Hello, BpinOK,

Welcome. Glad you decided to communicate with others who have inherited bipolar
illness or have had traumatic experiences that caused it to appear.

While you are just beginning with a specialist's help and advice--and medication prescriptions-- you will be going through an adjustment period. Once you have passed that point, you may likely want to do some things that will be of a self-help nature to enable you to keep medications at a minimum if possible.

Experience has taught me that over a long period medications may need adjustments, changes, and more improvement may occur with your doing certain things to help yourself.

One of them will be your diet: you need to make sure that you are ingesting good
amounts of Omega 3 fatty acids and are watching your intake of transfatty acids so that you don't have too much of that in your daily meals. (The American diet, unfortunately, includes far too many transfatty acids and not enough Omega 3 (fish oil) fatty acids, which is characteristic of the Mediterranean diet--and that's much healthier for you than the western diet, as a general rule.

My psychiatrist told me initially to avoid alcohol because it makes bipolar illness worse. She also warned me about eliminating caffeine, as well, because it makes bipolar illness worse. I would add that some people are able to use caffeine; but if we are sensitive to it, it's the last thing we need to include in our diet: that means coffee, tea (although drinking milk after ingesting tea will cut the effects of tannin in tea), and chocolate--often a favorite among many. (And anything else with caffeine in it.)

That's down the line, however, but something to keep in the back of your mind.
Right now you may wish to adhere strictly to your psychiatrist's efforts and prescriptions and see how you fare.

I certainly wish you a lot of success and a good stabilizing of your blood chemistry.
That will go a long, long way in helping you feel much better and live more contently.

Good wishes,

Genetic