help please, i think i am bipolar :(?

Question

my mom, and both of her sisters are bipolar. i think ive been in denial about it, but im starting to think that i am as well. this terrifies me, because my mom is a whack job and i want to be nothing like her. mood swings, yes deffinitley have those, but those of you who are bipolar, or have loved ones that are, what are personality traits of you/them? how do you/they cope?

loved ones have mentioned that i do alot of the things mentioned... i just always refused to believe them

Answer 1

Gosh.. what a question and where to start.

You know, I don't think I really want to start with what the personality traits are - this is really a misnomer - we don't have personality traits - we have symptoms that we exhibit that can lead to a diagosis.

Just because your Mom & your aunts have bipolar does not mean:
a) You have bipolar
b) If you have bipolar, you will be like them.

Let's say you do have bipolar - it is a real useful tool to look at the things that other people do that we don't like. If the things they do are a result of their bipolar disorder, then we can choose to not do those things through a variety of positive actions. What I mean by this is I have seen a number of people who have bipolar who have done some really outrageous things including spending the family fortune, breaking up their marriage, etc (this is the really radical stuff - I've been diagnosed for 25 years and work in the mental health field.) Now, these things may or may not have been directly their fault but were actually a result of the disorder and whether or not they were being effectively treated. What this has caused me to do is "TAKE MY MEDICATIONS." I don't want to go there - I've seen the harm and hurt that can happen.

Other things I have seen in myself when I've been off meds that makes me want to continue in the taking my meds routine is the crankiness (aka total B##@%) that I can become, how much I can hurt others - not a place I want to be - so I take the meds. Yes, I admit it, I'm one of those people who support taking meds. This route is not for everyone but it works for me!

I choose not to go down the pathway of becoming those things I see in others that I don't want to be.

I hope this helps.

I have provided a link on bipolar for you. It is about the diagnostic criteria for Bipolar - not the personality traits.

Answer 2

having mood swings does not necessarily mean you are bipolar. i am bipolar. i take medication so its mostly under controll. Without my medication, one minute i can be at an all tI'me high feeling great without a care in the world, the next minute, I'm at an all time low. With my bipolar, i also have depression and anxiety. Not all people with bipolar have that, but some do.

im not saying that you couldn't be bipolar because my mom is bipolar and so is my dad, so you could've potentially inherited it from your mom. But being bipolar is nothing to be ashamed of. All of my friends, don't know i have bipolar until i tell them what I'm taking medicine for. You'd never know because medicine helps me almost 100%. I still have days where I'm up and down. But so doesn't everyone else. I also go to see a therapist which also helps with alot of the anger and mood swings.

I suggest you see a Psychiatrist if you think you could be bipolar.

Answer 3

I am bi-polar. I have varying wide mood swings, from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows. You feel impatient and will cry over the weirdest thing under the sun. If you're in a hurry to get home and get stuck behind a bunch of slow drivers, you freak out, if you're just running in the store to grab one thing and the check out clerk seems to be taking forever, you all of sudden feel like crying, like everything always goes wrong. You can often have thoughts of suicide in the lowest as well as homocidal thoughts. There is medication you can take that will alleviate these mood swings and put your life on track. I would seek professional advise immediately and have them make a diagnosis before you work yourself up into a lather. You could just be having empathy towards what your mom has and you are reflecting that onto yourself. It takes a lot to find the right mixture of drugs that works best for you, but eventually you can find them. It is a condition that you CAN live with. I have bi-polar as well as OCD. Talk about a whack job. But as long as I take my meds, I'm great to be around and I don't have any mood swings anymore and the thoughts of strangling my daughter have ceased. Might be a good idea to recommend that your mom get herself some meds too!

Answer 4

I am bipolar, however I take medication, therefore my illness is controlled. mood swings does not necessarily mean u r bipolar. bipolar disorder is a chemical imbalance in your brain. Extreme highs and extreme lows. Do you ever have thoughts of suicide? If so, then you are probably at an extreme low-depression. Do you ever get a natrual high feeling where u r invincible-meaning you could walk across a busy intersection without getting hit-an extremely high high. See a psychiatrist.

Answer 5

My son is 5 years old and diagonised with bipolar and adhd. He had MAJOR mood swings daily, had no friends, no self esteem. I didn't like to be around him, never knew what was going to happen. If you need support, write me. Now he is on a medicine for the bipolar and one for adhd and is a "normal" child. You need to go get diagnosised if your interested in getting this under control. It is very hard on the people around you.

Answer 6

I too have have Bi-Polar "Mixed Episodes" which is the most rare and dangerous. People who have this type of episode have the highest suicide rate. Because you have racing thoughts that you can't stop and those thoughts racing around are not very positive. I say see a psychiatrist and if you aren't and if you have reservation what would hurt getting a 2nd opinion

Answer 7

You really need to see someone about this if you believe it is affecting you. But be careful not to try to convince yourself that you are ill when you really aren't just because your family has a history of mental illness. If you are really bipolar...chances are YOU won't notice it...but the people around you will.

Answer 8

Usually you can't recognize your own symptoms of a mental disorder, so you can't really self-diagnose it. See a psychiatrist and talk about your worries -- if you address it you will know one way or the other and will have a solution.

