as small as a world and as large as alone, How is autism mistaken for Bipolar disorder?

8:26pm May 22, 2014

Anonymous asked: How is autism mistaken for Bipolar disorder?

nectaresque:

youneedacat:

autisticdrift:

Autistic infodumping or difficulties with prosody (controlling speech speed and volume) can resemble the pressured speech of manic episodes

Alexithymia or difficulty with emotional regulation can resemble mood changes or cycling of bipolar disorder

Executive function impairment can resemble the impulsivity, inability to complete tasks and distraction of manic episodes and the difficulty concentrating, remembering or making decisions of depressive episodes

Irregular sleep habits are common to both conditions

Autistic burnout or withdrawal can be mistaken for a depressive episode

Also autistic people often have cycles of intense perseveration followed by crashing, that can look exactly like mania and depression.

Hmm, I wonder if it can be both? I should guess it can. I feel that both patterns (perseveration - crash, and mania - depression) are recognizable in my experience. In a way I feel I was lucky to recognize the manic factor in my ‘up’-phases so that I had a support in getting myself out of the spiral of exhausting myself and thus mitigating the crash/depression, even before I was diagnosed as autistic. And now I have the chance to gain a new understanding for what perseveration expresses about myself, which is nice. (I hope it will be nice.)

I bet it can be both.

I’ve noticed that I have a pattern that resembles bipolar in some respects, but it has no mood component.

This is a known thing in catatonia (and since I have autistic catatonia, this is one possible explanation), where in its most extreme form you get periods of frenetic physical activity followed by periods of total immobility.

I’ve had the frenetic physical activity before – to the point where I collapsed wheezing on the floor because my body would not put up with the strain of being run around the room in circles at top speed bouncing off the walls and jumping on the furniture indefinitely. And I’ve had the total freezing for long periods too. But usually what I experience is less extreme than either of that.

(Weirdly, the onset of the worst of the adrenal insufficiency, seemed to go along with an easing of the autistic catatonia. I can’t explain it.)

And catatonia and autism share a ton of features. Some people even go so far as to believe autism is just a particular expression of catatonia – I don’t go that far, but it’s a viewpoint that exists for a reason.

Anyway… what I usually have, is these periods where I get extremely focused on a perseveration or project, and I stay up for days on end, I sleep as little as I can, I focus totally on this activity and nothing else.

And then at the end, I’m worn out and I crash and I have no energy and my brain doesn’t work even at its normal level and I have to just lie there and regenerate.

But this doesn’t go with extremes of mood. I’ve experienced depression – lots of depression – so I know what that feels like. And I’ve had mania as a side-effect of certain meds – so I know what that feels like. And those things are not at all a part of my normal cycle of extreme activity followed by extreme inactivity.

I once asked a bipolar person whether there’s a form of bipolar that doesn’t involve mood, only these patterns of activity, and she immediately just said “no”. But I don’t know what her basis for saying that was, and I know from experience that she’s someone who goes by the strict definitions of conditions and gets kind of annoyed at people stretching the boundaries.

Bipolar certainly runs in my family, my mother and grandfather were both diagnosed. I was, I believe, misdiagnosed at a certain point, by a doctor who diagnosed everyone with bipolar. And later misdiagnosed as schizoaffective (the bipolar type), long story but the “mania” was med-induced. But I don’t know, sometimes I wonder if I do have a touch of bipolar that takes forms that are related to autism and catatonia. (And I wonder if there is a relationship between autism, bipolar, and catatonia, given that all three can result in extremes of activity levels like that. Or whether the resemblance is only superficial.)

Notes: