Hi, I've been wondering about this for a long time, and the psychiatrist I used to have didn't have the whole story to answer my questions right.

I was diagnosed as bipolar 2 years ago, when I was 21, when I had an onset of mania. Nothing of the sort had ever happened to me before, and according to what I read and heard, my symptoms fit "bipolar mania" perfectly: racing thoughts, euphoria, extreme creativeness and extroversion, intense happiness, and hypersexuality.

However, I never told my psychiatrist or therapist that I had been regularly using marijuana, and when I felt the onset of mania, I was high at the time. I had been smoking weed almost every day for about 3-4 months but nothing like that ever happened to me until then. I can trace the onset of the mania to an emotional trigger, but after a few months, when the mania died down, nothing like that ever happened to me again. I stopped taking the risperdal I was prescribed and it's been 2 years but never have I had either the ups or downs or cycling of emotions I read about that are a part of bipolar disorder. I stopped using marijuana a little bit after my manic episode, but when it comes to everything else about bipolar disorder, specifically the rapid changes in mood and mood shifts, I have never in my life had any of that, except when I was using drugs.

In short, I've had depression in my life before, but my mood has always been generally stable, and I've only ever had mania once as a result of drugs, which I no longer use. Does this really mean I am bipolar?