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Delusions/Psychotic beliefs during hypomania?

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Delusions/Psychotic beliefs during hypomania?

Postby David1999 » Sun Jul 23, 2017 5:03 pm

For years before my diagnosis in March, I had a similar pattern to many people with Bipolar II. I would go hypomanic for a 3-5 days at a time, become depressed for 1-2 weeks, with very few periods of stability in between. I've also had two hypomanias which dragged out for over a month (notably when I was taking my exams.
During these 'hypomanic' (what I assume were) periods... I would develop some bizarre, almost psychotic, beliefs. I don't want to repeat some of the examples (they're very embarrassing), but here goes: Once I believed that I was stolen. That I was born to millionaire parents and my parents had stolen me from them. I was so adamant that this was the case that I confronted my parents and slept in a tent outside for over a week.
I thought that psychosis wasn't present during hypomania. Were my episodes hypomanic or were they just mild mania with psychosis?
Does anyone here with type two experience psychosis?
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Re: Delusions/Psychotic beliefs during hypomania?

Postby UpDownAround » Sun Jul 23, 2017 6:47 pm

I am type II and I have told my pdoc about my most common delusion and she did not change my diagnosis.

My most common one is believing I have the ability to cure any illness and stop aging in my body using my mind. I will be immortal if I can avoid accidents, violence and disasters.

It is like a daydream only the thread back to reality for this belief is broken; all others seem intact. I am even aware that no one will believe me and worried I could end up in a mental hospital for all eternity. That's actually a logical conclusion because I am accepting the base delusion as fact.

It usually doesn't last all that long and I am really disappointed when I start having doubts that unravel the belief. In my version of Groundhog Day I have to realize my own mortality over and over. Kinda sucks.

I am not sure what separates a type I delusion from a type II. If I believed I could fly as completely as I believe this delusion when it kicks in, I would be a grease spot in a parking lot by now. Maybe my self preservation instinct would over ride that sort of delusion and that is what makes me type II. I think a lot is gut feel from the pdoc if you are in the gray area. I didn't actually ask her if it changed the diagnosis. I just looked at the box checked and the code circled on my check out sheet and it was still type II.
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Re: Delusions/Psychotic beliefs during hypomania?

Postby David1999 » Sun Jul 23, 2017 7:12 pm

All of my delusions (in the past, during hypomania), were somewhat feasible but very very unlikely.
Another example of a hypomanic delusion is me having the belief that I was so beautiful that I could have any straight guy I wanted (I'm a gay guy).
I've heard of many type II's having delusions - this goes against the diagnostic criteria for hypomania as hypomanic episodes, by definition, don't have psychotic features.
It's like a grey area between hypomania and mania... the mania isn't severe enough to be considered mania... but the psychosis is.
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Re: Delusions/Psychotic beliefs during hypomania?

Postby UpDownAround » Sun Jul 23, 2017 7:48 pm

Yikes - my delusion is above the bar you set (feasible).

One of yours might be also. I am a straight guy and like to think I am open minded but have some friends who are clearly not. One of the funnier (I have a warped sense of humor) situations I have been in was when I and a couple of friends pulled into a store parking lot and there was someone bent over messing with something on the floor of the back seat and showing us some tight jeans stretched over one the shapeliest derrieres I have seen. It elicited a couple of suggestive comments. Then he, yes HE, stood up and you should have seen the cringing. I pointed out that none of us was really going to do anything more than admire the view so there was really no point in denying the small pleasure we took in looking. They were both horrified that I suggested they had felt pleasure in looking at another guy even when they didn't know. Mostly the point of this is that I like telling stories, but it also is that your delusion about any straight guy really isn't feasible either. Most of us have hang ups that run way too deep.
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Re: Delusions/Psychotic beliefs during hypomania?

