Anyone out there have cyclothymic disorder?!

Anyone out there have cyclothymic disorder?

if so would really like to hear your experiences, would be appreciated.

I was officially cyclothymic from age 27 to age 34. Before I was cyclothymic, I had depressions, starting as a teenager. I don't remember if they ever lasted two weeks straight. In terms of being unhappy I'm sure they lasted months at a time, but the more unnatural part of it, like having profound trouble getting out of bed, would last a few days and clear up. I noticed in college that I could get up for classes on time Monday through Friday, but on some Saturdays or Sundays there was this profound lack of energy that kept me in bed all morning, much more than laziness, more like being dead. That was so unnatural that it sent me to student health where I coaxed the doctor into doing a thyroid test, which was normal.

I didn't associate that with feeling unhappy, for which I saw my first psychologist when I was 20. My therapy was mostly about how I tended to be happy when I had a girlfriend and unhappy when I didn't. I got better at that.

The diagnosis of cyclothymia came when I first noticed something on the manic side of normal, which was I started going days at a time needing only 3 hours of sleep a night, feeling fully refreshed just from that. I also knew there were other times when I could sleep 9 hours at night, and it wasn't enough. It was subtle whether I had other periods where my productivity was increased. The decreased need for sleep was quantifiable. I had had times of increased productivity that were harder to measure going back to high school, when one teacher expressed amazement at how much I had done for one project.

I started on lithium once I became cyclothymic. It seemed to diminish my moods. Not everyone was convinced of that. I saw my first psychiatrist because of further unhappiness. He didn't think I was bipolar at all. He had a theory about "people pleasers" doing well on an MAOI, so he started me on Nardil. It was great. One pill and I felt the best I had ever, seriously, one pill.

I kept taking the Nardil. After some months, the psychiatrist said I didn't need to keep taking lithium. A few months after that I had a full-blown mania, enough to put me in the hospital after a few hours of it. That would have gotten me called bipolar 3 if anyone was calling antidepressant-induced mania that then. Later that year I had another mania on lithium without an antidepressant, so I've been officially bipolar 1 since then. Eventually I did OK on lithium and sometimes other meds.

The existence of bipolar 1, bipolar 2, and cyclothymic as concepts is necessitated by the definition of bipolar 1. There are people who don't reach the severity of mania to be called bipolar 1, so they are bipolar 2. There are people who don't have the duration of symptoms to be called bipolar, so they are cyclothymic. Researchers have tried to find more distinctions among these labels than just those. Some say Lamictal is a better drug than lithium for bipolar 2. Time will tell how any of this holds up. It certainly could be that these are all artificial distinctions between those with mild disease and those with more severe disease.

It's also likely that bipolar disorder is a broad phenotype with many different genotypes within it. When people understand all the genes that go into this later this century, they may be able to separate phenotypes better between someone like me who has very typical bipolar disorder and does well on lithium to those who are more atypical to those who are schizoaffective.

Once a genetic basis is known, classifications focus on the genes rather than arbitrary levels of symptoms, as has already happened for some neurological diseases. Then it probably will be clear that the range of expression of some combination of genes will range from people whose moodiness is never bad enough to send them to a doctor to cyclothymia to bipolar 2 to bipolar 1. Maybe some combinations of genes won't produce that full range of symptoms.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/bipolar...