I'm sure we've all felt some sense of depression, anxiety, or a strange and driving manic feeling. And that's normal. Personally, and as the case is with just under 1% of the general population, I have bipolar disorder. Moreover, I have a thing called Bipolar 1+; meaning type one (full manic episodes and mixed episodes), with psychotic features. And, that sounds scary. Well it is.
You have no need to be afraid of people like me. I'm a danger to myself, and I'm the one who needs to be afraid. In psychotic mania, it isn't so much that your thoughts are lunatic weird and racing. It's that you have zero ability to perceive that during the episode. If it goes on too long, and you cannot sleep or eat, it has the same effects as methamphetamine abuse. You have a psychotic break. That's a terrifying experience ... you forget what it even means to be human. It's eternal because time means nothing, and the only sense you have left is a knowing that nobody will hear you if you scream. And you don't even remember how.
Now, let's look at the other end. The part I'm in now ... after about a decade I've learned how to recognize it. That, and I'm on enough antipsychotics to drop an elephant. Right now, all I can see is that I have no reason to live. No matter what happens, my perception will adjust to force things to appear that way. There's absolutely no "snapping out of it", and absolutely no convincing a person that what they are seeing, hearing, and feeling are all false. They aren't. The feelings are real and so are the perceptions. They're things we normally filter out. The fact is yes, they are all talking about you badly behind your back. No, none of your friends can keep a secret. No, people who aren't gossiping about you aren't even thinking about you at all. And, in psychotic depression that looks ... logically and accurately cold as fuck and lonely. The thing is, everyone else is too wrapped up in their own very important and real problems to be able to care about your relentless suicidal tirades.
And then the mixed episode. You combine both and get the most dangerous situation of all. The unbearable clarity of depression; the unquestionable drive of mania; the absolute conviction of psychosis... what you get there is very likely and very often suicide. A suicide that feels, at the time ... like everyone else is demanding it of you. It all feels external ...
it's fucking scary.
