Differences b/t real interests and mania

How do you know if you're truly interested in something and picking it up as a hobby or if that's one of the signs things are getting or are still problematic.

I'm trying to expand my list of early warning signs, and I was just wondering if you knew the difference if there is one. I know some people get hyperfocused on something and go all in, and that's me, but I don't know if that's manic me or just me me.

I tend to hyper focus on the same things. It’s like hypo or mania
Just puts my OCD on fire. I haven’t done that severely since being on clozaril
But we used to know I was up based on what I was doing. When I lived in my
House it was always trying to scrape wallpaper off or tear up basement carpet
Since those things involved sharps I was always made to stop or turn over the blades.

Do you mean with each episode it was the same thing or within an episode you'd hyperfocus on one thing throughout the episode?

I'm noticing a general trend in my interest in math/physics/bit of chem and it becoming stronger as (hypo)mania comes about. Sometimes it ventures into more life and earth sciences, but that's more so to arm myself for debates while I feel like I can take in information in the early stages. I was organizing my google drive and I made charts and graphs showing trends in climate change on average by thousands of years and that trend compared to the trend on a year by year basis since the ability to find yearly averages in 1875. Today I've been into chemistry. But yeah, a lot of the time I'm in the hospital for mania I'm just in there charting away at complex analysis problems I made up because it seemed more important to figure out sqrt(-6x+5) than go to group. I'm wondering if there's something to that, or if I actually like this stuff and I have more energy to dive into it when I have more energy from being up.

Every episode I did the same thing. Usually I'd be scraping the wallpaper at 2 AM and not realizing this was not normal until my therapist would ask if I'd been scraping wallpaper. Then I'd realize I might need to consider a med change. I had some insight into it once it was pointed out that it was not normal or healthy but I'd forget the next time.


It's been a few years since I've had a distinct up. I'm not sure what I would do here in this house. I need to keep my hands busy to distract me from racing thoughts that I can't follow. I'm not sure how I've done that here. I've not torn the place down so obviously I've not gotten too far out of hand.

When I was in grad school I remember sobbing over assignments that required analysis that my racing brain couldn't do but I had no choice because things were due when they were due, not around my mood swings that I wasn't admitting I had. I particularly remember crying for hours over a one page paper on the Americans with Disabilities act. I never did what you did and had heightened interest in problem solving.

I feel it always comes down to a question of whether it's effecting my functioning or not. One time i was hypomanic and planned a grand renovation of my condo and i would stay up all night surfing the home improvement site. I was gonna tear down all the interior walls and make my place into a giant studio. I got as far as submitting the project and paying for it but fortunately it never got scheduled and i got back down to Earth and got a refund before anything was done.

In that case, i feel because i wasn't sleeping and narrowly averting spending tens of thousands of dollars, it WAS problematic. I've had other times where i just really got into God and those were harmless. My warning signs are whether i'm not sleeping and am spending a lot of money. If you're skipping Group to indulge your fancies, i would say yes, that's problematic. It seems that health professionals will only involve themselves if we're not eating and sleeping tho. Eating? Check. Sleeping? Check. Next!

I start journaling and none of it makes sense. I had planned an inservice about finacial business. Convinced the fidelty folks to send over hundreds of packets for the whole company. I was so manic and undiagnosed until it was all over. Then I put a note on the front door that I was having a nervous break down. When hubby came home I asked demanded that he pray with me.I told jeff that I was trying to get jesus out of my head and into my heart. jeff was able to call 911 and leave the phone off the hook.
2 policeman showed up and I got hauled off to the psych hospital. In hand cuffs.
I was put into 4 way restraints, no not fun.
sorry did not mean to hog up your thread.
There is a book about it is called driven to madness. It is a good book.
kay jamerson wrote it about her life.
bizi

Almost certainly both. I'm pretty sure there's no cut and dried answer, and you'll have to sort out for yourself, situation by situation, how much of which best helps you get through what.

