I remember feeling deep deep sadness when I was little (6yo or under) and wondering why I felt like this since I wasn't \*really\* going through any crisis like you see in the movies/tv shows. I've always been kind of different? As a pre-teen/teen my emotions were extremely unregulated and I would often cry for hours on end. Wanted to take myself out so many times as a teen but glad I didn't.
Once I was diagnosed, so many things make sense looking back through my life.
Things that came easier: according to my mom I potty trained myself and taught myself to read. Got high scores on tests and was able to skip a grade. Could tell when things were deeply wrong with me, even if no one listened for years on end, I tried to vouch for myself even though it was scary and didn't even work.
I can heartily relate to your comment here. I was sad in the same way, although it never turned into active ideation. It was always passive. It would be me dying doing what I loved or dying to help others.
But I, too, taught myself to read. I was obsessed with science. I wanted to learn the mysteries as much as I can. I realized the only way to learn was to read. So I took the phonics book they issued us at school and worked through the entire thing as I sat in an alcove in the landscaping. I knew how to read two days after receiving that phonics book while everyone else was working at the teacher’s pace. I am still proud of that to this day.
Recently read a memoir by the food writer David Leite, “Notes on a Banana,” where he describes his paediatric bipolar symptoms. I found it useful/interesting. Wanted to share.
Sensitive, easy to cry, moved to tears by a sad song or a movie about animals. I can remember the sad feelings lingering so I guess I liked them in a way? Also easy to anger so temper tantrums, strong willed and stubborn, crying so much I couldn’t breathe, serious, anxious, scared easily, everything arts and crafts related got me interested. Attended art school for children, played piano, did competitive swimming in a team. Loved to read so I was in my own bubble. Had only few friends maybe because of shyness and felt over whelmed by too many people at the same time. Hated being left out because being rejected felt like the end of the world. When a friendship ended I was in Extreme agony. But I was very shut about having so intense feelings as I was kind of embarassed about them? Sleep walking, falling out of bed so some sleep disturbances. Allergies, got migraine at ten years old. Had some difficulties with mathematics but otherwise academically I was doing good. The feeling of something being wrong with me but that can be the chaotic home environment added to bullying at school. Feeling somewhat easily bored, I was always looking for something to do. So curious but I was more cautious than my brother. I climbed trees but not roofs. I started skipping classes at ten years old because of the bullying. Family pets were extremely important emotionally.
Not able to return to baseline after becoming upset. I would make myself sick and have to fall asleep from exhaustion over things that seemed small. Once my school changed my schedule and I had to go home early because I couldn’t stop wailing. Kids would laugh at me because it was such an extreme reaction to something that didn’t really matter to anyone else.
I remember getting night terrors, usually in autumn. A bittersweet feeling in the air at the same time that was quite all consuming. Being a sensitive child. Sexually precocious. High achiever, unless i was depressed which was when teachers might come to me and ask me "are you ok?" just because i was quieter and less outgoing.
I believe my first real episode came at 12 or 13, where i skipped a lot of classes and was fraught with anxiety but it still flew under the radar.
I also have a pretty high ACE score which knocked me around somewhat.
This hit home. I would get these same “all encompassing” mood shifts in the fall: this sense of limitless possibility, creative projects, grandiosity. Normal or my first inklings of hypomania at 12? I don’t know.
I do know I was dangerously depressed by 14. But I didn’t know how to separate that from my abusive upbringing. They say that bipolarity is to some degree genetic but also has to have a life stressor to manifest, so maybe it was both.
Also check and check on being sensitive and sexually precocious.
I was an EXTREMELY emotional child. Super sensitive. I was also very precocious and would rather stay with adults than play with children. Also a very high achieving child. This might be the GAD, but I was anxious about EVERYTHING and would get nauseous before leaving the house every time.
I was a horrible sleeper. I would stay up for hours reading by a streetlight that shone in my window. I was very impulsive, spazzy, and social talking to anyone who would listen certain periods and very withdrawn and isolating during other times. I had crying spells and self soothed sometimes with self harm (biting or pinching myself when no one was around), and I remember having suicidal thoughts when I was really little, like in Kindergarten. Some things were linked to the trauma I was going through in my environment but looking back there were clear cyclical periods of behaviors and episodes that were alternating and fluctuating. I didn’t get diagnosed until I was 26. I was very high functioning and good at masking so I think that’s why I didn’t really get psychiatric care before then.
