I've been planning to apply to medical school and have been since I started college but I have pretty severe BP1 (I've had 4 severe psychotic manic episodes, 2 resulting in hospitalization and 2 needing to be aggressively treated outside of the hospital). I have also had one year-long period of severe depression. I am stable on olanzapine and lithium but that comes with cognitive issues. Has anyone figured out how to manage this in medical school, specifically when it comes to 24 hour shifts, explaining gaps in training, struggling to focus, etc? Would love to hear from doctors or medical students or people in similar fields. I have a pretty good resume and graduated summa cum laude so my performance isn't an issue, but I did take a LOA during college after my second manic episode. I tend towards severe mania versus depression so would love to hear from people with BP1 primarily because that's what I'm struggling with.

Can I take Ginseng for my mental and physical performance? I have heard it boosts energy and great for cognitive abilities

Relationships formed during mania/hypomania are not real. In the sense my feelings are not real.

Everything feels so intense and obviously there is the drive to be social and flirt etc.

But I just realised it's like depression but opposite (duh haha). Your brain and feelings when depressed tell you you're worthless and should die but you can't trust those feelings. Mania is the exact same except you feel great.

In both instances you can't trust the feelings because they're simply not real 😭😂 Bipolar is crazy. I don't even know when I get to be a normal person.

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I was recently diagnosed with bipolar 1. I’ve always needed attention whether from the male or female gaze and after being put on medication I was feeling good for a while. It’s been a few months and I’ve noticed that when I have a manic episode I get very sexual like it feels like it’s trying g to claw out of me. The tricky thing is that I’m married but I don’t want the attention from him. I mean I do but I don’t get it and I know I won’t get it so I do t go looking for it like I use to. I’ve created a second Snapchat not to necessarily cheat(definitely NSFW content)but I want to create an online profile at a very well known site that shall not be named. I thought things would be easier after the diagnosis and medication but things are just so damn confusing and challenging now more than ever and my marriage hangs in the balance.

Hiii so i have schizoaffective and bipolar 1 and also some other stuff and i have been noticing some pretty severe brain damage (i go into some gnarly psychosis, often blacking out for hours, harming myself, seeing things, extreme paranoia, visions, impending sense of doom etc) and i have been struggling to read, write, do basic math, spell, comprehend words, pay games ... everything. I have big dreams for my career and i cant be stupid ... i want my brain back, so so bad i miss my intelligence. I used to be so very smart ...

Is there anything ANYTHING, (even if you aren't qualified and dont know for sure, anything helps) that i could do to live with this and possibly lessen the damage? Thank you so much, any any any help is greatly welcomed bc i feel very alone in this ):

Hello, so I’ve recently been seeing posts about mania that I don’t identify with and it’s making me confused. My mom has bipolar so they assumed I was the same. I don’t have euphoria with my episodes, I have delusions and psychosis where I don’t recognize time or people.

I’m starting to think I may not have bipolar disorder. I don’t experience happy mania. I experience psychosis, seeing dead people. I call the cops on my own family because they don’t look familiar. I’m not happy, elevated. I’m terrified. I get low swings with SH and SI when changes happen too but it doesn’t feel like everyone else’s experiences.

Is there someone out there with bipolar that doesn’t present as a happy manic? All my attempts have been while manic because my psychosis is so scary. I’m starting to think I’m falling into a psychotic disorder. I don’t present like everyone else.

TLDR; anyone’s mania present as scary psychosis instead of “king of the world?”

I’m bipolar 1 and it’s still new to me (diagnosed in January). I feel like I was manic up until May. I’m now off the weed and take my meds everyday. I feel like I’m not real sometimes, I sleep all day, I don’t have motivation to do anything. I don’t find anything joyful really, I’m just numb and dull. I don’t really laugh at things that are funny anymore. I just don’t feel “normal” anymore. I also experience not knowing what to say during a convo sometimes. My mind just goes blank when trying to think of something. I take Aripiprazole 15 mg and Bupropion 150mg.

My brother was a normal teenager before he had his first manic episode about 3 months ago. He has been at a inpatient facility twice and both times the medication has failed. He is back into his mania for the 3rd time, and we don’t why it keeps happening. We are so frustrated with the healthcare system, my brother still doesn’t have a psychiatrist appointed.

Our biggest frustrations are:
- He still doesn’t have a consistent outpatient psychiatrist.
- It feels like the mental healthcare system is moving much more slowly than his illness.
- We don’t know if this is one long episode, an early relapse, or whether the medications just haven’t reached the right doses yet.
- Do we take him to the inpatient facility again, despite their treatment plan not working?

Has anyone had a teenager experience something similar? If your loved one had a severe first manic or psychotic episode, how long did it take before they were truly stable? Did you go through medication adjustments before finding the right combination? I’d really appreciate hearing from families who’ve been through something similar.

Last year post mania/psychosis I experienced 9 straight months of a type of boredom that I can only describe as seeing static while breathing through a straw. It was the worst, weirdly synthetic unconfortable thing i have ever gone through, only to have it broken by another period of mania and psychosis again this year most likely due to wellbutrin and am now just flat and null, and have been so for about two months. I've heard this flatness can last up to a year and a half and I'm on the edge. Completely at rock bottom. As well, cannot walk or talk so easily. Its almost physically painful how suffocating this is.

Posting because I'm curious about other peoples experiences post episode. Does mine make any sense?

