A very common problem with first-year psychology majors is that they tend to start diagnosing themselves, and then their friends and roommates, with more and more pathologies (usually coinciding with what they've learned in lecture that week). It stems from an inability of the inexperienced psychologist to discern between tendency and pathology.

Behavior is a spectrum, and while bipolar disorder can be milder in some instances than others, the point is that rampant self-diagnosis -- or should I say, self-mis-diagnosis, of a tendency as a pathology is what's fueling this misnomer of "psychological illness as cry for attention"