I suffered from depression through most of my teenage years. At some point I began to have some psychosis during that period, but it can't have been too alarming as no one realised at the time. Obviously I knew things were happening, but invented explanations for myself. From late teens I think I started to have hypomanic episodes. Apart from the depression, which I knew was depression(!) the rest I just thought was crazy stuff I did, or crazy ways I acted, or crazy stuff happening to me... for a long time.

So I cycled like that all my life, eventually getting help for psychotic depression (which didn't help), which was re diagnosed as bipolar and eventually schizoaffective. Now I look back and see how the symptoms seem to have been there all along. Though sometimes I wonder does the diagnosis fit me, or am I trying to make my life fit the diagnosis?