Bipolar Mania Symptom – Grandiosity- and Financial Turmoil

We all love to spend money and experience the joy of buying some good or a beautiful something like a car, a house or anything good for our selves or members of the family. It is normal that we enjoy the fruits of our labor once in a while by indulging in a few things, while living within our means. But, some people can have an obsession with spending and running into huge debts, which may look innocent and seem unimportant. On one side they like to spend, and on the other they are crying out for help with the huge debts they have accumulated. If you or members of the family are spending so much money and are worried about your spending be aware, because manic spending is a well-known side effect of uncontrolled bipolar disorder. For many, the formula “bipolar mania = money problems + headaches,” is quite real.

Red Flags

One of the most common bipolar mania symptoms is impulsive and irrational spending. Dr Ronald R. Fieve, an expert, describes bipolar excessive spending in his book as “the lifestyle of the manic-depressive who is in a high tends to be a glorious scattering of money". These wild spending sprees can take many forms;

1. Shopping Sprees

Some bipolar children with  mania symptoms spend money on stupid little gadgets just for the sake of spending, or people with credit cards will go on shopping sprees, buying crazy manic purchases which we can call funny and outrages like 4 i Pods. One to be used in the morning, one for midday, the third for the afternoon and the remaining one for the evening. These people may go on wild shopping sprees with a self-medicating overtone.

2. Crazy Investment
Because of the grandiose crazy thoughts, these people will go into crazy investments thinking that nothing can go wrong. With these people there is no sense of logic and risk because their mind is blocked, all they are thinking about are these big crazy ideas.

3. Expensive Gifts
Have you heard about the car dealer who gave a car each for his staff as a gift? Well, he was suffering from bipolar mania. The buying of these extravagant gifts can be for families, friends or for charity. They usually do this because of the need to impress that they are a good person.

4. High Sex Libido
Because, bipolar mania symptoms also comes with the acting out of this strong sexual urges, on some very distressing scenarios bipolar mania patients are known to spend large sums of money on travel, hotel accommodation, pornography, prostitution, champagne, lingerie, and on any emotional outlet they get their hands on. What makes this scenario worse is, most do not have the money to pay for all these.

5. Gambling
This is a high addiction outlet, gambling to the point of losing everything. This comes in the form of horse racing, online poker and Las Vegas type of gambling.

What can you do?

The variations of these forms of mania episode are endless. And as much as you can, take cash, credit cards and ATM cards and put it somewhere safe. If you think they are out of control, consider taking their car keys and hiding it, which they may not like, but it may mean fewer headaches in the future. The second one is get them to take their medication or seek a doctor for diagnoses. It is better to be paying very little now on bipolar medication than loosing large sums of money on dept accumulated during the mania episodes.