[Icare dixit]

How many different (types of) cycle length do you experience? What meds or supplements or other substances change your cycle lengths? What other influences are there?

I experience four types, I think: many months (2/3 of a year or longer), textbook rapid cycling (six months for depression and mania), daily mood changes and extreme mood changes from seconds to minutes, truly mixed (thoughts can't keep up with the changes in mood).

Are any superimposed on others, on another?

My antipsychotic helps me to make me textbook rapid cycling, but the moderately mixed type may be superimposed on that one. The longest cycles have to be supported by changing and unchanging (and strict, unwanted) routines and activities.

Stimulants increase cycle lengths, except for some mixed states, serotonin might cause a mixed state. Nicotine decreases cycle length up to a point, I think. My other supplements (not 5-HTP) do a very good job at stabilising my mood, so decreasing cycle length.

Before I was on the right medications I was ultra rapid cycling (4+ episodes in a month). I would spend 4-7 days (hypo)manic followed by a week or so depression, and repeat with no stability.
When I was on weaker meds, I went down to regular rapid cycling. Instead of cycling quickly, my manic episodes went to being a week or so with more time being hypo and my depressions were about two weeks.
Now I'm on two mood stabilizers, an antipsychotic, and an antidepressant. I have had one hypomanic episode that lasted four days in the past 6 months, so hopefully no rapid cycling at all for 2016.

Lately, my depressions have been lasting 2-3 weeks and my hypo/mania lasting 1 week. Mixed is also 1 week. But, I don't really know anymore. I've started Lamictal and it seems to be working for me. Before I started taking it, I was getting an episode roughly every 6 weeks, but now it's been (I think) 9 or 10 weeks since I've had an episode.

I think Lexapro was causing the rapid cycling... because I used to have depressions that lasted 2-3 months, as opposed to 2-3 weeks. Latuda, on the other hand, just makes me pissed off and it does nothing for my depression.

[MBM17]

I wish my cycling were at all predictable.

I have two REALLY bad episodes a year, one in spring for about two months and one in the fall for about two and a half months.

The one in the fall is solid depression.

The one in the spring is what I call and "explosion" - rapid cycling, often ultradian rapid cycling with multiple cycles a day, between mood states. Severe agitation for three hours and unable to stop moving and stop my thoughts, three hours of feeling like a normal person, three hours of severe depression and not leaving the couch and not eating, then back to being only mildly disabled.... Or sometimes during my explosion I have four severely bad days, then two okay days.... It's completely unpredictable.

Aside from those two huge episodes, last summer I was having episodes lasting four days or seven days or two days or fourteen days - totally unpredictable AGAIN. (Noticing a trend?)

Now I'm on lamictal and it seems to really be helping with mood stabilizing. My seroquel is amazingly helpful in reducing the agitation of my hypomanic symptoms. (My hypomania rarely has euphoric mood and is instead usually panic and agitation.)

We'll see how this summer goes.