How do you experience Mixed States?

I find this very confusing. I think I experienced it once, but I'm not sure.

I've seen descriptions of it that to me sound like ultra rapid cycling (up/down/up/down many times in a given day) and other times it sounds kind of like an agitated depression (or depressive mania, if that exists?).

So what is it, how have you experienced it, and how do you distinguish it from other states?

Thanks!

One of my experiences with mixed episodes went something like this: One night around 2 AM I found myself in the bathroom on hands and knees, scrubbing the tiles with bleach and an old toothbrush, and bawling like a baby. I'd been fighting with dysphoric hypomania for around a week, and I just lost it. I cried until blood vessels burst in my eyes. Still don't know how it started, guess I'll never know. But I'll never forget how that felt.

My mixed state predominant mood is usually angry, irritable and sometimes with anxiety. And I feel really uncomfortable. Worse than being plain manic or depressed.

I chart daily. Usually I know that I am in a mixed state because I can't figure out how to chart my mood. It just doesn't fit. Sometimes I am crying with racing thoughts, Sometimes I'm angry and wanting to isolate. It really depends.

Mixed states for me is when I have agitated depression, or a surge of energy while feeling depressed. I've had both happen to me.

I get 3-4 hours of sleep and I feel highly energetic, yet I'm horribly depressed and have lost interest in everything. I also get racing thoughts (like you get when you're hypo/manic), but those thoughts are very negative. I'm highly irritable, too.

Funny you should mention it: yesterday I thought this mixed state was the best state to be in, now I think it's the very worst.

It started a few days, maybe a week (it's not as if your memory is functional under such circumstances) ago, with suffocating depression, the one where you want it to end no matter what, if you see a car or train it seems like an escape. You think about going to a hospital right away if you can even make it. Anger is the only thing keeping you alive. You are very, very hypersensitive. There's anxiety. Lots. Thinking is hard and slow: mentally painful.

Then mania: euphoria, lots of anger, mild hypersensitivity, mild anxiety. And depression again. And so on.

Gradually, two days (again, could be one or three) ago completely, depression has become milder and mania worse: not euphoria at all, but pure ecstasy, no care of dying, connected to everything and everything is connected, every fibre in your body takes in pure spirit, closest to God you've ever been, and depression is bad, but short and at least I can think.

Objectively, it's not the worst I think. Though you become highly confused and your memory is extremely bad. But it feels really horrible and is very, very risky. If depression hits after mania, the not caring about dying and the wanting it to end may merge.

If mood states alternate more quickly, you get this blending of thoughts and emotions, where emotion changes faster than your thoughts can. You can't reason, but only believe strongly one second and something inconsistent or different the next.

Cut-off point is one day: "nearly every day", in the DSM.

I experienced it for 7 years (with sometimes longer unipolar episodes; sometimes more, sometimes less severe).

This is my mixed state as well with a lil depression mixed in just for fun.

This sounds like my mixed states. I'm horribly impulsive as well. I don't think I've went more than a week during a mixed state without attempting suicide and/or being hospitalized.

It's worse when you never experienced a mild mixed state.

That's why antidepressants (and anxiolytics, mostly withdrawal for some maybe) can be so dangerous.

This is pretty close to how it is for me as well. The racing thoughts usually are the key indicator that I'm mixed. And the thoughts are terrible. I get very fixated on death.

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A mixed state, which I was diagnosed during, is depression on crack. I was literally afraid of my shadow (took overhead lightbulbs out, wore sunglasses inside). Racing thoughts, suicidal ideology, just a big ball of worst ever going really really fast.

Big thanks to the not one person that said, Dontspeak, are you ok? I think something is wrong here. Woohoo, mental illness, let's get a big old carpet to sweep it under!

The good thing is, when someone says something like that, you're more likely to believe it. You're more likely to seek help (or die, but you can't have your cake and eat it too ).

I hate the perceptual changes and delusions (and hallucinations). Staying on antipsychotics has helped tremendously (relatively speaking). Now it's not that bad. A mixed state does (I don't have this any other time, as some do) feel like drowning, extreme waves, no land in sight.

Nicotine helps as well.