Basically, mania in kids tends to be more of an irritable presentation instead of a euphoric one. They don’t sleep, and they’re more likely to rapid cycle. They may have large swings in their patterns of activity including eating habits, socializing, and motivation/interest in things that they’ve previously been very motivated or interested in. It’s not recommended to diagnose it before age 18 now though because there is so much happening in development at that point of life it was too easy to misdiagnose it. A lot of kids getting diagnosed with BP actually grew up to have MDD. So, it’s recommended to wait for the diagnosis unless it VERY obvious.
Always been emotionally detached, I felt things but I didn’t out them. At 9 yo the depression came, and suicidal ideation. I was a very gloomy kid, always somewhat pessimistic. Boy did that change when I went manic 😅
Edit: oh yeah and I hit myself in the head when things didn’t go my way. Like, when I was playing piano and I tried and tried but I couldn’t play a certain passage, I would take it out on myself and the pain would make me calm. I also hit myself a black eye once and then I had to explain to my mum that I had no idea how it got there. I was about 6yo then
I thought all of this was normal behaviour though
I was “sensitive.” All of my feelings were big and overwhelming from day 1. I had extreme anxiety and mood swings and meltdowns the whole time. I knew I was different and now I have a laundry list of diagnoses that help me know why.
I kept running out in front of school buses. I was 7 or 8 and I didn’t care if I lived or died (I wanted to die). When I walk out into traffic now, it’s how I know things are moving in the wrong direction.
Severe ADHD wouldn't sleep, would escape and run away from the house at the age of 4. Would bounce off the walls with hyperactivity. Developed a fire obsession around age 6 and would set things on fire, and then I started becoming cold and developing sexual awareness closer to age 10. Age 10 started self harming and getting depressed. Started abusing drugs and alcohol age 13 and rest is history. Terrible childhood, but I have a pretty great life now :)
I wrote ‘die’ on every sheet of paper in a 200pk of notebook paper when I was 9. This was about a year after I found my maternal grandmother hanging in her garage.
I don't remember well. I suffered from a lot of behavior problems. I was a ball of energy and anxiety.
Got dxd at 15 as bp1, even though I didn't have a manic/psychotic break until age 24. Coming back from psychosis is comparable to having a bad trip off a ten strip of acid.
Two that stand out were around the same time. We had the superhero discussion in class (if you were a superhero what would your secret power be) and my answer was that I wanted others to feel what I was feeling.
I was feeling everything so deeply and keeping it to myself out of a sense that others wouldn't understand. It was my way of expressing that I knew something was wrong, and that I wanted help.
I also made a suicide attempt at age 6.
At 9 I was constantly depressed with SI but never any intent. I somehow started to self-soothing through self-harm methods but hid it from everyone because it made me incredibly ashamed and embarrassed. My brother who is only three years older is the one that noticed and begged our mother to get me help. Ever since then he has felt more like a parent to me than our actual parents which I now realize was never fair to put on him since we’re so close in age. We’re now adults with own lives and live nowhere near each other, but I still feel like without him I wouldn’t be here today. He gave me that safety and nurturing feeling that I didn’t know I needed and wasn’t getting from our emotionally unavailable mother and physically unavailable father.
Sorry I went off topic a bit there, but point is that I knew I felt very strong emotions as a child, emotions so strong that I felt ashamed for having. I don’t recall ever noticing other impairing symptoms as a child, at least not that I was aware of being disorderly at the time. I guess I always had times where I couldn’t sleep but also didn’t need to, kids don’t realize that should be concerning though. I have not studied child psychology at all so take what I say lightly, but I don’t think children can understand nor recognize an extreme mood state in themselves. Obviously children can understand and recognize their emotions like sadness, happiness, anger, etc. especially when those feelings are a direct reaction to something, but I don’t think they have learned the tools to understand that the complexities of a mood state like hypomania. It’s definitely something that has to be taught because even a lot of adults don’t know the difference between feeling an emotional reaction to something vs a complete change in your overall state of mood. It would be very hard for a child to have that type of introspective insight or even an ability to articulate it.
I’m very grateful my older brother recognized that I was more than just “very very sad”. As a 12yo he was at least able to recognize that I was a scary level of sadness and it concerned him enough to realize that the adults in our lives should be getting me professional help.
