It happens that quickly.

When my brother had his first manic episode, he seemed a little off for a few days--he wasn't sleeping, he just seemed really high energy and jittery and talkative, when normally he's quiet and laid back.

Then on Christmas morning, we noticed he wasn't upstairs with the family to open gifts, so I went downstairs to wake him up. I noticed a bunch of weird symbols were drawn on his door in sharpie, really odd, and I knew my parents would freak out. I knocked and he opened the door and had this frantic look of excitement in his eyes. I was shocked when I looked into his room--my brother is a talented sketch artist and he had drawn these wild scenes on almost every inch of his walls, in sharpie, along with lots of words and phrases that didn't make sense. The drawings were violent and graphic and absolutely bizarre.

He told me he had stayed up all night making our presents, which were just old record sleeves covered in symbols written with sharpie.

We tried to talk to him but he didn't make any sense. He kept talking about how Gucci Mane was his messiah, and how he knew I was conspiring "with the republicans" to start a revolution (I'm a staunch democrat), all sorts of really odd things.

We tried talking with him to figure it out but he got worse over the next few days. The episode culminated with him taking off his shirt, smashing a bunch of glass items he found in the house, and running barefoot into the woods behind our house. My parents has no choice but to call the police for his own safety. He was hospitalized for a week.

Manic episodes happen quickly, and they will turn a person's personality inside out. Talk to your friends parents immediately. She's in danger and she's not thinking clearly.