I did not recognize my hypomanic episodes as such until an antidepressant triggered a worse episode. When the doc was listing off little quirks of my personality as symptoms, I was actually kind of pissed. I did not realize how often I was drowning out others and how little sense I sometimes made. I can not say if that is true with either of the two of you, of course, but we often are not the best sources of info about out own behavior.

And you are in a catch 22 if you tell a psy doc they are misinterpreting the episode as hypomanic because then they make a note- "thinks he/she knows more about this than I do"...