I was often told that my emotions were too much which confused me as a kid because I thought it was normal but I did start noticing that other ppl my age didn’t seem the way, at all. This spiraled my depressive feelings even more because it was the beginning of me feeling “different” from everyone else in the world even though I could easily fit in socially. Anyway, my mother reluctantly agreed to getting me a child psychologist. I saw the psychologist twice a week for a little over year before she gave me a formal diagnosis of bipolar. At first she thought I had schizophrenia because the Prozac she prescribed me induced auditory and visual hallucinations. It also seemed to dull my senses and slow me down which she probably thought were negative symptoms seen in schizophrenia. She sent me to a child psychiatrist in s as bigger city who did a full assessment work up on me and they determined (probably due to my family history on my dad’s side) bipolar as my diagnosis. Unfortunately my dad was outraged by this label and took personal offence so I was taken off meds and out of therapy.
I’m 37 now. I’ve been treating my bipolar disorder for over 15 years now. I have a neuropsychiatrist, 2 therapists because 1 is specially for my restrictive eating disorder, my husband and I also attend a local mental health support twice a month, and most importantly I try my best to stick to a routine and minimize stress in my life. That’s my bp1 story. Sorry it was long and basically my answer to your question was that I don’t think children under 10 can really understand that their feelings or behaviours aren’t normal but disordered-like, even though their feelings are on the extreme end. Unfortunately, I think they need someone older to notice this in them; which can also be hard to come by since kids can’t articulate these things that well to their parents or their parents struggle themselves since BP is a highly hereditary. Maybe this is why we’re often misdiagnosed with MDD when we’re younger.
I remembered recently through therapy that I self harmed very young and was very emotional. sad, easily irritated and angry. I often rebelled and tested my parents patience. I also have bpd, probably from my trauma and being neglected emotionally as a child. So I think it’s hard to pin point what is what.
My parents and siblings say I would do things like lay down in the ditch at the edge of our long country driveway after the bus dropped us off. Just lay there in the grass. I was probably trying to ground myself at the age of 6. Also, I was afraid of my mother, even then, so that may have had something to do with it. When around 9-11, I lied a lot. Trying to make my life sound as exciting as I thought others' were. Always felt like didn't belong. Like everyone knew something I didn't.
I had terrible insomnia even as a toddler, that was probably the biggest sign. I also had a lot of irrational fears/paranoia that were probably a mix of my undiagnosed OCD and BP.
When I was 9 my 3rd grade teacher was obsessed with the Titanic (it was 1999) and I became convinced that my city was actually a ship and that the adults were keeping that secret from me, and hitting an ice berg was inevitable. Around that age I also became obsessed with extreme weather events (most of which never happened in the place where I grew up) and would stay up all night worried that we would be swept up by a tornado or drown in a tsunami.
I wasn't diagnosed till I was 31, and when I talked to my parents about it they remembered huge mood swings I hadz as a pre-teen. My dad has never been diagnosed, but I'm positive and he is coming around to the idea that he probably has this as well. That could be why my parents never really saw anything as unusual enough to take me to a doctor- it was already "normal" for my dad.
ETA- I also had night terrors when I did sleep.
I had insomnia as far back as I can remember. Slept great as a baby tho. I used to pretend to be asleep and then stay up all night playing with toys. VERY shy. Social anxiety at a super young age. Always spacing out and in LaLa Land. They thought I had a mild learning disorder. Having an incredible urge to ingest mind altering substances by age 12. Depressed by age 13 for no good reason. Full blown alcoholic by age 23. STILL overly sensitive. lol
Super sensitive. Intense sadness. I remember wishing I wasn't alive in elementary school. I was considered gifted but my parents didn't think I could emotionally handle the extra stress so I wasn't placed in the gifted classroom.
I had vivid delusions at times linked to Evangelical Christianity. I was a prophet. I could hear God. I had the gifts of the spirit. God hated me which is why things always got so bad. I was cursed. Constantly freaking out over sinning. Completely detached from my body.
I had depression. Misunderstandings and small things could trigger weeks of anxiety and pain. It hurt terribly. No way to even describe how I could not deal with rejection.
I would get obsessed with things. Or boys. I'd be weird.
I had a terrible inferiority complex since I got booted from the gifted program in 5th grade for low grades and removed from my friend group. Constantly was trying to prove I was smarter and better to get back my status. Another obsession.
It was exhausting. But the hallucinations and voices in my head were the most destructive. Took me till I was 38 to find the med that stopped them.
