When you're bipolar, you spend less time in the emotional midrange, where social skills are built, and develop a social deficit. (Some people recover in their 20s, because a 20% social deficit is catastrophic at 20 but not at 40-- being "socially 16" at 20 is devastating, but at 40, it means you're socially 32, which is not a big deal-- but some don't). You also spend more time than most people in intense states, which makes you more creative. So bipolar people have a paradoxical age-skew where they seem socially younger but, in some critical ways (creative maturity, ethical insight) tend to be substantially older and more experienced, because they've spent more time at extremes.

From this, there's a tendency (out of resentment?) for people with BP to discount the experiences and skills of normal people as trivial "small talk" and turn emotional and ethical extremity ("I've really experienced life") into a virtue.

Bipolar, I'm convinced, is a different thing from being manic-depressive (which would, in 2014, be called hypomanic-depressive if the term were still used; but to save keystrokes I'll use "manic" even though modern psychiatry only uses "mania" for extreme highs that even most bipolar people never get.) Manic-depressive is present pathology, a symptom profile that few bipolar people have all the time. On the other hand, bipolar (as I'd define it) is a type of mind (creative, judgmental, ethically rigid) that has advantages (if the manic-depressive symptoms are contained) and drawbacks, but that never goes away, even if the manic-depressive symptoms remit. Well-treated bipolar people tend (contrary to stereotype) to be unusually conscientious, loyal, and self-aware. The flip side of it is a sort of extreme moral mysophobia.

It actually makes sense. If you're bipolar, little things have gigantic consequences. A night of heavy drinking can have you suicidally depressed for a week. Simple excitement about an intellectual interest can become socially harmful (you don't realize that others don't share the interest). If you live in a world where you're punished (by internal and external causes) severely for small mistakes, you tend to become intolerant of others who get away with much more.