Prior to taking Effexor, I'd only had one very mild hypomania incident that lasted only a few days, about a year before.*

Since my few weeks on Effexor, over the last couple of years, I've been hypomanic often, and it won't go away on its own.

There's this reinforcing nature of mania. Hence why I can't smoke pot. Patri figured out early on that smoking pot is a hypomania trigger for me.** The way mania works is that once the neural pattern starts it takes on a life of its own. So the high doesn't stop once I'm sober.

So maybe that's what happened on a grander scale. Maybe all of this hypomania I've been having is the aftermath of that one initial short lived bought of full blown mania.

* <sub>In retrospect. I had no idea that that initial few day long random high was hypomania until after being diagnosed.

** This started after the that first manic episode. I'd smoked pot before then and never had any after effects.</sub>