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Bipolar and related disorders

During a manic phase, you might experience an excessive, unusual feeling of happiness, with a high, expansive mood or abnormal irritability for several days in a row. Other symptoms may include physical and mental hyperactivity, a feeling of overwhelming energy and a reduced need for sleep. Your speech flow may accelerate, as well as your thought process and the ability to concentrate is disturbed.

There is also an alteration in judgment, which your peers might notice before you. Ideas of grandeur and extreme or unusual self-confidence may also be present, as well as so-called "risky" behaviors (impulsive and reckless shopping, hasty and risky financial investments, risky sexual behaviors, drug use) up to suicidal behaviors in some cases.

Hypomania is characterized by the same symptoms as mania but with less intensity.

Commonly known as "depression", it is a disorder that lasts for at least 2 weeks, during which you might feel constantly depressed. You might feel sad, empty, hopeless, and cry excessively. You might also experience some irritability and anger. You might lose pleasure in all or almost all activities: the little things that you used to enjoy or that made you smile no longer give you any pleasure. You might isolate yourself, withdraw and cut yourself off from everything that used to make you feel good.

Being depressed can lead to eating disorder (decrease or increase in appetite, associated with weight loss or gain). It can also disturbe your sleep (insomnia or hypersomnia). You might feel tired and lose energy, feel agitated or slowed down.

You might experience difficulties in thinking or concentrating. Negative thoughts about the world, yourself and others take up a lot of space in your mind, leading to feelings of devaluation, excessive or inappropriate guilt, low self-esteem, or recurrent thoughts of death and suicidal thoughts, which can go as far as attempted suicide and suicide.

Sometimes you might experience a combination of both moods, manic and depressive, at the same time and over the same period of time. This is called a mixed state. 

Cyclothymia is the rapid alternation for at least 2 years of depressive and then manic symptoms, without sufficient duration or criteria to be able to enter the definition of a depressive episode or a manic or hypomanic episode.