Bipolar Disorder Self Test – Self Help For Bipolar Disorder Patients

You can suffer from bipolar disorder for your entire life and you’d never know it. As a matter of fact, a lot of people who lived in the past had no clue that the condition existed so that they never got it diagnosed and treated. You should know that a good number of bipolar disorder patients end up committing suicide when the syndrome got a hold of them. Sincerely, if there is even a mild chance that you can have the disease, you want to get it diagnosed in a hurry. Even if you cannot drag yourself to a shrink just yet, you should at least begin with a self-diagnosis.

Self-diagnosing for bipolar disorder is not an easy thing to achieve, especially since you are not usually able to catch yourself before you slip either into a manic or depressive episode. However, it is not an impossible thing to do. You do have your ‘normal’ spells during which you are neither suffering from mania or depression.

Those are the times you should look forward to catching first. Men often catch a mania first before other symptoms of bipolar disorder set in. For women, the first phase of bipolar disorder that they suffer from is the depressive phase. As such, you should be able to know which you should expect to happen to you first. It will help also if you recruit your closest friend to take a closer look at you while it is on.

When manic, you may suddenly begin to find yourself irritable and short with your friends. All of a sudden, for no reason at all, you may find that you are speaking too rapidly about one thing and then about another, never able to settle long enough on any one thing. When in the manic phase of bipolar disorder, you feel too self-important and capable of doing anything at all, your energy is so much that you are not able to settle down or sleep. You may feel like you want to head out to Vegas or just take flight trips all over the country, wasting money unreasonably.

When you are depressive in bipolar disorder, the reverse is most often the case, unless it is bipolar disorder II that you are suffering from, in which case the depression is even going to be worse than the hypomanic mania you have just been through. The depression of bipolar disorder appears very much like major depression, the most severe type of depression that there is. You feel drained, hopeless, helpless, and listless. Things and people that used to bring you pleasures are suddenly lost on you, while your sleep, energy and appetite cycles are all messed up. Suicidal thoughts are like where it often ends.

Again, if you find that you cannot self-diagnose for bipolar disorder, you should have a friend keep a close watch on you so that they can help when you start to ‘act strangely’. Self-medication for bipolar disorder is a lot easier than the diagnosis. What you need to do for starters is to begin with serious dietary changes that include a lowering of your cholesterol foods, and an increase in foods that are fibrous in nature, while being full of vitamins.

And then you want to eat a lot of fish, because of the omega-3 content in it that helps to smooth out your moods. You should also include a lot of water in your daily diet – something on the upside of a liter of water should be helpful.

After the alteration to your diet, you should really learn to identify the episodes and experiences in your life that trigger your episodes. Control them in your thought process, and with some bipolar disorder medications from a qualified psychologist, you would have overcome bipolar disorder once and for all.