Throughout my life, the manic side of my illness clearly dominated. I never considered myself a depressed kind of person. That's not to say I didn't have pure depressions, but they seemed more like mental "flus" in my mind, with the exception of an extremely bad depression that followed about four years of frequent severe manias. Total crash!

My episodes on the manic side (often only reaching hypomanias) were significantly longer lasting than most of my depressions. Later in my life, and a few times in my youth, mixed episodes were common, but usually leaning more on the hypomanic/manic side than depressed. My worst episodes were full manias with mixed features, sometimes with severe psychosis.

Q: Did you likely live with bipolar disorder, initially, where you lacked insight to it?