Bipolar disorder is often a lonely illness. No one but fellow sufferers really understand what it's like. You never know if you're going to wake up and spiral into another episode that's out of your control. The meds don't entirely work, but they help and they're better than nothing. Sorry you are feeling bad. It is confusing.

I only got diagnosed last spring. The school's psychiatric nurse had been hinting at it because I responded very badly to SSRIs, but did well on Wellbutrin. I was also having disturbing dreams of massacres and she said that bipolar people had those. I thought she must be crazy. I didn't know what bipolar was, but I was sure I didn't have it. Around April or May of '09 I started doing my own research and found what I'd always been ignoring as the wildly creative "real" me that was certainly not part of my problem. My problem was only these horrible spells of depression. When I recharted my life with this new found info, I brought the episode chart in to the psych nurse and she diagnosed me with bipolar ii. Mainly because she'd never seen me manic and assumed my up periods were only hypomanic. But I also had mixed episodes where I had energy, but was depressed and doing dangerous things. She didn't listen to me when I said I needed a meds change. So, I went off of the Seroquel that was draining my will to live (and making me sleep up to 14 hours a day), and I flipped into a manic episode for 9 weeks last summer. My new p-doc that I went to in August for the first time diagnosed me with bipolar i. The meds never fixed my severe high and when I crashed they didn't fix my severe low...until mid February of this year. I somehow emerged after a dosage change of Geodon. But I'm on 6 meds right now.

So that's how I got diagnosed. It's different for everyone. Have you been diagnosed? The stigma sucks, but at least when you are, you know how it can be treated.

Hang in there.