Research! ...and anxiety!

I have been researching Bipolar II,since the official diagnosis yesterday, and found some pretty interesting things that I had never seen before and that make HUGE sense to me.  This is one web page I found and the OCD link just struck me like a lightning bolt.  I will be interested to see how it might play out in the long run for my diagnosis.  

http://www.psycheducation.org/depression/Anxiety.htm

OCD has a complex relationship with bipolar disorder.  I'm certain I've seen some patients start out looking like they have classic OCD and end up looking like they have definite bipolar disorder without OCD.  These two conditions might be part of the same thing somehow, at least in some people.  At least we know they are found together very often, much more so that one would expect.  In one study, 20% of people with bipolar disorder had OCD, twice the number seen in unipolar depression (which is also higher than people with no diagnosis).^Chen
A group of researchers has looked at how OCD and bipolar relate.  They found that whereas unipolar depression was "incidental", i.e. not clearly related to the OCD (although common), by contrast bipolar disorder seemed to be more directly related to the OCD.  For example, people with religious and sexual obsessions as part of their OCD were more likely than those with other obsessions to have bipolar disorder.  The authors specifically recommend that bipolar disorder take precedence over the OCD in terms of which is treated first.^Perugi

Anyhow, I just took the fist litium and am waiting to see if it causes any side effects or not. So we'll see. ♥