What Does it Feel Like to Have Bipolar?

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a form of mental illness characterized by severe mood swings between depression and mania. Individuals who have bipolar disorder feel out of control of their personality and moods, often when both on and off medication.

Yearly Experience

• Bipolar individuals may feel "normal" for only a short period of time every year. To be classified bipolar, an individual must experience at least one episode of mania and one episode of depression within 365 days.

Experiencing Cycles

• Periods of untainted mental function are typically experienced as a transition phase between one extreme or the other. Individuals coming out of a depressive episode will feel "normal" for a few weeks before they begin to pass into the manic episode, and vice versa.

Experiencing Mania

• Mania is a psychotic state where an individual experiences extreme euphoria, elation and breaks with reality. Bipolar patients, during untreated manic episodes, feel invincible, unnaturally confident, grandiose, and experience racing thoughts and flights of creative ideas.

Experiencing Depression

• Bipolar individuals in the throes of an untreated depressive episode may feel hopeless, sad, or unexplainably angry or irritable. Physically, they crave carbohydrates and sugars and feel persistent fatigue that can lead them to sleep over 18 hours a day.

Experience of Medication

• While medications such as lithium or antidepressants can help stabilize mood and prevent extreme cycling, many bipolar patients complain that life on mood stabilizers and antipsychotics makes them feel emotionally detached from the world around them and like they are looking at the world through a fog.