I don't see a lot written about asexuality and bipolar disorder.
One of the common symptoms of manic, hypomanic, and sometimes mixed episodes is hypersexuality. What does this look like? What does this feel like?
I can only talk about my own experiences here. It feels like something entirely new is created, like I'm seeing a new color like UV light for the first time. I don't normally feel it for anyone. The times I have looked at someone and thought "damn I want to fuck them" were all during hypomanic episodes (I believe—sometimes it's hard to tell in retrospect whether an elevated period was technically hypomania, or a subthreshold mood change). Same with the time that I had enthusiastically consensual sex (plenty of it, which I still look back on fondly—even if I think I'll never want to do that again, not enough to seek it out anyway), and even then I was a strictly stone top with fairly hard limits due to aversion and repulsion.
On average, people with bipolar 2 spend less than 2% of our lives hypomanic (Judd et al. 2003, "Long term symptomatic states of bipolar I vs. bipolar II disorders"). I'm probably really close to that average. And it doesn't even happen during every hypomanic or mixed episode—I have never had it happen in a mixed episode.
So given that context, I am almost always asexual and am almost always indifferent or averse to almost all sex. I have the same needs from the world as most sex averse people do. The main sexual right that I need is to opt out of sex entirely.
But I still feel like I don't really count as either strictly asexual or strictly sex indifferent (ranging to averse). It does make me feel like my hypomanic episodes have somehow betrayed who I really am.
And yet these are real experiences that I had. They don't feel like an illness. They especially didn't feel like one at the time (hypomania usually feels like an increased level of mental health, capability, focus, creative output, etc.). I don't have regrets.
I intended to make this about bipolar disorder and asexuality in general. Not just about me.
So I will say that even allo bipolar people have confusing, unusual, or regrettable sexual experiences and attractions during hypomania or mania. This is a quote from Chris Aiken's Bipolar, Not So Much, a self- help book for people with bipolar 2, bipolar not otherwise specified, or recurrent major depression with mixed bipolar features:
New relationships can form in this electrified state, some of which are later regretted. Sexually, you may find a broader range of people attractive during hypomania. Heterosexuals may experiment with bisexuality. We’ve even seen [gay] men who—to their bewilderment—find themselves attracted to women during hypomania.
And so it goes with asexuality.
I wonder how many bipolar aces don't have the language of asexuality. I wonder how many of us don't have the language of bipolar disorder—it takes on average over 7 years for us to get a correct diagnosis (Ghaemi et al., 1999, "Is bipolar disorder still underdiagnosed? Are antidepressants overutilized?"—note that this is actually one of the lower values in the literature, and I found other studies showing even longer average delays up to 10 years). For me, it took 15 since my first psychiatrist appointment. And I'm sure there are some of us in this tiny intersection who do have the language and the diagnosis and just can't see how the two could possibly fit together.