Talked to T yesterday.

-- Forgot to mention self care problems.

-- Mentioned shopping. She started smiling, admitted to shopping too much herself, and said that if shopping were a bp symptom, then half of the country would have bp .

Well, I will need to explain the EXTENT of buying useless stuff. Last weekend, I took a couple of items from IKEA, unopened, to Goodwill (American chain of stores where you can make donations of stuff), WITHOUT KNOWING WHAT THEY ARE FOR! I think I recall that they are some unusually shaped hooks to attach to walls for hanging, but I am not 100% sure. That IS a little extreme - to buy something and then not recall what it was meant for. Plus, I have all this excessive shelving from the Container Store in my living room now that I bought trying to organize us in a RENTAL house, and it is clear that even that huge, rundown house could not have possibly housed all the shelving. There were not enough closets to place shelving in. So, extreme. And when on this forum I read about women buying things in quantity and never using them, say, yarn, yarn, and more yarn, or artistic markers (by a med student, not an artist, mind you), I could really relate to that. So to me it seems like a very well defined symptom that I used to have that is clearly, squarely bp.

-- She smiled again when I mentioned that I enjoyed attention from multiple guys at, say, one party. So that is normal. No concerns.

-- I told her how in 2011 I had one evening when my mood was elevated and I was walking along the main drag in my city, crossing one little cross street after another, until I noticed that I was ALWAYS the first person in a crowd of people to start crossing the street when the light turned green. I decided that my speed of reaction must have become faster and that meant hypomania to me. Finally, when I looked at one street sign that I had seen a thousand times before, it seemed unusual and significant to me all of a sudden. I asked T if an evening like this rises to the level of hypomania. She said no.

-- She said that insomnia and needing medication for sleep can be a stand-alone disorder, not necessarily part of bp.

She did not have the DSM in the office but will bring it next week to go over the criteria.