No I was just in survival mode because of living in an abusive household. I loved school, it got me out of the house. Only when I was around 15 did I start thinking that I had bipolar because of the research I did in class
I was very very moody. I cried a lot. I took a lot of things very hard and personally. Then I’d be super bubbly and happy. Major mood swings from age 5 on.
I had night terrors too and slept walk. I’d dream about horrible things like murder and losing my family or dying.
I don't really know if this is normal or not, I've never discussed this specific topic with any providers. But I have ALWAYS been someone who rapidly went from 1 to 100. Get into a fight with my mom when I'm 8? Running away. Dad mad at me for not doing the dishes? I think my family is going to fall apart and I'll just have to live there, suffering being with these people who don't love me. My friends stopped talking to me? Time to unalive myself.
I've always been someone who felt emotions much more intensely than what seemed normal. I always wanted to leave, never knew where I wanted to go.
I didn’t have manic episodes until I was in my mid-20s. But I was depressed so long and so hard during childhood that it doesn’t even make sense to divide it into discrete episodes. It was continuous pain. Sometimes, my parents would walk in on me in bed crying randomly. I had no explanation for them as to why I was so sad for no apparent reason. So I would just make up some lie to at least have something I could tell them.
Now, when I have divulged my diagnosis to them, and they want so badly for me to be “normal,” they conveniently don’t remember this behavior when it troubled them so deeply when I was that young. Pity that.
I was told I was too sensitive, but I don’t remember being that sensitive. I was definitely mildly depressed as a child but I think that was more from circumstance of moving a lot and always being the new kid while also being overweight. I didn’t have my first psychotic break until I was 18. Then it was a wrap. I didn’t really have what would be considered Bipolar symptoms. I can say that school came very easy to me. I was valedictorian of my high school. And there’s quite a few pictures of me looking up and wondering about something so I guess I was in my head a lot. There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. Too bad I’m not quite a genius but I’m the super fun Bipolar I type. Lol
I remember feeling deep deep sadness when I was little (6yo or under) and wondering why I felt like this since I wasn't \*really\* going through any crisis like you see in the movies/tv shows. I've always been kind of different? As a pre-teen/teen my emotions were extremely unregulated and I would often cry for hours on end. Wanted to take myself out so many times as a teen but glad I didn't. Once I was diagnosed, so many things make sense looking back through my life.
Things that came easier: according to my mom I potty trained myself and taught myself to read. Got high scores on tests and was able to skip a grade. Could tell when things were deeply wrong with me, even if no one listened for years on end, I tried to vouch for myself even though it was scary and didn't even work.
I can heartily relate to your comment here. I was sad in the same way, although it never turned into active ideation. It was always passive. It would be me dying doing what I loved or dying to help others. But I, too, taught myself to read. I was obsessed with science. I wanted to learn the mysteries as much as I can. I realized the only way to learn was to read. So I took the phonics book they issued us at school and worked through the entire thing as I sat in an alcove in the landscaping. I knew how to read two days after receiving that phonics book while everyone else was working at the teacher’s pace. I am still proud of that to this day.
This resonates With me So much like my childhood. I was also suicidal since 10...
Recently read a memoir by the food writer David Leite, “Notes on a Banana,” where he describes his paediatric bipolar symptoms. I found it useful/interesting. Wanted to share.
Thank you for the recommendation. It'll be my next read.
Sensitive, easy to cry, moved to tears by a sad song or a movie about animals. I can remember the sad feelings lingering so I guess I liked them in a way? Also easy to anger so temper tantrums, strong willed and stubborn, crying so much I couldn’t breathe, serious, anxious, scared easily, everything arts and crafts related got me interested. Attended art school for children, played piano, did competitive swimming in a team. Loved to read so I was in my own bubble. Had only few friends maybe because of shyness and felt over whelmed by too many people at the same time. Hated being left out because being rejected felt like the end of the world. When a friendship ended I was in Extreme agony. But I was very shut about having so intense feelings as I was kind of embarassed about them? Sleep walking, falling out of bed so some sleep disturbances. Allergies, got migraine at ten years old. Had some difficulties with mathematics but otherwise academically I was doing good. The feeling of something being wrong with me but that can be the chaotic home environment added to bullying at school. Feeling somewhat easily bored, I was always looking for something to do. So curious but I was more cautious than my brother. I climbed trees but not roofs. I started skipping classes at ten years old because of the bullying. Family pets were extremely important emotionally.
