Hope you don't mind me asking about this, I seem to be going through very much the same thing at the moment. Decades of depression, probably pretty constant in some form but several phases of major clinical depression. Looking back I suppose I could also describe that as 'mixed episodes with severe depression' - mostly I have managed to survive at least, if not always function well. I have had my ups as well as downs but the ups have never gotten to the point of what people describe as 'mania'. I guess I do have periods of what some people are now calling 'hypomania' in that I have relatively lucid periods where my mind goes at a rate of knots and my creativity and ability to make mental connections is off the scale, but they are not usually lengthy periods and tend to coincide with insights at work in my research or when I'm painting, making music or writing, so up till now I have always seen them as brief periods of 'normal me' where I'm doing something I enjoy and connecting with others intellectually. I am loath to pathologize this and even more loath to take some drug that might risk me losing that capacity and that would blunt my emotional responses which are important to me creatively. Reading the literature I do wonder if this concept of hypomania can sometimes lead to psychiatrists over diagnosing and confusing normality with pathology, some of the constructs within it seem tenuous and have the usual lack of criticality and category errors I associate with psychiatry (which is not exactly a science to put it bluntly).