Interesting article Jack, although it does appear to focus on prediagnosis bipolar and those taking antidepressants as a monotherapy. The use of anti psychotics and mood stabilisers should reduce this. They were also comparing the switching rate of those with unipolar depression and those that later turned out to have bipolar depression, and that is more likely to occur with bipolar anyways. There is a lot of interesting research on the use of AD's in bipolar, I couldn't find the paper when I looked for it but I read one recently that said that taking into account the disruption that depression caused versus the subsequent hypomania that the AD caused, and the inherent cycling nature of bipolar, in some patients there was still an net benefit the antidepressants. It's a complex area!
/sorry for the tangent.
How are you doing? Have you managed to get in touch with any MH people? You definitely wouldn't be wasting their time, they are there for people in any form of mental health distress whether that is due to low mood or high mood. Mixed states can be unpredictable you deserve a helping hand to deal with this.
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