How To Distinguish Bipolar 1 From Bipolar 2 2024

Number one is inflated self-esteem or grandiosity -decreased need for sleep, more talkative than usual, or pressure to keep talking. Number four flight of ideas or racing thoughts, distractibility, increase in goal-directed activity, or psychomotor agitation. You just can't stop doing things. Excessive involvement in activities that have a high potential for painful consequences such as things like going on buying sprees or getting involved in business investments. Sometimes people become hypersexual. Also, the symptoms caused clinically significant distress or impairment in various areas of your life, not just one little area. 

Hypomania has the same symptoms except they only need to last for four days instead of a whole week. Another main difference is that with hypomania the symptoms don't cause any real impairment and in other words, you're still pretty high-functioning. Now the second part of bipolar disorder would be to have depression or depressive episodes. So bipolar one would be having episodes of mania and depression. Bipolar 2 would be episodes of depression and hypomania. If a person has delusions or any other psychotic symptoms, it's automatically considered mania versus hypomania because with hypomania there's no impairment. There's a good chance that if you have bipolar two disorder you can go all of your life and never have to be put in the hospital because of your bipolar disorder. But with bipolar one, it's tough, pretty uncommon for someone with bipolar one to never have a hospitalization because the manic episodes tend to be pretty destructive. Now knowing that, it's easy to conclude that bipolar one disorder is much worse than bipolar two because the manic episodes can cause a lot of problems. it's kind of like a tornado ripping through and then you've got to clean up all the damage. But the reason bipolar 2 is not merely a milder form of bipolar one disorder is because people with bipolar 2 tend to have a more chronic course to their illness. They also tend to spend more time depressed than the people with bipolar 1 so bipolar 1 may be more intense but bipolar 2 can be more chronic and persistent. 

Also, the number of lifetime episodes of hypomania and depression tends to be higher for the person with bipolar 2 than the person with bipolar 1. So did you get that?  People with bipolar 2 tend to have more recurring episodes of depression than the person with unipolar depression. So in many ways, although bipolar two disorder may be less intense when it comes to the mania at least, it can just create more overall dysfunction in the person's life because of the lingering and recurring depressive episodes. Now I said all this because I think in the past we as clinicians have tended to think that bipolar two disorder is not really that bad and that's kind of trickled down to patients in the way that they even think about their illness and may even feel like you don't really need to get treatment for it because it's just not that bad. And I think this is because we tend to focus on the intensity of the mania and see that as more the thing to keep under control but depression can be pretty debilitating and we're not talking about like a hypo depression there's no such thing either in girl or boy. 

People with bipolar disorder will not have as severe of a manic episode but they can have very severe depressive episodes so depression can still be a big problem. And a reason to continue in treatment and to maintain regular treatment to prevent the bottoming out episodes with depression. A good medication regimen can help reduce the overall burden of the illness by lessening the symptoms and maybe even decreasing the number of recurring episodes that you have over time.