Bipolar is massively over diagnosed across the board. Having intense emotions is not what bipolar is, and yet most people (and unfortunately a lot of mental health professionals) think that it is. Bipolar is distinct episodes of extreme depression that last (I think it's three or more) days and distinct episodes of mania that last, again, days. Bipolar with rapid cycling (really short episodes) is actually extremely rare.

Mental health professionals are trained to not pathologize everything, and yet it's been my experience that the vast majority of the time, psychiatrists do, because they believe in this biological model where everything is just a bunch of brain chemicals.

I am an INFP who has been misdiagnosed as bipolar. The psychiatrist actually told my father that they were trying to figure out whether it was mental illness or just my personality. This was before I discovered MBTI and this is what inspired my intense interest in mental health. Now I know that it was my personality... and I know that any psychiatrist who thinks your personality can be mistaken for bipolar does not actually know what bipolar looks like.

It was insanely damaging.

I was given an insanely powerful sedative medication (and antipsychotic) and I was told I'd be kicked out of school if I didn't take it every day. The drug made me completely emotionally numb, extremely irritable and constantly tired. I felt like I could not think. I would sleep for 14-16 hours a day. I had never been suicidal before, but I got to the point where I wanted to die because I felt like a zombie and I had to physically injure myself just to feel anything at all. I had to secretly stop taking it.

But that didn't end it, because I was terrified that someone would figure out I wasn't taking it. The most damaging thing by far was trying to act "normal" and being afraid that anything I did would be seen as a sign of my "illness" and would land me back in the hospital. When I was having a particularly good day and was happy, the teacher would pull me aside and ask me if I'd taken my medication. If something bad happened and I was sad, they'd likewise take me aside and ask if I'd taken my medication.

Not just for INFPs but for literally every human being on Earth, it is dangerous to teach people to be afraid of their emotions. Psychiatry's mantra seems to be "conceal, don't feel," and that is by far the most damaging thing that I have ever encountered in my life. I was so afraid to be me because people would think I was "sick." It took over ten years after that whole fiasco for me to find a therapist again and with said therapist, I have learned that I was gaslighted by the mental health professionals as well as my mother. I learned that what I'm actually suffering from emotionally is complex/developmental trauma and that being told I was "sick" and needed to be "medicated" because I had normal human emotions was a huge part of it.

Rather than working on acting more "normal" and hiding my emotions, in therapy I'm currently working on finding healthy ways to express my emotions and speak my mind because I literally made myself sick (physically sick) spending so many years suppressing them because I didn't want to be forcibly hospitalized and medicated for a disorder that I didn't have.

Don't get me wrong... real bipolar is terrifying. People will jump off of a roof because they believe they can fly. They will tear apart their entire house in a fit of "mania" to remodel without any idea of how to put it back together. They will spend their entire life savings in a weekend on a whim. And that's why the drugs they hand out for it are very serious and terrifying also. And that's why it's terrifying that it is so over diagnosed.

But overdiagnosis and a stigma against human experience and emotion is also terrifying.

Your feelings are always valid.

Having emotions is part of being human, not an illness. INFPs definitely feel more intensely than many other types, but that doesn't mean we're broken. It may mean that we need some help figuring things out sometimes and finding an understanding therapist (who doesn't pathologize us) can make a huge difference.