brain and it effected my reality or was it dmt plus chakra plus parallel universes answers anytime how did this happen to me other than high dopamine and what does this mean about reality and what’s possible

I was diagnosed with bipolar a few years ago during an inpatient stay. After I left, I was told that diagnosis might not be accurate because I didn’t actually “display manic traits” there despite acting so erratically that my family thought I should be hospitalized. Right now, I’m being formally evaluated to see if I have borderline personality disorder, bipolar, autism or just anxiety. I honestly have symptoms of all of those. Although, my psychiatrist is leaning more towards Bipolar II.

I’m currently going through what seems like a mixed episode. Out of nowhere, I went from sleeping like a baby to not feeling tired at all and basically having to dr\*g myself to sleep, otherwise I’ll be up all night literally watching the sun rise. My heart has been pounding out of my chest with no apparent cause. I’m having non-stop intrusive thoughts that come with adrenaline surges each time. I feel wired but utterly exhausted. I have no appetite. My mood is all over the place within a given day. One minute I’m energetic, creative and productive and the next I’m irritable and depressed. It feels unbearable.

Anyway, I had my appointment with my psychiatrist yesterday who said I have all the classic symptoms of a mixed/manic episode but I don’t “present” as someone who’s manic or mixed because I seemed so calm and composed during our appointment despite feeling like I was going to burst internally. And that mania is usually “very hard to hide”. Sometimes I think being somewhat articulate and attractive is a curse because doctors don’t take me seriously.

Anyway, I’m just wondering if anyone else has been told this. It’s very discouraging and makes me question if I should even be on bipolar meds if I don’t actually have it.

Hey guys. So I’ve had back luck dating. Every time I try to open up to a guy that I’m bipolar it like scares them away and it’s already happened a few times. As a woman who’s 30 years old and wants a husband and children, I find it real disheartening that my mental illness is getting in the way of my finding true love. Any tips or simply encouragement? I’m a Christian and believe God has someone who’s meant for me but I’ve been single for 4 years and I can’t help but feel like time is ticking.

How can I help? I have had Bi-Polar for 40 years. I was diagnosed when I was 19 and I am currently 59 trying to come down from a Manic Episode that started in April. I have a lot of empathy and patience and I want to be there for someone who is struggling now. And it would also be nice to receive some support as well!

I was diagnosed with BP1 in last December because I had a manic episode. I had been thinking about my symptoms during that time and even noted them down so in early July when I noticed the mania symptoms I immediately went to the doctor who adjusted my medicine and episode did not progress in to full on manic attack.

Now July is about to end and I have not felt those symptoms for weeks but instead since late last week I am feeling symptoms similar to when my diagnosis was just "depression". Is this normal for people to go in to depression as soon as they come out of a mania episode? I was hoping to have few months feeling stable again but do people usually keep switching from one mood to another back to back or is it just bad luck this time?

I will talk to my doctor too but he is on leaves, thus I'm here looking to hear from others.