[ultramar]

I was interested in looking into the role 'irritability' plays in bipolar disorder and its diagnosis. Most of what I ended up finding was in the context of 'over-diagnosis', but in any case, these articles address the symptoms/experience of irritability in bipolar in different ways -so for anyone interested:

Is Bipolar Disorder Overdiagnosed in Adults? | Bipolar Beat | Candida Fink, MD | Bipolar Beat

Some interesting points, by a psychiatrist:

You Are Not Your Illness, and the Over-Diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder - moodtraining.com

The irritability issues is a couple of pages in:

http://advancedch.com/_data/files/Av...rdiagnosis.pdf

Canadian psychiatrist:

http://www.cma.ca/multimedia/staticC...3/pdf/pgE3.pdf

Interesting as ever Ultramar.

If we go back 20 years to 1993 before the DSM III came out the following year less than 1% would be diagnosed as Bipolar. Bipolar 2 debuted that year and now we also have Cyclothymia and Bipolar NOS as being classified on the spectrum. The DSM V has reduced the hypomanic length from 4 days to 2 days also I believe. Then we also have the debate about Borderline Personality Disorder between myself, you and a number of others that I found very helpful. Indeed, one person on here sent me a book via e-mail that was incredibly helpful.

I suppose the debate is where does the spectrum lie and what symptoms would be classified to be on it. Irritability is a big part of it and I originally thought I would not have BP because of my major episodes of irritability and agitation thinking the criteria was just elation and depression.

It is what you judge to be severe enough symptoms to warrant the diagnosis. One could make the argument that Bipolar 2 may not even be classified in a strict diagnostic criteria which I believe would be totally wrong but I am sure some could make the argument it is on the soft BP spectrum and therefore not strictly BP.