It's hard to put my finger on. I could speculate that maybe mild, mostly elated but occasionally irritable, hypomania could have been the first sign of my bipolar disorder. I'm not sure, though. I will never know if other children at like 8 years old experienced what I experienced. Like the one poster above, I daydreamed a lot, and many of them were grandiose daydreams. I did feel elated back then and also had a temper to the point of tantrums. Again, regular kid or bipolar?

My very first symptom that required treatment was anxiety at 14. My GP put me on Buspar. Then either hypomania or mania came, then depression. I went through the gauntlet between 14-16 years old. I almost failed the year from skipping school too many days, had a traumatic even at school, was sent to therapy (though received no dx), went on a mission to find God and joined the Catholic Church, and then the recommended I switch to a private school. After that things eased a bit. Maybe some hypomania in my freshman & sophomore year, a depression in junior year, and then perhaps a brief full blown mania with mixed episodes in my senior year, for which the university health center sent me to the university psychologist (still no accurate dx). That pdoc put me on Prozac, which I took for maybe three days and then transitioned to hypomania. After that the year became quite wild.