I’m ‘round ‘bout 50 of 100 on Axis V. A global assessment of functioning that puts a number to my condition. Sure there are times when I can function above a general 50%. Those times are brief and ascend so quickly to matters not on the functioning scale other than vague labels of psychosis and hypermania. At that point function plummets to crisis and I do not hover at 50% for long before I am drenched in lethargy and creep through anguish until even that emotion is lost on my suffering. The only thing to predict is that it will change again, not how or when much less why. Environmental, situational, and chemical factors—linked—are bound only by my will to survive and hope to help others, as I feel I cannot be helped anymore than I already am from within or without.

Rapid-cycling is a term I think is fair, yet still not specific enough for someone, even experts on any axis as defined by the DSM-IV or otherwise. The word cycle puts too much of a mechanical spin on something that follows such erratic conglomerations. If you were to put my mood on a bicycle the contraption would certainly break, just as my mind and body have. Yet it is something that needs a scale and identification for communication and understanding. There is an up and a down, and time between but it is wholly unnatural and unfamiliar. Nature is wrought with the sin wave, from oceanic currents to disease, electron course to failing freshman English. The pattern of my mood, on two axis: time and mood, makes nothing of cycle. For some bipolars it may show some patterns and aid in treatment. Bust out a few supercomputers and add medication (30 psychotropics in 13 years), diet, exercise, family history, stress including traumatic, triggers, support webs, multiple hospitalizations, all the tentative information psychology has offer, and my hope is it would appear to be a new fractal. But I don’t think it would be a pretty one for a poster, more like one to enlighten mathematicians on a new power source; controlled chaos.