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Originally Posted by Atypical_Disaster
Yeah this whole thing seems strange. Bipolar is a possibility maybe but I've never seen you talk about mood related stuff here. If I was your doctor I would be focused on what's actually being presented, ie the psychotic symptoms, instead of looking for something that might not even be there... That's what it seems like is happening, they're trying to say you're bipolar without much evidence. I don't know. It just seems weird...
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I agree. My daughter was dx bipolar at age 13. She had hypomania - now I realize from very, very early age. It wasn't until it had swings with the counterpart of irritability that it came under consideration for her psychiatrist. What tipped the scale was a full blown episode where she got extreme - she went on a shoplifting spree while out shopping with grandma - at a very boring store! And she suddenly - very impulsively and spur of the moment during the same week, got involved in some extremely inappropriate texting with boys she hardly knew. It was SO unlike her. She was as horrified as her family, and it was like when she got back to 'normal' she had no idea how all that happened. Anyway, it definitely involves mood swings though. She told her psychiatrist last week that she can 'feel' a manic episode coming on. She said she feels like a vibration in her head and her body feels jittery.
So - I can't imagine bipolar without mood swings. The typical behaviors during a manic episode would be not just buying a lot of things, but buying way more than you can afford and getting into financial trouble. Other typical behaviors are hypersexuality and other manifestations of extreme impulsivity. Also talking very, very fast (which my daughter experiences), and she also has a typical symptom of thoughts racing and being randomly. She cracks me up when she describes the randomness of how her thoughts jump from one thing to another - hardly related. Starts out thinking how she loves bananas, and then jumps to thinking about a yellow bird she saw, and the random associations of thought continue. For the first several years her counterpart of the bipolar was irritability. And it was intense. I barely survived it.
However, now that she has reached early adulthood, she's been experiencing the scarier counterpart of depression. Her psychiatrist, from the beginning, impressed upon us the importance of staying faithful to meds and doing everything possible to limit what we call a 'bipolar crisis' where everything falls into a hole and she's totally out of whack. Since her initial diagnosis, she's had one serious breakdown, and we had to change her meds.
Anyway, bipolar has some specific criteria for diagnosis, and I think extreme mood swings are core to the diagnosis.