*Sigh*

One, I am very proud of you for putting yourself in a safe place when you were feeling aggressive. You can read your own signals a bit. This is important, and valuable.

I have to tell you..."normal" people wake up depressed too! Medications are such weird things and the mechanisms by which they work are largely unknown. It is shooting in the dark and seeing if perhaps one can hit something. You have comorbidities of UC and TOS which, just so you know, can cause depression without bipolar in the mix. If you don't feel well or are in pain, your mood is going to go down the toilet.

You can read yourself to some degree, so use this skill. If you get suicidally depressed, you DO NOT hurt yourself, you go to the doctor. If you are so manic that you are out of control, you go to the doctor. I think you are going to have to learn to deal with some bounce. What I mean is, you don't want to be bouncing like you are high jumping on a trampoline, but you can't walk on the surface of a trampoline without a little bit of bouncing. Having high and low emotions is normal, everyone has these. It is the degree of the highs and lows and the duration that makes one have bipolar, or not. A little mania that allows you to clean the entire house in a day or study long hours for a big test might be a good thing. Feeling down in a way that sends you to bed for a little extra rest and relaxation could be a good thing. It is whether these last days and days and you move further into the mania or down into a deeper depression that is the concern.

You ask if you are going to ever feel normal. Normal people have emotions. They feel excited and happy. They feel anxious and depressed. They feel jumpy. They feel sad. They have a whole smorgasbord of emotions. If you are having one too you are feeling normal. It is mixing meds till you have a "bounce" but not a "leap" if that makes sense. The rest of the work that the meds can't do, you'll have to.

Keep us posted!

This first post simply declares my suspicion that my bi-polar mania-mild Dx this last January was competently made but it now seems likely that the mania was induced by prednisone and this was missed. Anybody else have experience with steroids?
I am sixty eight y/o. At onset, I was well married and fairly well off and had no debt, in other words very lucky. Now about 18 months later none of that is so.

I had used SSRIs and blood pressure meds for years and had no need for them while manic and am still not using any though dropping out of the mania left me depressed, virtually inert. Today I am feeling better. This is my third day back on prednisone. 20mg the first day, 10 the last two.

Advice I wish I'd gotten and taken: If you have a credit card and folks say be careful, stay off Craigs list.

I'll try to answer any comments. Cheers
Cherrylogger