Thanks folks... Well my diagnosis is still new (1 year) so I'm just trying to figure things out. It could be that the first mania that I'm referring to (when I was 25... now I'm 45) only lasted 8-9 months or whatever. This was the period in which I seemed to have exhibited manic behavior .. obsessive running, impulsively quitting my doctorate to run off to California, changing pretty much everything about myself. During that period I spent so much money, prostitutes, surfing, climbing, lost my job, etc, etc. So I'm just looking back more at behavior. The periods of depression were so much more clear in retrospect. And there was no doubt that I settled down for quite sometime and got pretty stable... until I moved out here to northern Wisconsin... and things have fallen apart again.

The more I think about it... the thought of having such long manic periods doesn't make sense.