With severe bipolar disorder, you may have hallucinations, where you see or hear things that don't exist. You may also have delusions, in which you firmly believe in something that is simply not true. Here's When It's Easy to Confuse Bipolar Disorder with Schizophrenia. Visual hallucinations occur in a wide variety of neurological and psychiatric disorders, including toxic disorders, drug withdrawal syndromes, focal lesions of the central nervous system, migraines, blindness, schizophrenia, and psychotic mood disorders.
Visual hallucinations are generally assumed to characteristically reflect organic disorders and are very rare in affective disorders. We report a case of visual hallucinations in a young woman with bipolar disorder during the manic phase. For some people with bipolar disorder, these hallucinations or delusions arise during severe episodes of mania or depression. Not everyone realizes that some people with bipolar disorder also have psychotic symptoms.
These can include delusions, auditory and visual hallucinations. This happens during periods of extreme moods, so when I am manic or severely depressed. During Mania, Voices Can Be Comforting. I have a lot of ideas running through my head during a manic phase, and the voices I hear add to the jumble.
They give me ideas and fill me with confidence, which then raise my mood even more. I often speak aloud to them and they respond to me very audibly, as if they were in the room with me. I remember cases where I had been alone in my room and ran down the stairs extremely excited, as if I had just spoken on the phone with a friend I hadn't seen for a while. I have had conversations with people where I have been distracted or “turned away” because there is a voice that speaks to me.
Sometimes I can make a joke that no one understands except me and the voices, or I laugh out loud for no apparent reason. The voices have become my friends and I think I would miss them if they were gone. If my mood rises a lot, I know they will be there and I look forward to hearing them. When I'm very depressed, I've heard screams and screams in my head.
It's often incoherent, with a few words and sentences scattered and everything incredibly loud. The volume of all this makes it an extremely intense experience, like being in the cinema with sound rumbling around you. Sometimes, if he feels directed at me and other times the screams feel intrusive, as if someone is ranting and raving at nothing or no one in particular. While bipolar disorder cannot be cured in the traditional sense, with proper diagnosis and treatment, symptoms of the disorder can be successfully managed in the long term.
Katie, who has bipolar disorder, describes her experience of hearing voices when she is manic or depressed. Psychosis can occur with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, some types of dementia, and other conditions. Bipolar disorder can also cause anxiety and psychotic episodes, during which a person loses touch with reality. A manic episode is all that is needed for a diagnosis of bipolar I disorder, while hypomania that precedes or follows a major depressive episode is necessary for a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder.
When this occurs, health professionals provide the diagnosis of bipolar disorder with psychotic characteristics. Anxiety, for example, commonly occurs with bipolar disorder and many people living with anxiety report hearing voices. Hallucinations tend to occur more frequently with manic episodes that characterize bipolar I disorder, although they can also occur during depressive episodes. Experts don't fully understand why some people with bipolar disorder experience hallucinations and others don't.
If you have bipolar disorder, you may have episodes of depression more often than episodes of mania, or vice versa. If you live with bipolar disorder, it's always a good idea to work with a therapist who has experience treating the condition. Psychosis often accompanies episodes of extreme mania in people with bipolar I disorder (the most severe form of the disease). Postpartum psychosis is rare, but it's more common in people with a history of bipolar disorder and always represents a medical emergency.
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