Handles

Symptoms and signs

An episode maniac is characterized by a modification of the mood, and which has occurred of certain symptoms such those described here. Obviously, all the symptoms are not present at the same time at the same person.

Many aspects make it possible to regard the mania as a “reversed depression”, in the direction of a “acceleration”, an intensification of the thoughts, emotions (all is stronger, sharper, more intense, including the mental pain or sadness sometimes, which brings to diagnostic confusions).

Typical symptoms are for example:

an excitation, an exaltation, felt “interior pressures”;
a “high” mood: euphoriant classically, but also an irritability, a greater reactivity (“with the quarter of turn”), a propensity to put itself in anger;
of the activity without rest, unproductive agitation. The person begins several things and does not finish them, for example;
a reduction in decency, a “loss of embarrassment” going sometimes until attitudes of seduction and contacts sexual with excess or randomly (whereas in her “normal” state, the person would not have wished to have this kind of behavior);
an acceleration of the thought: without delay of new thoughts cross the head of the person:

difficulties of concentration: difficulties of being held with the same activity, distractibility,
turbid of the course of the thought: while speaking about something, the person still deviates and still wire of its thought (multiple digressions) and it has evil to find the initial subject of which it wanted to speak,
the escape of ideas: the thoughts are followed extremely quickly (Tachypsychie), are hustled sometimes in the head. The person passes from the hundredth to the thousandths. Associations of ideas are slackened. The continuation of the thoughts remains logical for the person, but for its interlocutor, it is sometimes difficult to follow the wire of the speech (“cock with the ass”). The person who suffers from mania, having forgotten the goal of her account, is not inevitably any more able to answer later questions;

a need important to speak (Logorrhée), and an abundant word, accelerated, inarrêtable. It is about the reflection of the acceleration of the thoughts. In the extreme cases, the words precipitate so quickly that the listener has difficulties in follow;
an excessive insurance;
a reduction of the need to sleep, without the person also not feeling tired whom it would owe it while sleeping if little. The reduction of the sleep is often one of the first signs of an episode maniac;
altruistic feeling: envy to help the others, felt emotions of the others (hyperempathy);
emotional over-sensitiveness (emotions plus sharp) and sometimes sensory;
emotional lability: the fact of passing easily from the laughter to the tears;
sometimes negligence of the food or hygiene.

At the time of a mania, in one delusion of grandeur, the patient can engage in businesses leading to very unpleasant consequences for the people concerned and its close relations, for example when it is involved in debt to buy a hearth for animals or when it engages an orchestra, that it subscribes a credit which it will not be able to honor for example.

The complete image of a mania, at the same patient, can differ from case in case and often from episode in episode. The patient becomes aware of the suffering of his close relations and the social consequences only when the mania decreases. Serious feelings of shame thereafter are not rare. The friends and the family do not manage to prevent the patient from acting. A maniac lets himself neither slow down nor to give lessons.

The majority of these behaviors are foreign with the character of the patient who, during a phase maniac, generally does not realize that it is sick feeling “perfectly well” , (what makes the treatment difficult).

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