distantfuego,

Thanks for your post. I am very interested in the question/observation you made - about yourself. It's just what I wonder about myself. I know that I am "emotionally overreactive." That's an observable fact that anyone who knows me would probably readily testify to. A pdoc is now trying to tell me that he thinks I am on the Bipolar spectrum. Like you, "I do go from feeling hopeless to relatively happy pretty often . . . " (Well, I used to. I am stuck on hopeless most of the time, now.) So my pdoc sees this as cyclical and therefore suggestive of bipolar.

Here's my big reservation about this whole bipolar thing. I am not in the least bit convinced that there even is such a thing as Bipolar Disorder. In fact, nobody can prove there is. It is a theory.

We know there are people who are "emotionally overreactive," and we know there are people who have mood swings, and we know there are people who have a cyclical character to their mental lives. These are all observable facts. However, do we really know that all people who have these traits have the same disorder?

I've got a very strong hunch that under the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder are a lot of people, who are lumped together, who may very possibly have different types of disorders. Maybe this so-called Bipolar Disorder is actually a syndrome, rather than a disease. A syndrome is simply an observable manifestation. This same syndrome can possibly be given rise to by a variety of very different fundamental disturbances. All I'm saying is that I don't think we really know, yet. I don't think the doctors know.

I prefer to think of myself as "emotionally overreactive." I'm fine with saying that I have a very obvious problem with severe mood dysregulation. It is so severe that it easily, in my opinion, meets criteria for mental illness. But I'm not sure that, when we say "Bipolar Disorder," we are saying anything meaningful, at all. A word like "polar" has a scientific ring to it. When we stick the Latin prefix "bi-" in front of it, the "scientific ring" gets even louder to some people's ears. None of this impresses me.

In no way, am I suggesting that persons diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder don't have something very serious gone wrong with their psyches. Psychiatrists consider the diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder as pretty heavy duty, and they don't hand that diagnosis out willy-nilly. What I am saying is that, in handing out this diagnosis, they may be mixing apples and oranges and, even, fruits and vegetables . . . all of them seriously disordered, but, perhaps, not all in the same way when you get down to the root dynamics of what has gone wrong.

Maybe I am just excessively skeptical. For better or worse, though, I am highly skeptical of this whole paradigm.

I was about to say that I may be the only person in the world who thinks this, when I decided to google just that question. Well, I'll be a monkey's aunt! Within two seconds I was reading a piece by a psychiatrist who thinks exactly what I just said above. Here is the link:http://pasadenatherapist.wordpress.c...isorder-exist/

That has gotten off the original thrust of this thread, but it's relevant. I am becoming more and more of a mess, with my chaotic sloppiness being a very outstanding symptom. Meanwhile, I'm getting told that the pdocs can account for my problems by giving me a diagnosis of a disease that I can't for the life of me even believe in.

Thanks, again, for the reply - very thought provoking.