Another feature about this guy is his low threshold of boredom.
He'll pick up on a task and work frantically at it, accomplishing
wonders in a short time and then get bored and drop it before its
properly finished. He'll do nothing but strum his guitar and lie around
in bed for several days after. That's also part of the pattern too;
periods of frenetic activity followed by periods of melancholia, withdrawal
and inactivity. This is a bipolar personality.
Actually, that also sounds like the prompt on a psychology exam, and the answer is "Attention Deficit Disorder".
Or, rather, it fits what I wish I could feel free to do as life cycles between these phases. What usually happens is I have to keep going to work and slogging through stuff even after I finish a productive frantic stage, and it's really really hard to do that. I get very slow. I feel down/demotivated/depressed during the down phase. Then the next frantic/excited stage hits (randomly as far as I can tell) and I work on the currently interesting feature/framework/whatever with all my waking energy until the phase suddenly fades on me. Rinse, repeat.
I was, straight out of hell, diagnosed as having bipolar disorder, and subsequent pharmacotherapy not only controlled my most salient symptoms, but helped me untangle many, many psychological issues.
After all that process -- two years, maybe -- me and the shrink began to look into some things that still happened, and arrived the conclusion that I have ADHD too. The comorbidity (epidemiological correlation) is actually not low.
Because I then went into palliative care for the ADHD (it's much less effective than bipolar, essentially because the drugs keep you "more on the edge" so you feel motivated to do things -- which is just a crutch), and I have a good idea of what ADHD and bipolar feel like.
Many things in the essay sound like ADHD. But if you remove the first sentence, that paragraph sounds more like bipolar compressed into a too-short time span. Change "days" for "weeks" and you have rapid-cycling bipolar.
Overall, the cluster that he refers to sounds more like the Dynamic Duo (bipolar+ADHD) than either condition alone.
