Hello globalcitizen. The next move would be to share the above experiences with a psychiatrist and ask for a thorough evaluation for possible bipolar illness. An online questionnaire can be a tool to help provide a start to such a conversation, but as you wrote, it's not a diagnostic tool.

Questionnaires don't ask nearly enough questions. Plus sometimes it's very hard to gauge through them where your "ups" fall in a spectrum. Also, how various levels of stress affect one.

I'm not a doctor or therapist, but from personal experience, a couple additional things to mention to them include:

* The medications you've taken, how they've affected you, including your moods, and how fast they caused a switch.

* A full description of what it felt like during your depressed days, more normal ones, and far "better" or energetic ones.

* How your moods affected your school and/or job performance and relationships with others (in terms of social anxiety and other aspects) and what the feedback was during your most energetic (or "up") periods. Did you ever suffer any form of consequences during the latter, small/medium/large?

* The effects, good and bad" of behavior during your more "up" days and weeks.

* How long the depressions, more normal mood times, and assumed "up" times lasted, individually and in relation to each other, plus the patterns.