I can't function without suffering, so a mild mixed state is for now the best I can be in. Of course, if it's any worse it's completely different.

Edit:
That (the analogy) reminds me of Life Of Pi.

I smoke cigarettes too, and a lot when I'm stressed to manic. But my pdoc says those that use nicotine process their AP bc the liver is detoxifying the nicotine. So we clear our meds faster. Something to think about it. It's not only a stimulant, and addictive, but it's clearing our drugs faster! I hate that I smoke. But I love smoking. End of rant.

Life of Pi so good

Nicotine actually speeds up liver metabolism. That allows more of a med to be used. It is kept in the body for some time because it's used as a neuromodulator. It's not considered very foreign by the body.

However, cigarette smoke does contain other substances/particles which suppress liver metabolism.

The net effect is negative for cigarette smoke, but better with just nicotine.

I was told I was having a mixed episode once.

But I'm not sure if it was one because I wasn't depressed during it and I thought you were supposed to be depressed during them and I just felt bad because everything that was happening to me was so horrible!

I don't remember a lot of it because I was psychotic, but, horrible, torturous racing thoughts, all night long so I couldn't sleep, bad paranoia and fear, seeing weird ****, feeling suicidal because everything felt so horrible, general frantic feeling, moments of intense euphoria, knowing the secrets of the universe, escalating to intense delusions about how I could save the world and thinking I was walking around in my unconscious mind and when I was asleep I was actually awake. Confusing time. A lot of bad feels. Ultimately I ended up in the hospital.

So, that was my experience with an episode I was told was mixed.

It absolutely does sound mixed.

If it was horrible (which is likely) then that's the depressive part. Let's not split hairs.

The end of mania is (however shortly) also depressive, manic, so it's also mixed. Mania is just more apparent, easily discernible, positive, independent, while depression is always a bit more corrosive, negative, affecting.

Mania is fast, depression is just too slow to do more than make you feel bad and affects your beliefs ever so slightly that you become mad by nuance, in a certain mixed state, where your mood changes indiscernibly fast.

Maybe extremely nuanced should be the name for that kind of mixed state. Would you agree?

Maybe that's a different variety though.

Ah, that's maybe just one aspect. Maybe "circus" would be better. But not very specific. Or just "tiring, sleep-depriving, extreme, pseudo-state".

Edit:
But it's dimensional at least: different cycle frequencies, main polarity and severity. That's at least 8 types.

I don't know what it was. I spent an entire year trying to figure it out before I let it go because no one really seems to know.

All I do know is that it felt bad.

Not depressed. Bad.

People feel bad all the time and they're not depressed.

I feel bad right now but I'm not depressed.

Bad feelings happen.

I feel strangely good at the same time though. haha!

Ok, with feeling bad I meant as in depressed. Really, really bad. People with just extreme anxiety don't generally want to end it, for example. But maybe it was different in your case. Wouldn't know.

Depression is not just thoughts, right? For me it isn't. That's why CBT (or things like it) isn't a cure all. Thoughts can be controlled, depression probably less so (I'm working on the magic formula right now ).

Wouldn't one be a mood state, the other an emotion? Or something. Maybe.

Normal people aren't this extremely ambivalent, surely. But maybe it's not extreme. Is it?

I don't know.

It's a step above a writer's high.

I'm so confused by my feelings! I'm to be trying to figure this out all day! The bad feelings are just because of it, and I'm working on ways to get rid of that situation and than I won't have these abnormal thoughts and everything will be fine again.

So it sounds like a kind of very very agitated depression sometimes accompanied by psychosis? I'm still confused, but regardless everyone experiences it (as all related to Bipolar) in different ways.

Or full blown mania with depressive features, though maybe that's the same thing?

But one thing is clear, at least from what you guys have responded, is that it's not an unending up/down state (which I have seen explained on another forum elsewhere) it's truly a constellation of of symptoms that are experienced simultaneously, which at least makes some sense DSM-wise (not that everyone neatly fits into the DSM).

Hope this makes sense, I have come down with the flu of the century and am feverish, etc. with migraines thrown in for good measure.

Thanks for sharing your experiences!

Oh no. I hope you feel better soon!