I don't have much that is predictable although I always get hypomanic/manic in June and will get depressed somewhere between Nov. and February nearly every year from SAD.

Otherwise who knows? I know that my episodes often contain periods of mania and depression (this last year several times although depression has prevailed) and I have to hit no symptoms for a bit before an episode is done. Until time passes without symptoms I still can head for an extreme and the episode goes on.

The last 11 months have been non-stop. I've had long episodes before but they usually were a few months with a short period of improvement between and not one continuous episode. I think. My memory of these things isn't very reliable so I trust my therapist to tell me these things. This period has just been different from my usual. Even then I went up a few weeks ago and it was pretty obvious I was going to crash down again which I did. I don't think I usually come out of mania and bypass depression. But I'm sure at some point I probably have. Cycling for me is confusing and makes mood charting hard.

I do, however, highly recommend mood charting. If I hadn't done it this spring my drs. never would have understood what I was going through and things would have gotten even worse. I use iMoodChart app which is available for iOS and android. There are other apps as well as paper and pencil charts. I like imood because you can enter 10x/day if you want and not at all if you want.