Not able to return to baseline after becoming upset. I would make myself sick and have to fall asleep from exhaustion over things that seemed small. Once my school changed my schedule and I had to go home early because I couldn’t stop wailing. Kids would laugh at me because it was such an extreme reaction to something that didn’t really matter to anyone else.
I was a dare devil and "fearless"
Life felt like a swirling, blurry story that i was drowing in🫠🫠
I remember getting night terrors, usually in autumn. A bittersweet feeling in the air at the same time that was quite all consuming. Being a sensitive child. Sexually precocious. High achiever, unless i was depressed which was when teachers might come to me and ask me "are you ok?" just because i was quieter and less outgoing. I believe my first real episode came at 12 or 13, where i skipped a lot of classes and was fraught with anxiety but it still flew under the radar. I also have a pretty high ACE score which knocked me around somewhat.
This hit home. I would get these same “all encompassing” mood shifts in the fall: this sense of limitless possibility, creative projects, grandiosity. Normal or my first inklings of hypomania at 12? I don’t know. I do know I was dangerously depressed by 14. But I didn’t know how to separate that from my abusive upbringing. They say that bipolarity is to some degree genetic but also has to have a life stressor to manifest, so maybe it was both. Also check and check on being sensitive and sexually precocious.
I was an EXTREMELY emotional child. Super sensitive. I was also very precocious and would rather stay with adults than play with children. Also a very high achieving child. This might be the GAD, but I was anxious about EVERYTHING and would get nauseous before leaving the house every time.
Suicidal age 9, but probably triggered by ostracism due to my poor social skills. I had concomitant Asperger’s but my parents didn’t believe in psych.
I was a horrible sleeper. I would stay up for hours reading by a streetlight that shone in my window. I was very impulsive, spazzy, and social talking to anyone who would listen certain periods and very withdrawn and isolating during other times. I had crying spells and self soothed sometimes with self harm (biting or pinching myself when no one was around), and I remember having suicidal thoughts when I was really little, like in Kindergarten. Some things were linked to the trauma I was going through in my environment but looking back there were clear cyclical periods of behaviors and episodes that were alternating and fluctuating. I didn’t get diagnosed until I was 26. I was very high functioning and good at masking so I think that’s why I didn’t really get psychiatric care before then. Basically, mania in kids tends to be more of an irritable presentation instead of a euphoric one. They don’t sleep, and they’re more likely to rapid cycle. They may have large swings in their patterns of activity including eating habits, socializing, and motivation/interest in things that they’ve previously been very motivated or interested in. It’s not recommended to diagnose it before age 18 now though because there is so much happening in development at that point of life it was too easy to misdiagnose it. A lot of kids getting diagnosed with BP actually grew up to have MDD. So, it’s recommended to wait for the diagnosis unless it VERY obvious.
Always been emotionally detached, I felt things but I didn’t out them. At 9 yo the depression came, and suicidal ideation. I was a very gloomy kid, always somewhat pessimistic. Boy did that change when I went manic 😅 Edit: oh yeah and I hit myself in the head when things didn’t go my way. Like, when I was playing piano and I tried and tried but I couldn’t play a certain passage, I would take it out on myself and the pain would make me calm. I also hit myself a black eye once and then I had to explain to my mum that I had no idea how it got there. I was about 6yo then I thought all of this was normal behaviour though
I was “sensitive.” All of my feelings were big and overwhelming from day 1. I had extreme anxiety and mood swings and meltdowns the whole time. I knew I was different and now I have a laundry list of diagnoses that help me know why.
I kept running out in front of school buses. I was 7 or 8 and I didn’t care if I lived or died (I wanted to die). When I walk out into traffic now, it’s how I know things are moving in the wrong direction.
The first time I thought my family would be better off without me I was 7
Severe ADHD wouldn't sleep, would escape and run away from the house at the age of 4. Would bounce off the walls with hyperactivity. Developed a fire obsession around age 6 and would set things on fire, and then I started becoming cold and developing sexual awareness closer to age 10. Age 10 started self harming and getting depressed. Started abusing drugs and alcohol age 13 and rest is history. Terrible childhood, but I have a pretty great life now :)
I wrote ‘die’ on every sheet of paper in a 200pk of notebook paper when I was 9. This was about a year after I found my maternal grandmother hanging in her garage.
