So this got me curious and as i'm up (and trying to stay so...so to not sleep thru an early assignment) i wanted to come back to this.
From one of the books i have called "Taming Bipolar" written by Lori Oliwenstein and published by Psychology Today.
It lists Bipolar I and II (and also III, but which doesn't officially exist and i suspect reasons for that so I won't elaborate), but also Cyclothymia.
It was Cyclothymia that i was thinking of when the above mentioned Cyclothymic disorder. As i had first thought when reading the above, it doesn't talk of cyclothymia as being a "disorder" out right...as in "bipolar disorder", but rather as you had read it Teach to be a TYPE of bipolar disorder.
The reason why i never have paid much attention to it is because of it's description in saying:
Quote:
|
"And in as many as one in three cases, the mood swings will get wider and you'll wind up with bipolar I or II diagnosis. In fact, some clinicians think of cyclothymia as a precurser to bipolar disorder rather than one of its forms. Others think it's basically indistinguishable from bipolar II."
|
I agree that it is most likely a precurser or the same as bipolar II.
As to rapid cycling it says:
Quote:
|
Rapid cycling isn't a "type" of bipolar disorder - if you have any of the diagnoses described earlier in this chapter, you can find yourself swinging from mania or hypomania to depression and back again. Rapid cycling, does, however, seem to pair itself most often with bipolar II.
|
Quote:
|
It also seems that people who are rapidly cycling actually spend most of their time depressed. In Judd's "Archives of General Psychiatry today study, which followed 86 patients over a period of more than 13 years, he found that people with bipolar II spend 50.3 percent of their time battling symptoms of depression, both major and minor, but only 1.3 percent of their time dealing with the symptoms of hypomania.
|
it also goes onto say (which i find interesting as i didn't remember) that there's some evidence to suggest that THYROID problems might contribute to cycling and its speed. This particular screams at me as BOTH my paternal and maternal family lines have diabeties and my maternal side has Graves disease (my aunt who's issue is not blood sugar levels, but rather thyroid levels that affects so many things in the body and her son is most definetly bipolar...and only occationally treated for it. And she suspects her mother, my grandmother, to have died young from undiagnosed Graves disease).