I'm not diagnosed, but...

@asthesunsets Hello, sorry about your low season. The best way to surely find out is through diagnosis by a certified health practitioner, they'll normally rely on your symptoms in order to make a diagnosis. Maybe on your end you could try keep a record of how your moods are in the morning, afternoon, evening everyday, no matter how static they may seem to be everyday. You can also access resources here on 7 cups of tea training section as a member to find out about various symptoms and signs of various disorders and their management. Treatment is strictly under prescription after diagnosis . I sure hope that you get the financial resources sooner and seek clarification from a certified clinical therapist.

@asthesunsets healing can be scary; ups+downs. Seek help if it's bad enough: Mental hospitals come with free psychiatry. You can check yourself in voluntarily...just for a day or two. There's many community resources available too. 

Hi

I think we all fall on a spectrum. The highs and the lows intensity are different.

If the highs and lows are different from majority, one may call us as having bipolar.

From your symptoms, I think you are also bipolar. Me too.

But I try to manage with my parents, spouse and incoming kids.

So it's doable

That sounds like bipolar, and yes, you should! The rest of the symptoms can show up or not at various points in your life, but that cycle of a possible hypomania (at the least) followed by severe depression is telltale.

What led me to realize it was likely bipolar (mine has psychotic episodes/schizoaffective too) was how I can’t take SSRIs or SNRIs because antidepressants triggered hallucinations and mania, I actually caught on to it before my prescriber at the time did, she just thought it was weird how I kept reacting bad and kept prescribing me different ones until I refused to take them anymore 🫠 I’m also not consistently depressed, it comes in phases, I can go weeks or months without it then suddenly it’ll hit and last weeks at least. The depression is deep, you can’t even form a complete thought in your head, getting out of bed and doing normal activities is so hard because my body feels heavy and I can’t remember what I was just thinking or doing so I either do nothing for days or barely am active enough to eat and get dressed. Mania you often won’t even realize is there, you just feel normal and have so many racing thoughts and might even get irritable too, full on mania has had me ending up in places I don’t remember being and getting into fights and self harming, heightened sexual activity, sometimes impulse spending, temporarily behaving narcissistic but not in a manipulate people way, just feeling and thinking you’re suddenly better than most people and understand more than they do. Delusions I can only remember a couple breakdowns where I got suddenly religious, thought the Bible had hidden messages for me, tried to sacrifice myself, writing Bible verses all over, crazy stuff but in the moment you genuinely don’t realize that you’re thinking and behaving abnormally. Or the paranoia, thinking people are watching and after you is a common delusion too.