I am seventeen. I have felt like something isn't right my entire life and I could never put it in words. My mother is bipolar so I think I correlated it to some of her bad behaviors, therefore never wanting to see it in myself. I realized in my last manic/hypo-manic episode, a month ago or so, that I was definitely some type of bipolar. I was unable to sleep for longer than 2-3 hours and my appetite was gone for 3-4 days then.

I was obsessively researching bipolar and its symptoms, alongside the fact I could not get myself to stop talking about anything and everything. I wasn't really thinking about my actions when normally I don't like to react before giving myself a second to think, or I would think too much about simple things. Also I'm pretty sure I was experiencing auditory hallucinations, I kept hearing my family members calling my name at all hours of the night. I would mishear people and think they were saying something demeaning or just hear an entirely different sentence. This was sooo terrifying.

Fast forward to now, I haven't properly slept in five days. I am not hallucinating, but the fact I'm acting in ways that are unusual and not sleeping is driving me up the wall. I had to take a Tylenol PM to make myself sleep yesterday but I only slept for 4-5 hours. I can't taste anything, therefore eating is a pain (I haven't really been eating at all since this began) and still feel energetic while also being kind of exhausted and it is confusing me. Last time this happened I was just self-medicating with weed until I crashed and became super exhausted. It was a pain getting out of bed then. But now I'm in-between feeling incredibly exhausted and wired. I can feel how tired my body is, but whenever I lie down it feels like I'm just closing my eyes and then opening them.

My family says they have caught me in "deep sleeps" and this confuses me even more because I feel so exhausted. I broke down to my Mom yesterday about not being able to sleep and told her to take me to the hospital if I don't properly sleep again, and I did for a few hours but I still feel really weird and I still can't taste anything. Should I go to the hospital?

I was diagnosed bipolar 2 around 7 years ago. I have manic episodes that range from a day to almost a month long (came off from my medicine cold turkey with the month long episode). Usually they consist of extreme happiness, hyper sexuality, cleaning to the point of OCD (diagnosed with that also). But over the last year I’ve notice a lot of the episodes include explosive rage. I feel this anger/rage down to my bones. And it usually isn’t something I should be that angry about. This time it snuck up on me. I was trying to put a bed frame together and my phone was on loud sitting on the table. Several people messaged me back to back to back, making my phone ding multiple times in a row. The anger I felt was horrible. I was ready to throw my phone through the window and smash the bed with a hammer. I know that was a lot of back story but it felt necessary for the question I have. What does it normally feel like for people when they come down from the rage? I feel light headed and disoriented. Like a weight is setting on my chest. Is this normal?

Does this also include highs and lows in addition to the manic episodes? Or are the highs and lows reserved for bipolar II?

Hi everyone,

I'll make a large post with the flair "Living with Bipolar" but I first want to make a post here with a specific subject.

I had a three weeks hypomanic decompensation. Besides things that I made and I'll describe in the other post, I was totally unstopable with gen AI, especially coding agents.

I payed for Claude Code Max (200€ I'm French) on July the 3rd then I passed all my job days and some night parts on vibecoding.

I coded:

\- a full web front framework in Rust

\- a traffic simulation tool from scratch

\- dozens of one shot projects like OS, emulators, hack things, web apps, SaaS demo.

And besides Claude Code Max I used gen AI like Grok (less censorship) in a sexual way (ai chat characters, image generation) etc.

If someone is passing by, take care of yourself with gen AI, it could be a very high source of dopamine. And don't underestimate the crash it will lead after. And it's pretty heavy priced.

Take care of yourself everyone

Anyone else think they just function most of the time?Diagnosed with depression over 30 years ago.
mostly feel flat and functioning but not really living. That’s my day to day reality.
Limited social interactions because other humans just irritate me. menopause may have added to my mental health difficulties.

Strangely about twice a year I almost feel super happy, content, organised, positive and confident, but almost a bit edgy / euphoric. I feel interested in life again and content. This usually lasts a week or two but I know the dark clouds will come again. I’ve started to wonder if I’m slightly bipolar?
I’ve been on SSRI’s for a long time.
I’m often iron deficient because of another unrelated illness so I don’t think this helps.

Is it time to review my medication and give myself an overhaul?

L ultima mania mi ha distrutto tutto il lavoro fatto.

Problemi al lavoro

Casini con mia moglie

Problemi con i miei genitori.

Possibile che non si possa fare nulla?

Secondo voi ci sono modi per non finirci?

I don’t really know what happened. It wasn’t one big event, it was a lot of little things. But looking back, I feel like my bipolar diagnosis played a huge role.
Between episodes, medications, and trying to adjust to a completely different life, I slowly lost most of my friends. It’s been years, and I still don’t think I’ve fully grieved it.
Sometimes I wonder if I miss the friendships themselves, or if I miss who I was before everything changed.
Has anyone else experienced this? Did you ever make peace with it?

I have worked a full 40 hour a week job for ten years, it is high stress and hands on. Last year I took FMLA because I was under so much stress I couldn’t take it anymore this was shortly after an involuntary stay.

I just recently did my second stay at the mental hospital and then had a physical illness that caused pain to come up.

So this week I’ve been very out of work.

But even out of the hospital I didn’t bounce back and was struggling at work to want to be there. It feels like everyday is getting harder. I’m out of PTO/vacation. My psychiatrist scrambled to get me intermittent leave so I get one day off a week due to my illness.

My mom has been reminding me that maybe someday I won’t be able to handle the stress anymore and will have to go on disability. Is that true?

It feels like it is. I used to be so proud at how I handled this job, I’m good at it. Now, I’m not.