Answer 9

definetly talk to a doctor. they will be able to diagnose and treat you properly

Answer 10

Meditation techniques can greatly help to cure Bipolar, depression, anxiety, & other unwanted mental/emotional states, and generates within a person a very positive optimistic viewpoint of oneself, and of life. Buddhist Philosophy and Buddhist psychology offers more than a method of investigation. Its core techniques of meditation, mindfulness and awareness may have much to offer ordinary Westerners, whose material comforts have not wiped out rampant emotional distress. To most people Buddhism is an ancient Asian religion, although a very special one. It has no god, it has no central creed or dogma and its primary goal is the expansion of consciousness, or awareness. But to the 14th Dalai Lama, it's a highly refined tradition, perfected over the course of 2,500 years, of analyzing and investigating the inner world of the mind in order to transform mental states and promote happiness. "Whether you are a believer or not in the faith," the 14th Dalai Lama recently told a conference of Buddhists and scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you can use its time-honored techniques to voluntarily control your emotional state. Yes, the 14th Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of over 580 million buddhists worldwide. Yes, he is also the head of the Tibetan government in exile. But in the spirit of Buddhism the Dalai Lama has an inquiring mind and wishes to expand human knowledge to improve lives. At its core, Buddhism is a system of inquiry into the nature of what is. He believes that psychology and neuroscience have gone as far as they can go in understanding the mind and brain by measuring external reality. Now that inner reality--the nature of consciousness--is the pressing subject du jour, the sciences need to borrow from the knowledge base that Buddhism has long cultivated. A comprehensive science of the mind requires a science of consciousness. Buddhism offers what MIT geneticist Eric Lander, Ph.D., called a "highly refined technology" of introspective practices that provide systematic access to subjective experience. Yet Buddhist psychology offers more than a method of investigation. Its core techniques of meditation and awareness may have much to offer ordinary Westerners, whose material comforts have not wiped out rampant emotional distress. Over the past 25 years, starting with his own personal interest, the 14th Dalai Lama has set up discussions with Western scientists in an effort to further knowledge about the emotions. The recent meeting, held at MIT, was actually the eleventh in a series of annual conversations sponsored by the Colorado-based Mind & Life Institute. But it was the first one that was open to other participants. The Buddhist view of how the mind works is somewhat different from the traditional Western view. Western psychology holds to the belief that things like attention and emotion are fixed and immutable. Buddhism sees the components of the mind more as skills that can be trained. This view has increasing support from modern neuroscience, which is daily providing new evidence of the brain's capacity for change and growth! “Buddhism uses intelligence to control the emotions!! Through meditative practices, such as mindfulness of breathing, loving-kindness meditation, and insight meditation, awareness can be trained and focused on the contents of the mind to observe ongoing experience. Such techniques are of a fast growing interest to Western psychiatrists, psychologists, and cognitive behavioral therapists, who increasingly see depression as a disorder of emotional mismanagement. In this view, attention is hijacked by negative events and then sets off a kind of chain reaction of negative feeling, thinking and behavior that has its own rapidity and inevitability. Techniques of awareness permit the cultivation of self-control. They allow people to break the negative emotional chain reaction and head off the hopelessness and despair it leads to. By focusing attention, it is possible to monitor your environment, recognize a negative stimulus and act on it the instant it registers on awareness. While attention as traditional psychologists know it can be an exhausting mental activity, as Buddhists practice it it actually becomes a relaxing and effortless enterprise. One way of meditation is to use breathing techniques in which you focus on the breathing and let any negative stimulus just go by--instead of bringing it into your working memory, where you are likely to sit and ruminate about it and thus amplify its negativity. It's a way of unlearning the self-defeating ways you somehow acquired of responding catastrophically to negative experiences. Evidence increasingly suggests that meditation techniques are highly effective at helping people recover from of depression and especially very useful in preventing recurrences. *"Medication may be needed during the depths of an acute episode to jump-start brain systems*", BUT at best "antidepressants are a halfway house," says Dr. Alan Wallace PhD. When you have identified your major problem through meditation, whatever the problem is that is bothering you terribly, you should then sit there, relax, and call up this emotion in your meditation. Whether it is anger, jealousy, pride, envy, greed, loneliness, depression, anxiety, Bipolar, summon it here. Look at the essence of this emotion that makes you suffer so much. The mind is the root of all our experiences, for others and for us. If we perceive the world in an unclear way, confusion and suffering will surely arise! It is like someone with defective vision seeing the world as being upside down, or a fearful person finding everything frightening. We may be largely unaware of our ignorance and wrong views, yet present the mind it can be compared to a wild tiger, rampaging through our daily lives. Motivated by desire, hatred and bewilderment this untamed mind blindly pursues what it wants and lashes out at all that stands in its way, with little or no understanding of the way things really are. Mindfulness meditation helps us see things, people, situations, clearly – as they really are. The wildness we have to deal with is not simply that of anger and rage; it is much more fundamental than that. The tendency to be driven by ignorance, anger, hatred, and greed enslaves us, allowing confusion and negative emotions to predominate. Thus the mind becomes wild and uncontrollable and our freedom is effectively destroyed. Normally we are so blind that we are unaware of how wild our minds really are. When things go wrong we tend to blame other people and circumstances, rather than look inside ourselves for the causes of the suffering. But if we are ever to find true peace or happiness it is that wildness within which must be faced and dealt with. Only then can we learn to use our energy in a more positive and balanced way, so that we stop causing harm to ourselves and to others. The meditative techniques of Mindfulness of Breathing, Insight Meditation and Loving-kindness Meditation greatly aids us in curing depression, anxieties, anger, rage, hatred, greed, and creates Optimism within.
Excellent Beginner’s Books to read and practice are: (1) “The Beginner’s Guide To Insight Meditation” {This is a most Excellent book to get started with, providing a very Positive, Optimistic View) By: Arinna Weisman & Jean Smith. (2) “Open Heart, Clear Mind” By: Thubten Chodron (Her teacher was the 14th Dalai Lama). (3) “Working With Anger” {& other difficult emotions). By: Thubten Chodron. (4) “The Heart of Forgiveness” {A practical path to healing ourselves) By: Madeline Ko-I Bastis. And also (5) “Transforming The Mind” By: The 14th Dalai Lama.

Source: Psychiatrist, with a PhD.