Is bipolar just a sleep disorder?

I’ve wondered about this before.
Maybe bipolar is just some kind of major disruption to the sleep cycle. After all, look at the facts. Excessive sleep when depressed, and sleep deprivation when manic, are at the core of the illness. Maybe they are the cause of the illness, not just a symptom?
It seems to me that anybody who stays up for several days without sleep is going to be crabby, irritable, and irrational. They are also likely to then feel really bombed out and have to sleep lots and lots. Which looks a lot like depression.
So, how is that not just a sleeping disorder?
There are other clues. Bipolar looks a lot like cocaine addiction, and one of the chief problems with coke is that the user spends a lot of time being hyper-stimulated and not getting enough sleep. What could be causing this lack of sleep? The drug itself!

“Well, that’s different,” you might say. “Drug use has nothing to do with bipolar.”

Not so fast! One of the symptoms of a manic episode is drug and alcohol abuse. In fact, if someone has been recklessly using alcohol or drugs, a clinician will tick this off as one of the symptoms of mania. But wait a moment…. won’t drug and alcohol binges keep you awake? Is it possible that these are driving, or at minimum exacerbating, the manic episode? And why is this a symptom, rather than an alternative diagnosis?
These are just questions. I’ve never seen them adequately addressed. I’ve never seen anyone address them at all.
They are food for thought.
I can tell you that Dee was using coke for a time at the worst point of the mania, which was about 5 years ago. She hasn’t used it in about 4 years. She’s still not completely right, even all these years later. If I was to take this idea to its logical conclusion I could say that her brain has experienced long term changes and is still healing. In other words, ongoing symptoms of mania and depression are simply long term residual effects of extreme alcohol and drug abuse.
Again, this is just an idea. i’m not saying that it’s the case. I’m saying it could be the case, at least with some people. At least with Dee, my wife.

There are some similarities between bipolar and chronic sleep deprivation. This table shows them side by side:

Bipolar Sleep disorder
insomnia insomnia
irritability and aggression people who are tired get irritable
poor judgement poor judgement
incoherence, babbling people can make less sense when very tired
difficulty sustainging attention lack of sleep makes it hard to pay attention
euphoria, happiness, feelings of grandiosity interestingly, sleep deprivation can trigger euphoria
long periods of depression and sleep once you get to sleep, you’re out for a while.

Well, that doesn’t explain the whole gamut of bipolar symptoms. But the others – hypersexuality, delusions of grandeur and so on can either be explained by the substance abuse that often accompanies mania, or by the impaired cognition that goes along with it.

This could be off the mark. I am sure, though, that there is more than one person out there who has been diagnosed as having bipolar as the root cause of their problems, when in fact either sleep disruption or substance abuse, is the root cause of their problems.

Is Dee one of those people? I couldn’t say. I am certain though that the lifestyle she used to lead has played a role in damaging her brain and diminishing her ability to interact as a normal, well-functioning adult.

She is slowly getting better.

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