My Support Forums - View Single Post - What is the difference between rapid cycling and normal bipolar?

Resident Bipolar · Nov 05, 2013, 05:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ultramar

"Rapid Cycling bipolar disorder is often diagnosed when a patient has four or more mood episodes during a 12-month period. This essentially means that an individual with rapid cycling bipolar disorder can constantly cycle between periods of (hypo)mania and depression, without any periods of stable mood in between each episode.

I think if you're having, say, 4-5 episodes a year, it's perfectly plausible to have a lot of time in between episodes of 'normal'/'baseline.'

I think rapid cycling in general does assume that there exists a baseline mood. I think, my personal opinion, that mood shifts in a given day, over a day or two, may likely be at least in part due to situational mood reactions.

OP, does your pdoc know that you are cycling within a given day and/or day to day at times? Has he/she discussed the possibility that some of these moods (*not* necessarily all, of course) may be due to situational/environmental issues? Sometimes even non-bipolar moods can come about for no apparent reason, or there is a trigger that we just haven't identified yet.

I actually recently posted an article about rapid cycling and one of the things that it points out is that if someone is constantly dysregulated, attributing all of these mood shifts to bipolar can put someone in a position of feeling out of control of all of these moods, when it's possible that at times these can be controlled by other (non-medication) means.

Are you in therapy? Perhaps working on mood regulation might help with *some* of these mood shifts, which would give you a lot more breathing room, so to speak, in your daily life.

I believe that generally rapid cycling is diagnosed with there isn't typically a period if what would be classed as a "normal mood". From what I remember from how it was explained to me, a patient with rapid cycling Bipolar Disorder will always be in either a state of some severity of depression or a state of some sort of severity of (hypomania) - this is without the correct treatment, of course.

Ultradian cycling bipolar disorder (ultra ultra rapid cycling) can involve multiple episodes of depression and hypomania in a single day. Rapid cycling is nowhere near the same. Research is, however, still ongoing.

RB.