Most episodes need to last at least 2 weeks to be considered an " episode"

Personally I have had 4 or so .

Are people counting each stage as a episode? Hypo 1, then manic 2, then depressed, 3 ???

Or a episode from start to finish ? Curious about this ?

Also you need to come off a baseline to have an actual " episode" as my Pdoc explained to me years ago.

A lot of rapid cycles are actually someone that hasn't actually had a good dose of time " baseline" to actually have something to compare to.