A person that is bipolar is someone with a very serious mental condition when not taking prescribed medications?

Sometimes: Bipolar disorder can be very serious and does typically require long term management with medications. However, the nature of bipolar disorder is that people usually do quite well some of the time and then periodically have a bout of depression and other times have a manic episode. Between these depressive and manic episodes they might function very well. It is important for them to be monitored