Riding the Emotional Roller Coaster: Is It Bipolar Disorder?
“She’s so bipolar!”
“One minute he’s happy and the next he’s yelling and screaming. He must be bipolar or something.”
“I just have these highs and lows.”
At one point or another, we have all probably heard one of these comments or had similar concerns about ourselves or someone we know. First and foremost, it is completely healthy to have shifts in our emotions throughout the course of the day, from frustration while sitting in traffic during our morning commute to happiness as we sit down and have our first cup of coffee, quickly followed up by panic as we find out the meeting we have to present it has been moved up, and then sadness as we realize our empty social calendar and growing feelings of loneliness.
Such fluctuations in mood can even occur within the course of a couple of hours and that does not necessarily mean there is anything clinically wrong with us. Despite the many benefits of social media platforms and several high-profile celebrities sharing their experiences with Bipolar Disorder, they have also contributed to several misperceptions regarding the illness and concern that any fluctuations in mood that deviate from “normal” must equate to a form of mental illness. So where does the line between normal and abnormal get drawn?
What is Bipolar Disorder?
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - Fifth Edition (DSM-5), Bipolar Disorder is an illness marked by unusual shifts in mood that affect a person’s functioning in various areas of their life, including employment, school, relationships, and self-esteem.
Again, while we all experience moments of sadness or elation, the mood shifts that happen within the context of Bipolar Disorder are much more extreme, prolonged, and impairing. They are also accompanied by additional symptoms that will be discussed below.
While the disorder used to be referred to as “manic-depression” given the belief that people with the illness would only fluctuate between mania and major depression, it has since been recognized that moods actually exist on a continuum between the two extremes/poles of mania and depression, leading to the updated term, Bipolar Disorder.
Each person experiences what we call euthymic mood, or their emotional baseline. This refers to their personal “normal” when they are stable or not experiencing a mood episode. I use quotation marks given the highly subjective nature of what normal constitutes based on a variety of factors, including your cultural background, gender, and natural disposition just to name a few.
By and large, euthymia is a state in which you experience a range of emotions that are appropriate to the context and do not repeatedly cause impairment in daily functioning. As we move farther from this center point of the diagram in either direction, we approach more extreme emotional states that reach clinical significance given the impairment they cause.
Depression:
To the left of the spectrum, we have Major Depression, frequently referenced in more casual conversation as simply depression to describe feelings of sadness. Surely feeling sad is something everyone can relate to but a person may be experiencing Major Depression when they feel sad nearly all of the day for most days during a period of at least a couple of weeks in addition to some combination of the following symptoms:
loss of interest in ac