Rapid cycling is called a course specifier. It’s not a separate diagnosis, instead It used to describe the course of the illness. The rapid cycling specifier is added if you have 4 or more episodes of either depression, mania or hypomania in a year. If this is the case, your diagnosis would be bipolar 1 or 2, with rapid cycling.

People usually will say ultra rapid cycling when a person has mood switches each month and ultra, ultra rapid cycling, also called ultradian when a person has mood cycles lasting a day. The use of ultradian is controversial because according to the DSMV, the least amount of time you can have mood symptoms is 4 days for hypomania. Therefore, changing mood symptoms daily wouldn’t be considered a bipolar illness according to the DSM. We would call this mood lability and you can see this mood instability with other disorders like borderline personality disorder and PTSD.

In this video I discuss possible causes of rapid cycling and ways to approach minimizing the cycling.

Videos referenced:
Borderline personality vs bipolar disorder video:    • Bipolar vs Borderline Personality Dis...  

Mania definition:    • Bipolar 1 Disorder or Bipolar 2 Disor...  

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