If you take the position that group seldom does much for you and is well worth avoiding, then working on sqrt(-6x+5) is bound to feel like a better way to occupy yourself -- even more so if you already find problems like that inspiring.

If, on the other hand, you already know that group most likely would be worth going to but you also didn't like the idea of what stuff it might stir up for you or what uncomfortable situations it might jam you into, you might then choose to view math problems as a distraction from taking care of yourself.

At any given moment, is the glass half full or half empty? (And either way, who says so?)

ughh this is really bothering me but I meant -6i not -6x

You're all good bizi Kay Jamison also wrote "An Unquiet Mind" which one of my NPs gave me a copy of and it was excellent

Oh yeah, I wouldn't be able to do things that were required for school or anything (it's actually why I flunked psychology...go figure ) I had a lot of essays that I just gave up on sounding like they made sense and turned in a lot that my teachers/professors didn't even grade, just gave them back with a good ole' question mark on them. Could always do math though. Before this last episode I started connecting things about how we perceive senses and how sight is the weirdest, then with sight came a lot of learning about light and that turned into protons and seeing the space between things that were what I guess you'd call touching each other (but they're not really touching touching) and that turned into the proton shyt and emailing a bunch of places and thinking MIT was going to give me a full scholarship.

Bizi--I'd do a lot of nonsense journaling too. You can really tell by what I've written by both content and handwriting that I was hypomanic or manic.

@JaneOnceMore that is very fortunate you didn't/couldn't go through with that "little" project. Yeah, the mental health system is awful. I go to the ER sometimes clearly unable to do any real thing, but if I've eaten at all that day and I don't need a certain amount of stitches/staples (four isn't enough, 18 is. Not sure where the cut off is) then they do not care. I literally went into the ER last year hallucinating constantly, haven't slept for over 3 days (and yes, I told them this), and overall probably just really disorganized. They gave me a fking HYDROXYZINE and sent me home...without a ride..middle of the night in a NH winter, and wouldn't let me stay. Thank God they at least let me use the phone and I found someone awake enough to answer and give me a ride!

you are right t is called the unquiet mind! Great read for any one struggling with mania.

OMG, thank you so much for that, because I was like, "What's to figure out?" But now I'm thinking about it...

I'd usually start with an answer by taking some random complex number and square it, then take that and actually take the square to hopefully get the same answer (well, and then the other that comes up with the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra you mentioned (totally forgot that name or what the other answer's name is if there is one), so I would get a cleaner answer than sqrt(-6i+5)

Anyway, I think it's more of a whether it's an organized way of attacking whatever I'm studying or just a mess of ideas. Of course, with this rapid cycling shyt, it doesn't matter. If I'm "stable" I'm going to go up soon anyways, so I guess this isn't as reliable as sleep, increased and more impulsive drug use, and hypersexuality. Could probably use it to back it up though.

I'm not a mathematician and don't play one on TV, so I'm usually happy to settle for an approximate answer. It looks as if (-1.185379618i + 2.5308348106) squared is very close to -6i + 5. And I didn't even have a group to avoid!

What bugs me about trying to work with complex numbers and other weird **** is that I find I can easily misunderstand or misapply the "rules." For me at least, there's usually no way to check my answer against something else, like a physical object, that's exists independently of those rules. If I square my answer and get -6i + 5 that's a good sign, but I'm still not 100% sure that I've correctly followed all the applicable rules for squaring complex numbers.

It's different when I'm playing with "my kind" of problem -- say, something like a set of data points meant to represent a 3D map of a landscape. If I also have a photo of the same landscape, I can calculate where in the photo each landmark should appear. When (as often happens) some of my data points don't fit the picture perfectly, I get to reexamine my data points, tinker with my estimate of where the picture could have been taken from, and try again.

I'm not sure how manic I've ever gotten (probably not very), but knowing that I can successfully pull off a bunch of intricate calculations and have the result agree with other, independent information says to me that I could very well still be making sense.

I hate irrational numbers though, so when I solve I just keep things under the radical. Can't cheat that way either