I don’t know about you, but it’s springtime that usually triggers my mania. The warm weather, the tulips popping up, green grass, and trees with budding leaves makes me feel high after a winter of hibernation and depression. That first hint of “T-Shirt Weather” is golden. There’s just something special about spring. I don’t get manic in the summertime, but spring, I tend to lean hypomanic. Spring is the flipside of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) for me.
And it was in springtime during which I had my first manic episode. Feeling sad and anxious in December 2007, I went to see a psychiatrist, who diagnosed me with depression and prescribed Prozac. Bit by bit, as time elapsed, my mood proceeded to get increasingly higher until it reached scorching-hot manic with psychotic and hallucinogenic features.
At that time, all of a sudden, I became a madman. I thought I was on a reality TV show. I thought there were cameras in my apartment watching my every move. I stayed up all night dancing with myself to M.I.A. and The Teenagers (Warning: NSFW). In April, I eventually got my bipolar diagnosis.
But that’s just part of the story. For a more detailed look at my first major manic episode, stay tuned for my book The Bipolar Addict, scheduled to arrive later this year.
“Seasonality” is the scientific term for moods alternating with the seasons. People with rapid-cycling bipolar — symptoms changing over a small period of weeks or months —are particularly vulnerable when the seasons change.
And researchers at Toronto University concluded that “individuals with bipolar disorder experience greater seasonality than those with [unipolar] depression or healthy controls.”
We are not without help. Our therapists and psychiatrists keep us in check. There is something called the Seasonal Pattern Assessment Questionnaire, which is a test mental health professionals use to measure our moods throughout the seasons. It examines our socializing, weight gain or loss, sleeping patterns, and more.
For further reading, check out this article on spring fever and mania in bpHope magazine.