Postby xmadcap » Wed Aug 02, 2017 3:30 pm

I was diagnosed 'severe, mixed-episode Bipolar with Psychotic features", along with BPD, Generalized Anxiety and PTSD. So I don't know how common it is for other people with Bipolar to get delusional thoughts/psychotic symptoms, but the past two years for me have been a horrifying nightmare-trip at times because of them.
Spent two weeks in the hospital around 6 months ago apparently seriously believing that I was part of a ghost-hunting team inside of an abandoned hospital, and couldn't understand why my 'teammates' (the psych ward staff) wouldn't help me find the ghosts we were supposed to be hunting. Couldn't tell anyone who I actually was. My boyfriend said he would come visit me and I'd either be so medicated up that I was drooling on myself, or just talking gibberish and calling the staff "robot people" and stuff. When I finally came out of it, it was like weeks of my life was lost in a void of vague, fragmented delusion-memory. Like trying to remember a dream had while awake. Really weird, and scary. I also have visual and auditory hallucinations while really "manic", or during particularly bad panic attacks.
Anyway, that's just one of the most notable psychotic episodes, I have them on a regular basis and have been involuntarily hospitalized more than once for it. The delusions change and shift, but I feel like I'm almost never fully in "baseline" reality anymore, and it terrifies me.
I've brought up schizoaffective disorder to my doctors, but they stick with the Bipolar diagnosis. I only hope those parts either go away (so far they haven't ever completely, and I've been on almost every antipsychotic and am in therapy) or become easier to cope with in time.
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Re: Delusions/Psychotic beliefs during hypomania?

Postby antisocialsocialclub » Wed Aug 02, 2017 5:55 pm

Absolutely. My diagnosis reads as Bipolar II with Psychosis in my file at the doc. It's very common from what I understand during mania and full blown episodes. I hear stuff at my worst... mostly people saying my name. This has only occurred during my worst manic episode at 19 however. I'm 30 now with no other occurences.
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Re: Delusions/Psychotic beliefs during hypomania?

Postby Rev678 » Thu Aug 03, 2017 7:22 pm

I'm BP1. Don't really know much about hypomania, but I get delusions and psychosis all the time, manic or depressed, really. Thought maybe I could commiserate and share some good ones?

My favorite was this one time I was 5 shots in an hour level of drunk, and I was VERY manic, and I decided that flying just couldn't be that hard if a pigeon could do it. I was sitting on a roof at a house party I'd crashed. Didn't know anyone, but more than a few people were quite upset that some girl seemingly leapt off the roof into the pool. It was a pretty dramatic distance. I'm really very lucky I managed to hit the pool at all. Turns out pigeons seem to know something I don't.

Other delusions...

My grandmother was a robot alien from outer space and was sent here to take me away from my mom. That one was actually some mean joke she started when I was like 2, but as I got older I just rolled with it. To this day, I'm not 100% sure she died. She died a total of seven times, and I'm still not entirely convinced she died as much as the alien ship came and took her away.

I'm an alien, and maybe that's why my grandmother was sent to take me away. My mom was an "old" mom, so at 34 she found herself with a baby and my whole childhood she would jokingly say, "Who are you and where did you come from? Maybe one day I'll love you." My mother has always loved me very much, but as I got older, the two ideas merged and I have spent a considerable amount of time wondering if I aren't an alien and my grandmother was just on some kind of rescue mission, or maybe that we both crashed here and she assumed my grandmother's body and planted me in my mother... so that someone could take care of me until the mothership came back. As a result, I call my mom the mothership.

I've deluded myself with many ideas of who my dad might be, even though my mom insists it's the guy who got shared custody of me in middle school. He's such a worthless thing, though, I don't really think he could have contributed to the artistry that is myself. However, he IS bipolar... and that adds up, unfortunately. Still, he's Mexican and I'm the whitest Mexican I've ever seen... but I did do one of those 23&Me DNA tests and I've got the right genetics for it.... but still... no one so pathetic could REALLY be my father, could they?
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