anghraine

An anon said:

I was also told by a psychologist that bipolar depression is usually worse than mdd/unipolar depression, it really is messed up how it’s overlooked and people seem to really underestimate how bad it is to have bipolar ii. Like it’s not that bad if you don’t have mania that ends up with you in the hospital

I replied:

Some quick research turned up a lot of debate about bipolar vs major depression, but regardless, I agree that there seems this tendency to understate/underestimate what bipolar II is like. Of course mania is more severe than hypomania (that’s what defines the distinction!), but depression is so dominant in both that only treating bipolar I as the real deal is puzzling and awful IMO.

And if “mere” hypomania is supposedly not enough to make bipolar II a serious problem for those of us with it, what about depression with no mania at all? It’s just a terribly harmful perspective all around.

Current Location: Washington
Current Music: Piano Man (Billy Joel)

beatrice_otter responded to this post:

In general, from what I know of the fields of psychology and psychiatry, that is ABSOLUTELY the case with pretty much every disorder. The thing that spurs research is not "how much does this disrupt your life/how hard is it to live with" but rather "how much does this annoy/freak out the people around you."

This is one of the reason we need more people with disabilities in the medical field, both in research and treatment.

heckofabecca said:

Fascinating, ty for sharing

not-that-manic-pixie-dream-girl said [on Feb 25th]:

True, i’ve been in two sides and for me depression is 100 times worst than mania/hypomania

When i’m depressed my life literally stops for months. I can’t study,i can’t work, i can’t have sex with my girlfriend, i don’t eat,i don’t exercise,i don’t clean the house , I DON’T DO ANYTHING vs mania/hypomania i can still carry my life,of course there’s bad consequences

[ETA 5/14/2024: I don't know if I responded to any of these people at the time, but I thought the responses were intriguing/pleasant enough to preserve.]

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Current Music: Fire and Ice (Pat Benatar)

I was reading an article on one of the medications I take for bipolar II, in relation to its use in managing both bipolar I and II. And it was really interesting in a lot of ways, but one of the things it talked about is how scholars have often focused on mania, but the research is pretty clear that bipolar depression is much more dominant with both bipolar I and bipolar II and frequently more disruptive.

And, honestly, that is definitely my experience? It’s not to say that hypomania hasn’t been super disruptive (it starts out great! so much energy! but then my thoughts just skitter around and I can’t focus on anything, and I start getting really aggressive). But one of the most alarming things about it is that, once I realize what’s going on, I know the “high” is going to crash into depression at some point, and that lasts much longer and is more ruinous. And that mix of the high and the looming dread of depression is … weird.

I mean, my experience is that people definitely take mania (even hypomania) more seriously, so it was interesting and kind of validating to read that, yup, bipolar depression is Really That Bad for most bipolar people.

(I think, also, that the prioritization of mania/hypomania and kind of dismissive attitude towards bipolar depression is bad for people with unipolar/major depression as well. IMO the root is “depression isn’t that big of a deal, but mania is freaky,” and if your operating assumption is that depression is nbd, that can easily extend to major depression. And as someone who was misdiagnosed w/ major depression for a long time, I did run into that often enough.)

Tagged: #my deeper-yet suspicion is that there's a prioritization of what is most disruptive for /other/ people in a lot of research #much more than the actual patients #this article also got into how the assumption has often been that bipolar people's lives are mostly split between mania/depression/normal #but it increasingly seems that the bulk of our lives are depressive (mainly) and manic (sometimes) #w/ comparatively brief non-cycling periods #which strongly affects quality of life /for bipolar people/ #so

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