What is your tapering schedual and what dose are you at? How long have you been on lithium?

I tapered off six meds two years ago. I started with the antipsychotics and then the benzos and anticonvulsants, I saved lithium for last. I did this over months, about 5-6 months. It went reletively smoothly just a few bumps here and there the first little bit, nothing major. This was probably about my 20th attempt at getting off meds. All my previous attempts were basically just ditching the meds suddenly.and not really putting a whole lot of prepration into finding other ways to manage

I'm still off all meds, no mood problems. I didn't gain weight on lithium, not much help there.

Do you have skills and tools to help you manage? How have your moods been recently?

Sorry for all the questions, just want to know your situation better and see if I can help anyway. I onow that at least in my case it took a pretty major overhaul of changes in my life and just the way I think to be able to walk away from meds for good. I have a bipolar 1 dx with psychosis nos, badisically dr's didn't want to choose between bipolar and schitzoaffective. I will admit I was doing exremely poorly. However, I feel that the changes I made and getting away from the meds literally gave me a new life. There was no way I could continue the way my life was. It is probably one of the best choices I ever made.

If you want I can always share things that helped me. Just let me know. It's not easy to get off and stay off them but I really see it as possible and for some people maybe it is what they need. I made a lot of changes prior to getting off meds and I think that was my saving grace this time.

With lithium and the many times I had gone off it, I never really got physical withdrawal like you see with ad's, more of a rebound affect. When you remove these chemicals the brain is used to being fed, blocking this receptor, uptaking that one... takes a little while to for it to get back to functioning regularly. Haha that's not the greatest explanation. Who knows what the heck they real mechinism behind lithium is, but I would say it was much easier to stop, it's more how are you going to handle the bipolar I think.