My first manic episode started off with too much energy. I couldn't sit still, I needed no sleep, I talked too much and a mile a minute, I was the life of the party as they say. Then it turned into irritability. I was picking fights with the wife for no apparent reason. They were so irrational that I flipped out on her about socks on the floor. Something so trivial, but I flipped out, flipped out. I was throwing stuff, cursing, and just being mean to the wife. Another time I nearly jumped the counter to fight the pharmacist because he wasn't understanding what I was saying. Luckily the wife was there and could see the escalation so she got me out of there before anything happened.

The came the paranoia. I was seeing shadow people and they were there to get something, I didn't know what, out of my head. They would haunt me at night, staying in dark rooms or just out of reach of the back porch light. And during the day they had spies spying on me to report back to the shadow people. One time I got out of the house while the wife was upstairs reading because the shadow people were looking at me through the glass in the backdoor. I took the keys to the car and drove up and down the freeway, at really high speeds so the shadow people could catch me. I had to stay on the freeway because it was the best lit street in town. The wife called me when she found out and convinced me to pick her up. She spent a good 3 hrs driving up and down the freeway with me but she was behind the wheel so we were driving a normal, non dangerous speed.

After that the wife called my shrink and we added a mood stabilizer to the anti-depressent I was on. That's when my diagnosis changed from nos mood disorder to bp 1.