Party girl, adventurous, obsessive, volatile. But at what point is unacceptable behaviour pathological?

The day I was diagnosed with mild bipolar disorder, I wasn’t feeling particularly bad. I had been taking an antidepressant for a couple of years, and up until recently it had been making what ranged from generic boredom to absolute, confusing depressions recede into the background of a life rich with family, friends, parties, and work. Life hummed along nicely until my volatile mood swings reached such appalling heights that it could no longer be blamed on depression or teenaged hormones.

Somewhere along the line I had lost grasp of happiness, sleeping immensely long hours and withdrawing from social interaction. People and activities that usually filled me with joy, now barely dented the fog of depression that surrounded me.

“I had just assumed she would snap out of it like usual” was the standard comment from friends and family. However this time the depression only deepened to the point where I spent the majority of my time in pajamas.

“Your skin turned a terrible grey shade“, my mother said, “It was as though the life had been drained out of you.” A visit to my doctor held no answers: a modification of antidepressant and some lifestyle suggestions. Nothing changed.

One morning I awoke to my heart pounding in my ears and the heaviness that had been crushing me for weeks absent. The sunlight that had poured through the blinds every other morning to no effect whatsoever now invigorated me to the core.

In the days that followed, I began to feel well again, perhaps better than well. This is the point in the bipolar story at which you’re supposed to book a first-class ticket to Paris and spend $30,000 in one weekend at the Plaza Athénée. Or look on amazed, or terrified, as the sunlight metamorphoses into a band of dancing sea monkeys. Or systematically begin to date all the available (or unavailable) men in your personal network.

But the reality is that nothing of the sort happened—I simply felt smarter, funnier, cooler, prettier, better than I had before. I had fabulous concentration, was undistracted by any edge of competition or envy, and found that I could function easily on four or five hours of sleep.

I went out to parties often, dressed in tight figured hugging outfits to the delight of my male companions. No one was saying no to me; “no” was not an acceptable answer.

I recall breaking the heel off my shoe in a nightclub at 2 a.m., and when I took a taxi back to my house twenty minutes away to change into another pair of shoes the cabbie wouldn’t wait.

Of course I did the only reasonable thing I could think of – I called the police on my mobile. When the police arrived 25 minutes later they let the driver go, then waited for me to change and escorted me back to the club. I was invincible.

“You lied and flirted your way into the good graces of the cops, convincing them to drive us back to the nightclub,” my companion told me later, “I was pretty drunk, but even I knew you’d gone too far.”

I’d always thought that my explosive episodes as I had come to call them were a release valve for my unpredictable hormones. A truck driver once screamed some hideous profanities at me out his window, so I picked up a garbage can threw it at the cab of his truck.