There are two disturbing ends. Being diagnosed bipolar out of some kind of whim. It nearly happened to me. In 2001 after 911 actually (should not mean anything I'm in Europe) my doctor started suspecting BP and changed my meds accordingly. It took just forever getting out of her experimenting and getting on an antidepressant since I'm unipolar.

The other end at least here in Europe is that you have to have very profound symptoms of bipolar or you will get treated as unipolar or anxious. It means that patients with severe recurring depressions and only slight hypomania don't get treated they way they would benefit from. They might be upped to max levels on antidepressants and antianxiety meds when they would have done well on a low dosage of mood stabilizer and maybe suffer their whole lives because of overmedication and a med that doesn't really fit their symptoms.