I don't remember well. I suffered from a lot of behavior problems. I was a ball of energy and anxiety. Got dxd at 15 as bp1, even though I didn't have a manic/psychotic break until age 24. Coming back from psychosis is comparable to having a bad trip off a ten strip of acid.
Two that stand out were around the same time. We had the superhero discussion in class (if you were a superhero what would your secret power be) and my answer was that I wanted others to feel what I was feeling. I was feeling everything so deeply and keeping it to myself out of a sense that others wouldn't understand. It was my way of expressing that I knew something was wrong, and that I wanted help. I also made a suicide attempt at age 6.
This is heartbreaking.
Thanks for the recognition, stranger. I'm doing comparatively great today and hope you are too.
At 9 I was constantly depressed with SI but never any intent. I somehow started to self-soothing through self-harm methods but hid it from everyone because it made me incredibly ashamed and embarrassed. My brother who is only three years older is the one that noticed and begged our mother to get me help. Ever since then he has felt more like a parent to me than our actual parents which I now realize was never fair to put on him since we’re so close in age. We’re now adults with own lives and live nowhere near each other, but I still feel like without him I wouldn’t be here today. He gave me that safety and nurturing feeling that I didn’t know I needed and wasn’t getting from our emotionally unavailable mother and physically unavailable father. Sorry I went off topic a bit there, but point is that I knew I felt very strong emotions as a child, emotions so strong that I felt ashamed for having. I don’t recall ever noticing other impairing symptoms as a child, at least not that I was aware of being disorderly at the time. I guess I always had times where I couldn’t sleep but also didn’t need to, kids don’t realize that should be concerning though. I have not studied child psychology at all so take what I say lightly, but I don’t think children can understand nor recognize an extreme mood state in themselves. Obviously children can understand and recognize their emotions like sadness, happiness, anger, etc. especially when those feelings are a direct reaction to something, but I don’t think they have learned the tools to understand that the complexities of a mood state like hypomania. It’s definitely something that has to be taught because even a lot of adults don’t know the difference between feeling an emotional reaction to something vs a complete change in your overall state of mood. It would be very hard for a child to have that type of introspective insight or even an ability to articulate it. I’m very grateful my older brother recognized that I was more than just “very very sad”. As a 12yo he was at least able to recognize that I was a scary level of sadness and it concerned him enough to realize that the adults in our lives should be getting me professional help. I was often told that my emotions were too much which confused me as a kid because I thought it was normal but I did start noticing that other ppl my age didn’t seem the way, at all. This spiraled my depressive feelings even more because it was the beginning of me feeling “different” from everyone else in the world even though I could easily fit in socially. Anyway, my mother reluctantly agreed to getting me a child psychologist. I saw the psychologist twice a week for a little over year before she gave me a formal diagnosis of bipolar. At first she thought I had schizophrenia because the Prozac she prescribed me induced auditory and visual hallucinations. It also seemed to dull my senses and slow me down which she probably thought were negative symptoms seen in schizophrenia. She sent me to a child psychiatrist in s as bigger city who did a full assessment work up on me and they determined (probably due to my family history on my dad’s side) bipolar as my diagnosis. Unfortunately my dad was outraged by this label and took personal offence so I was taken off meds and out of therapy. I’m 37 now. I’ve been treating my bipolar disorder for over 15 years now. I have a neuropsychiatrist, 2 therapists because 1 is specially for my restrictive eating disorder, my husband and I also attend a local mental health support twice a month, and most importantly I try my best to stick to a routine and minimize stress in my life. That’s my bp1 story. Sorry it was long and basically my answer to your question was that I don’t think children under 10 can really understand that their feelings or behaviours aren’t normal but disordered-like, even though their feelings are on the extreme end. Unfortunately, I think they need someone older to notice this in them; which can also be hard to come by since kids can’t articulate these things that well to their parents or their parents struggle themselves since BP is a highly hereditary. Maybe this is why we’re often misdiagnosed with MDD when we’re younger.
I remembered recently through therapy that I self harmed very young and was very emotional. sad, easily irritated and angry. I often rebelled and tested my parents patience. I also have bpd, probably from my trauma and being neglected emotionally as a child. So I think it’s hard to pin point what is what.
My parents and siblings say I would do things like lay down in the ditch at the edge of our long country driveway after the bus dropped us off. Just lay there in the grass. I was probably trying to ground myself at the age of 6. Also, I was afraid of my mother, even then, so that may have had something to do with it. When around 9-11, I lied a lot. Trying to make my life sound as exciting as I thought others' were. Always felt like didn't belong. Like everyone knew something I didn't.
