Help am i experiencing mania?

[snailboy]

i've gone from horribly depressed over losing friends to insanely energetic in only a few days and its already causing me to do things i know ill regret. my head is pounding and i can't focus on anything else. i want to self harm just to calm down because my thoughts are so fast. im not even tired anymore. its scary but i can't stop it. is this normal??

 

[ocklepold]

Doesn't sound normal to me. I have never been manic though. I would get some professional help before you do something really dumb

 

[Ki_Nam]

I think you should talk to a specialist if you want to find out if you have mania or not. But that sounds like it... I try to put on a facade of normalcy when I'm around other people. I laugh, I smile, I talk, and I eat. But in the end I'm numb. I had momentary shock when I found out that I was being targeted, and have lost my friends over it. That pain was only momentary. Because they don't mean shit in the end. So people believe that I'm recovering, or even manic sometimes. So you never know.

 

[janejackson]

i've gone from horribly depressed over losing friends to insanely energetic in only a few days and its already causing me to do things i know ill regret. my head is pounding and i can't focus on anything else. i want to self harm just to calm down because my thoughts are so fast. im not even tired anymore. its scary but i can't stop it. is this normal??

I can't say for certain, but huge amounts of energy, lack of ability to focus on anything, racing thoughts, and not being tired / lack of need for sleep are all symptoms of mania. Also concerning is you say these symptoms are causing you to do things you know you'll regret. The good news is you are aware of it. Sometimes mania can get so out of control that you completely lose touch with the fact that anything is wrong.

 

[snailboy]

I can't say for certain, but huge amounts of energy, lack of ability to focus on anything, racing thoughts, and not being tired / lack of need for sleep are all symptoms of mania. Also concerning is you say these symptoms are causing you to do things you know you'll regret. The good news is you are aware of it. Sometimes mania can get so out of control that you completely lose touch with the fact that anything is wrong.

im trying to make things better. i deleted my social media for now because i can't stop myself from messaging my ex friends. i honestly feel like im suffocating

 

[janejackson]

im trying to make things better. i deleted my social media for now because i can't stop myself from messaging my ex friends. i honestly feel like im suffocating

I'm very sorry you're going through this. I'm Bipolar I so I know what mania is like. It's not really something you can control once it starts.

For what it's worth, I have a very low opinion of psychiatry because it's ruined my life, but to engage that model, anyway, there's hypomania (Bipolar II) and full blown mania (Bipolar I). In the case of the former, they usually don't medicate you and the hypomania passes in a few days or weeks… Rarely months. In the case of the latter, the mania gets so out of control that it can wreck your life, you can lose touch with reality, etc. and they medicate you to snap you out of it.

I don't know what to recommend. I'd say go to a doctor, but there's a ton of quack shrinks out there and also once you have a mental health label and they medicate you, you're generally in that system for life. But that route may be preferable to a mania that gets out of control (no way to know right now how bad yours might get).

The less you sleep, the worse it gets. If you can manage to regulate your sleep and try to get 7 - 8 hours, after a little while the mania will go away. I've also read studies where being in a completely dark room in bed for a couple of days will knock it down in its early stages. Benzodiazepines can also knock it down, but those are hard to get at all, let alone on short notice.

 

[kunikuzushi]

I've been experiencing this switch from horrible depression to what you described, and I have a suspicion it's mania or hypomania. I hope you can talk to a professional. For now, I recommend doing whatever you can to relax yourself and lying down and closing your eyes trying to sleep as much as you can. I know this feeling is hell and you feel like you have no control over doing things you know you shouldn't. I'm sorry and I hope it stops soon

 

[snailboy]

I've been experiencing this switch from horrible depression to what you described, and I have a suspicion it's mania or hypomania. I hope you can talk to a professional. For now, I recommend doing whatever you can to relax yourself and lying down and closing your eyes trying to sleep as much as you can. I know this feeling is hell and you feel like you have no control over doing things you know you shouldn't. I'm sorry and I hope it stops soon

thank you so much. im starting to feel better now. bless my cat, i just laid with him until i started to calm down. gonna try and get some sleep now. thanks again, everyone in this thread was so sweet.