Sense of smell while manic/hypomanic

[sb7777]

Often, my sense of smell becomes heightened right before I have a manic/hypomanic episode. Does anyone else experience this connection, or have similar stories of links between senses (visual, auditory, etc) and mood?

[Elinah]

i get the same sensory experiences in taste. when i put a teaspoon of sugar in my tea/coffee it tastes like ive put 8 heaped teaspoons in it. it happens often and im not sure if its a hallucination or heightened awareness.

i understand where your coming from :)

[sb7777]

I think illusion is a better description for what I'm experiencing as well. Sometimes it's a flutter in my peripheral vision that makes me turn my head. Or seeing something move, again in my periphery. I also find that the experience is sometimes tied to when I'm due for another dose of Lithium. But I'm not sure if that's just coincidence or a real correlation.

[Amy4891]

I think the only form of hallucination I have had was seeing what I thought could have been a mouse running across the floor out of the corner of my eye. Though it happened several times so there was no way it was the same mouse or even more than one with the amount of times it happened.

I talked about it in the group therapy I went to today. They said sometimes there is illusions. For example; if there is a kid laying in bed with the night light on and it makes a shadow on the wall, and the shape of it makes the kid scared it is something else, but it is not.

I think a hallucination happens without an external stimulus. I am going to give a link, but without the http. Just copy and paste into your browser. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucination
I love Wikipedia. :-)

[sb7777]

Thanks hell1971. Your comments will better help frame the experience when I talk to my pdoc.

[hell1971]

I get this in a hypomanic / mixed state, I smell bad smells that no one else can smell or if they can its only mild to them but it seems extreme to me, i also have visual disturbances at the side of me of course when i look it is not what I thought or it is not really there, not sure if this is anxiety when in this state or wether it would be classed as hullucinations, still learning.

[sb7777]

I've definitely had intense sensory experiences in taste (like you mentioned) and vision (sunlight seems brighter, hurts my eyes). So it's entirely possible your experience is similar to mine. Thanks for the support.

You mentioned hallucinations -- do you get them often? I've been noticing more visual disruptions over the past few weeks. I wanted to see if others had that experience.

[Amy4891]

I had an experiance with a heightened sence of smell only on one occasion. My experiance was more with a hightened sence of taste especially towards salt. Everything salty tasted 10x more salty than it actually was. I wondered if it was a halucination or if it was actually a higtened sence. Who knows...what do you think?