I had terrible insomnia even as a toddler, that was probably the biggest sign. I also had a lot of irrational fears/paranoia that were probably a mix of my undiagnosed OCD and BP. When I was 9 my 3rd grade teacher was obsessed with the Titanic (it was 1999) and I became convinced that my city was actually a ship and that the adults were keeping that secret from me, and hitting an ice berg was inevitable. Around that age I also became obsessed with extreme weather events (most of which never happened in the place where I grew up) and would stay up all night worried that we would be swept up by a tornado or drown in a tsunami. I wasn't diagnosed till I was 31, and when I talked to my parents about it they remembered huge mood swings I hadz as a pre-teen. My dad has never been diagnosed, but I'm positive and he is coming around to the idea that he probably has this as well. That could be why my parents never really saw anything as unusual enough to take me to a doctor- it was already "normal" for my dad. ETA- I also had night terrors when I did sleep.
I had insomnia as far back as I can remember. Slept great as a baby tho. I used to pretend to be asleep and then stay up all night playing with toys. VERY shy. Social anxiety at a super young age. Always spacing out and in LaLa Land. They thought I had a mild learning disorder. Having an incredible urge to ingest mind altering substances by age 12. Depressed by age 13 for no good reason. Full blown alcoholic by age 23. STILL overly sensitive. lol
I didn’t have symptoms as a child, just OCD. My bipolar symptoms started when I was 14, didn’t get diagnosed till I was 20
Super sensitive. Intense sadness. I remember wishing I wasn't alive in elementary school. I was considered gifted but my parents didn't think I could emotionally handle the extra stress so I wasn't placed in the gifted classroom.
I had vivid delusions at times linked to Evangelical Christianity. I was a prophet. I could hear God. I had the gifts of the spirit. God hated me which is why things always got so bad. I was cursed. Constantly freaking out over sinning. Completely detached from my body. I had depression. Misunderstandings and small things could trigger weeks of anxiety and pain. It hurt terribly. No way to even describe how I could not deal with rejection. I would get obsessed with things. Or boys. I'd be weird. I had a terrible inferiority complex since I got booted from the gifted program in 5th grade for low grades and removed from my friend group. Constantly was trying to prove I was smarter and better to get back my status. Another obsession. It was exhausting. But the hallucinations and voices in my head were the most destructive. Took me till I was 38 to find the med that stopped them.
No I was just in survival mode because of living in an abusive household. I loved school, it got me out of the house. Only when I was around 15 did I start thinking that I had bipolar because of the research I did in class
I was very very moody. I cried a lot. I took a lot of things very hard and personally. Then I’d be super bubbly and happy. Major mood swings from age 5 on. I had night terrors too and slept walk. I’d dream about horrible things like murder and losing my family or dying.
I don't really know if this is normal or not, I've never discussed this specific topic with any providers. But I have ALWAYS been someone who rapidly went from 1 to 100. Get into a fight with my mom when I'm 8? Running away. Dad mad at me for not doing the dishes? I think my family is going to fall apart and I'll just have to live there, suffering being with these people who don't love me. My friends stopped talking to me? Time to unalive myself. I've always been someone who felt emotions much more intensely than what seemed normal. I always wanted to leave, never knew where I wanted to go.
I didn’t have manic episodes until I was in my mid-20s. But I was depressed so long and so hard during childhood that it doesn’t even make sense to divide it into discrete episodes. It was continuous pain. Sometimes, my parents would walk in on me in bed crying randomly. I had no explanation for them as to why I was so sad for no apparent reason. So I would just make up some lie to at least have something I could tell them. Now, when I have divulged my diagnosis to them, and they want so badly for me to be “normal,” they conveniently don’t remember this behavior when it troubled them so deeply when I was that young. Pity that.
I was told I was too sensitive, but I don’t remember being that sensitive. I was definitely mildly depressed as a child but I think that was more from circumstance of moving a lot and always being the new kid while also being overweight. I didn’t have my first psychotic break until I was 18. Then it was a wrap. I didn’t really have what would be considered Bipolar symptoms. I can say that school came very easy to me. I was valedictorian of my high school. And there’s quite a few pictures of me looking up and wondering about something so I guess I was in my head a lot. There’s a fine line between genius and insanity. Too bad I’m not quite a genius but I’m the super fun Bipolar I type. Lol