I've been incorrectly diagnosed many times, one of those incorrect diagnoses was Bipolar. The only thing my pdoc and I agree I do have is PTSD and a substance abuse disorder. In any case, the meds do help me presently, but we're going to try to lower them to see if I'm less of a walking zombie.
One of the reasons PTSD might feel like Bipolar to the untrained eye is the mood instability in times of ptsd crisis looks similar to a mixed episode, when you're dysphoric and hypervigilant at the same time.
Med reactions like hypomania, for example, happen even to folks without any mental illness.
One thing a lot of places are doing now is only diagnosing a severe mental illness when there is extreme dysfunctionality in the patient's life, innability to work, form relationships, function in general. To avoid over diagnosing severe mental illnesses when they're non existent. The other side of the coin in this situation, is that sometimes folks are overlty functional when they in fact suffer in silence.
Due to psychosis from substance abuse (which my first pdoc didn't believe I had) and trauma (which he didn't believe I had either), it seemed like I had schizophrenia, later schizoaffective, until I changed pdocs and got a bipolar sort-of-diagnosis that was later removed. It's a given those pdocs sucked lol... my current pdoc understands there's more to a set of symptoms than a simple diagnosis, sometimes it's not even a diagnosis, just a mixed bag of reactions to the environment.
Conclusion, mental health diagnoses are a hard thing to get right, we shouldn't take them too seriously. Treat the symptoms, or remove the trigger and treat the consequences.
