In 2015, Magda stepped into a psychiatrist’s office for the first time. “I was feeling so terrible,” she tells me. “I was sad all the time, I felt the world closing in around me, I saw no way out.” It wasn’t the first time Magda had felt this way—for the past two years, she had struggled with periods of darkness that overtook her seemingly at random. “When I stepped into that doctor’s office, I thought it would be the beginning of recovery. That’s the way it’s supposed to go; you’re sick, you go to the doctor, you get better.”

But Magda didn’t get better. After receiving a diagnosis of major depressive disorder, she began taking a daily dose of an SSRI antidepressant. “I remember feeling such hope when I filled that prescription,” she says. “But it didn’t help.” Nor did any of the other SSRIs she cycled through over the next year. In fact, her mood became increasingly unstable, and her depression reached new depths. “I thought I was going crazy. I had done everything I was supposed to do and yet there I was, sicker than ever.” There was a reason Magda wasn’t getting better: she didn’t have major depressive disorder.

Sitting in her psychiatrist’s office with tears in her eyes, talking about her sense of dread, her lethargy, her pervasive sadness, she certainly appeared depressed. But the psychiatrist wasn’t there on the weeks of elevated energy, the nights she forewent sleep, the days her thoughts raced with excitement, nor was she ever asked if she experienced such episodes. Magda never mentioned them because she didn’t recognize them as part of the problem. Those times were when she felt most alive; they were a respite from the pain of her depressive episodes, not something alarming that needed treatment. And so her bipolar disorder went unrecognized, her hypomania remaining invisible to both her and her physician, and the resulting mental health misdiagnosis prevented her from healing.