I’m diagnosed bipolar 1, but I'm kind of uncertain about whether I truly experience mania. I keep hearing stuff like “mania will usually result in hospitalization”, and I’ve never been hospitalized or even come close, nor have I ever gone days on end without sleep or believed myself to be a celebrity or a god or anything like that. I’m high-functioning in general, and so far I’ve never lost a job or anything like that because of mania. 

So, am I really experiencing mania? Where’s the dividing line between hypomania and mania?

\--

If anyone’s willing to spend a little more time, let me describe two things I believe were manic episodes, and maybe you can tell me if they sound more manic or more hypomanic to you:

1. My first manic episode started out really positive. I was extremely excited about my life, which was going through a big transition, and excited to meet a lot of new people. I dressed wildly and shaved my head and went out drinking every day. This excitement quickly spiraled out of control until I had so much energy I physically couldn’t sit still, and my thoughts were racing so quickly I couldn’t follow them myself or carry a coherent conversation. I couldn’t control what I was saying to people and I kept saying things I really didn’t want to say, things that would’ve been better kept private, which ended up alienating me from most of the new people I’d been so excited to meet. I started isolating myself because I was getting frightened, realizing that something wasn’t right, that I wasn’t in control of my behavior. I spent whole days pacing in circles around my studio apartment. At that point, I became convinced that my neighbors could hear every single move I made and that they were furious about it and would call the cops if they heard me making any more sound, so I started tiptoeing around my apartment and wouldn’t speak above a whisper. I also became convinced that people were watching me through the windows, so I kept my blinds closed, and that someone was going to come barreling down the hall at any moment and break my door down, so I watched it like a hawk and piled stuff in front of it to slow down whoever came breaking in. I was sleeping about 3-4 hours a night, waking up frequently and feeling incredibly antsy the whole night. I also was having peripheral visual hallucinations of cockroaches and centipedes that weren’t there when I looked straight at them, and tactile hallucinations of them crawling on me. This went on for about a month before I crashed into  a terrible depression.

2. Last summer, I had a mixed episode that mostly manifested in paranoia and anxiety. I was hypomanic for months before it, and I didn’t notice when things changed, but all of a sudden I realized things weren’t okay anymore. I was curled up in a tense little ball in my home office from the moment I woke up until the moment I went to bed every night, grinding my teeth so badly my jaw hurt, somehow obsessively working the whole day even though I only actually had about 2 hours’ worth of work to do each day. I would immediately begin panicking if I stopped working. I felt super antsy and restless, but I bottled it up and expressed it by rocking back and forth and, like I said, grinding my teeth and tensing my muscles till I gave myself cramps. I couldn’t eat anything except protein bars and popcorn, because it felt like my body would just reject it and it would make me gag, and I’d go into a rage if my wife tried to get me to eat anything else. I flew into blinding rage over every little thing, screaming and hitting myself and being totally unable to calm myself down or stop lashing out. At the same time, I became convinced that my wife’s family despised me and that they didn’t want anything to do with me (they were all visiting at the time), to the point where I had debilitating panic attacks when she asked me to do anything involving them. I also became convinced that our house would burn down in the night if I left anything plugged in overnight, so I went around the house unplugging everything except the refrigerator (my wife put her foot down on that one) before bed every night, and I became convinced that our car was going to spontaneously combust while I was driving, so I couldn’t get in the car. I was sleeping around 4 hours a night during this time, waking up frequently and shooting out of bed in the morning like a bat out of hell. I was also experiencing a lot of derealization and depersonalization during this episode, a lot of out-of-body-experience moments. This went on for about two months before I crashed into a moderate depression.

Do these sound like manic episodes? I just feel really confused.