My life started with PTSD and it's hard to know what is what sometimes. Most young stuff I call PTSD although it certainly fed into BP as well.

In my early teens I became suicidal and was diagnosed with depression but it wasn't treated because my mom was too afraid to tell my father I had this diagnosis. So I went until I was 18 with the only treatment being some counseling through CPS.

In college I started seeing a therapist regularly. I refused meds for a long time but agreed to them the fall of my senior year, during my first big crash from mania, which I lied about so he wouldn't know how high I'd traveled in the summer. That lie delayed diagnosis for years.

ADs were a mess for me; they kept trying SSRIs and I kept getting "agitated" on them. That was, of course, mania but my life was so bad that the therapist thought it was trauma and this made sense so it wasn't diagnosed.

In grad school I saw my first psychiatrist. He continued to treat for recurrent depression and kept changing my meds as they didn't work or sedated me too much. He died 6 months before I graduated and his replacement asked if I might be bipolar the day I met her which scared me so badly I left and wouldn't return.

When I started working and studying for my boards I lost it. I cycled wildly for 18 months while working with a psychiatrist who I later learned had no clue what I was telling her. She thought I was fine.

Eventually I got so much worse with her that I got suicidal and so I started lithium to boost my ADs and counseling. That made it very clear i was cycling so I got a temporary BP diagnosis. I managed to do some research online, understood I was bipolar, and got into a mood disorder clinic with a top expert in bipolar. With him I did a 6 month clinical trial for a med combo and then moved on to my current pdoc.

It's been 12 years with her now and we're still trying to get me relatively stable. I've been there briefly a few times but not long enough to even say "stable". I spend most of my time in some degree of mixed and so my best is usually mixed mild. I've been on 67 drug cocktails with a ton of dose changes within those and am still seeking the elusive one that works really well. But I'm better now that a month ago and much better than 3 months ago and that is very important even though "in remission" would be even nicer.