> I don't know whether my brain was sufficiently re-wired by those 9 months of pills or what, but it's a bit strange to me that essentially every psychiatrist w

> I don't know whether my brain was sufficiently re-wired by those 9 months of pills or what, but it's a bit strange to me that essentially every psychiatrist would have insisted something like this was impossible. Bipolar disorder disappears in some people spontaneously. Around 10% of people who have a first bipolar episode will not go on to have a second one, even if they permanently discontinue medication. And some people who have a second episode will never have a third, even if they stop taking medication, although I don't have an actual statistic on that. Let's suppose it is 1% of all bipolar cases – which is a figure I just made up, but probably in the right ballpark. Since bipolar is around 1% of the population, people like you would be around 0.01% of the population. That sounds insignificant, but in a country like the US there would be over 30,000 people like you, and worldwide could be over 700,000. I think the psychiatrists who told you this is "impossible" probably knew that it actually wasn't. It is just that it is rare, and they don't want to give patients and their families false hope or encourage non-compliance with treatment, so instead of telling you the truth that it is 10% or 1% or whatever of all cases, they tell you a "white lie"/"simplification" that it is 0%. 90-99% of the time, their lie turns out to be true for the person they told it to. In terms of whether 9 months of medication "rewired your brain" – it is impossible to say. It is possible that without medication you would not have gone into remission, and would have had further episodes. It is also possible that you were always going to remit anyway, and still would have even without medication. Nobody really knows. The fact is, for just about all psychiatric disorders, our knowledge of what causes them, and how the medications work, is extremely incomplete, and we don't know enough to answer those questions in individual cases.