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Comment by CephalopodMD | Hacker News Reader

Gotta be honest, it sounds like this guy has bipolar disorder

Not sure about diagnosing someone over the Internet, but yeah, can’t relate. The rare days I wake up feeling half as alert and driven as described, it’s great, I get a ton of important shit done, feel wonderful and alive the whole time, go “oh, this is why some people are wildly more accomplished than me—they must feel like this quite a bit more often than I do, I’d be fucking emperor of Earth if I felt this way even one day a week”.

Then I’m back to normal for the next six months or so :-)

This reminds me of some of the stuff I would write in my early 20’s, well after midnight. The difference being that I read it the next morning and hit delete.

Not sure if you're talking about the above comment or my post, but IF it's the latter I take it as a compliment, so thank you. If you meant the former, ignore the rest of this comment.

The reason I take it as a compliment is that I created this secondary blog to work on my perfectionism (I write mostly on sonnet.io), so the content here will be rough and generate this sort of feedback. People still seem to find it useful, so I'm ok with mistakes.

> hit delete.

I hope you kept a copy somewhere! Whether you feel embarrassed about it or not--it's a part of you and there's something to learn from. Speaking as someone much older than early 20s here.

Thanks for the diagnose, but I have neither Bipolar Disorder nor ADHD. There's some similarity between how my brain works and people with ADHD, but for different reasons and at a much smaller scale.

I recommend reading a bit more about those conditions, especially BD. You'll realise that the similarities are only superficial.

Idk, this resonates with me and in ten years with a great therapist, the idea that I have bipolar has never come up. A friend of mine acts this way too. She is an artist, and has late night art sessions from time to time, which ultimately wipe her out. I appreciate the discussion in this article about it.

What he's describing sounds similar to experiences of some people diagnosed with ADHD.

Yeah, I relate and got an ADHD (inattentive) diagnosis some years ago, though wasn't able to take meds. This kind of really wired manic phase descends on me sometimes and it's usually quite brief (two weeks) but I have come to resent it rather than enjoy it as the burnout after is always terrible.

Why weren't you able to take meds?

I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and the anxiety increasing side-effects on stimulants made me into a gibbering wreck. My extreme reaction was part of what got me the OCD diagnosis as I was forced to come clean about some of the thought patterns I had been unwilling to discuss. I still believe I have ADHD as with appropriate therapy the OCD symptoms are largely gone, but the ADHD ones are not. I also have a number of other family members on my maternal side who have ADHD diagnosis or would have if they werern't from an older generation (most notably my mother, from whom I have learnt all the coping mechanisms that allow me to get by without meds). Complicating things further, my mother's side of the family has an abnormally high number of people with bipolar disorder, which is also understood to have a relationship to OCD. I am not bipolar however, and neither is my mother.

There is a strange psychology rabbit hole to go down with the inter-relation between the conditions. Each population is more likely to be diagnosed witht he other condition than the general populace -- yet our biochemical theories for how each works should make having both impossible. One is believed to be caused by too much dopamine, the other too little.

Related to this, after a first attempt at stimulants, I was given an anti-smoking medication that has off-label use as an ADHD treatment. It works by increasing dopamine levels. This was even worse than stimulants, but I wouldn't have called the effect as increasing the obsessive-compulsive symptoms, more I just felt very very stressed and about a hair-width from a breakdown for a week.

Why the hell each time someone is telling about some sort of hyper active brain state people starts to point out to bipolar or ADHD disorder??

If you can't relate with that it doesn't mean it must be immediately labeled as mental disorder.

Not even close to a clinic diagnosis for bipolar.

Bipolar changes don't just randomly happen on a Friday and return to normal Saturday morning. They tend to be long last swings from manic to depressed.

That was exactly my thought. A relatively mild case, but still.

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