Diagnosed at 53 after a lifetime of always feeling something was wrong with me. I'd actually suspected bipolar after reading a copy of Jane Pauley's book Skywriting---my sister also read it and told me "I think you have that (bipolar)". But I didn't want to take lithium, which I thought was the only treatment for it, and I didn't want to believe I was mentally ill so I ignored it until I couldn't anymore.

I was sent to a psychiatrist when my regular doc said I had something too serious for him to treat. I was madder than a wet cat, but I went because I was really losing my $#!+ by that time. I'd been on Wellbutrin for a short time and it basically made me manic and psychotic, I was threatening to kill people and in a rage much of the time. In retrospect, I know I was lucky not to have been hospitalized, but by the time I actually saw the pdoc, I was merely depressed and he spent 90 minutes telling me how many ways I might not be bipolar.

However, he saw enough to diagnose me with BP-NOS on the basis of my history; that diagnosis has since been refined as my episodes have made things more clear. I've had a lot of trouble accepting it, but the dx explains so many things that have happened throughout the course of my life since I was very young---why I wanted to die as early as age 10, why I did crazy things like run off to Ensenada, Mexico with some friends and self-medicated with alcohol, why I'd go for long periods feeling really good and then crash into an angry depression. It even explains my lifelong seasonal patterns of feeling super-energetic in the early summer and early fall, depressed in the late fall and mid-winter, and mixed in the spring.