My name is Xanthe Wyse. Diagnosed bipolar 1 disorder (which has mania), post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD (avoidance and shutdown presentation), mild social anxiety disorder.
This video was recorded after reading a comment requesting to sum up how mania completely changes how a person's personality presents.
I am on medications and have had over two years of weekly therapy with a clinical psychologist.
Some brief notes to what I said:
Hypomania (elevated mood but not full mania):
- seems magical - noticing connections
- feel creative - from tangents
- can feel euphoric
- get told that 'beautiful', 'glowing'
- write my best
- productive
- mood features such as needing less sleep, increased libido
Mixed features aka dysphoric mood (mix of mania/hypomania plus depression):
- scattered thinking
- more pain physically
- tired but wired
- irritable
- tend to eat more junk food as stressed
- hard to focus
- is confused with ADHD but has mood features and is episodic
- difficulty sleeping but still tired
Mania:
- extremely high energy (hyperarousal energy)
- significantly less sleep
- significantly higher libido (hypersexuality)
- talk very fast (pressure of speech)
- off on extreme tangents (flight of ideas & loose associations)
- racing thoughts
- impulsive, reckless, lack of judgement eg unsafe sex, overspending
- socially unacceptable behaviour
- grandiosity (believing one is the 'chosen one' etc)
- intense emotions, including anger/rage
- no filter blurting out whatever pops into head
- extremely spiritual or religious when usually not
- trainwreck with relationships
- massive mood crash (plunge from high to low quickly, with a lot of stress and suicidal ideation).
I have observed in my case that whatever has been extremely suppressed (mainly from trauma) comes out in mania (eg sexual stuff, intense emotion, flirty etc).
My self-published books so far are about what bipolar mania (with trauma) is like.
Pet Purpose: Your Unspoken Voice is my best writing effort so far. I figured out my triggers and wove them into a story, describing mania from the inside and outside as a novel (fiction and memoir woven together):
[ Ссылка ]
Bipolar Cringe is a raw account of a hypersexual mania episode (written while still in that state), before diagnosis, and identifying as autistic:
[ Ссылка ]
