My wife has a bipolar diagnosis (type 2 I reckon, but no distinction back in the day). She is currently hypomanic, but she always has had some idiosyncratic symptoms that has me wondering about comorbidities or possibly even a misdiagnosis.

She speaks of episodes in her life as "masks" she's worn along the way. Long ago, during an episode called by her professionals post-partum psychosis, she had very noticeable disassociative symptoms. Her current m.o. is that she "has to" shed her latest mask, and needs to be completely free from anything that "tries" to return her to her old one. This current one she acknowledges to be an escape, and she is aggressively fighting any attempt to tie the clearly unhealthy and/or irrational ideas she has to any diagnosis. Like she'll admit that she was suicidal, but not that she was bipolar, or needs psychological care. She'll acknowledge that what she is doing now is escapism, but won't allow any abstraction from that...that she's manic/hypomanic, needs professional help etc., but will admit that it's not good, but states there are no other options.

Throughout our lives she's been incredibly episodic, but not always in a clearly depressed to manic pattern. For instance, the last 10 years have been largely depressed, but there's been a lot of episodes where she's clearly a different person. There's continuity between these "people" she assumes, in fact she sells it in a very generic/normal context most times, but other times she'll acknowledge how disordered it really is.

In her mind, for her to become an attentive, functioning mother and wife, she needs to assume a certain identity, an identity that will make her so miserable that she'll kill herself most likely. She's used language like this a lot over the years, and she can't separate behaviors from the paradigms or masks, versus behaviors we simply integrate into ourselves. It's as though she doesn't understand how healthy/most people change and evolve over time.

So all that for, does that sound consistent with simple bipolar? I've often thought she had a more complicated mental health profile than that.