It sounds like you really feel abilify isn't the right med for you. My personal experience was that it was very stimulating and so I'd agree with that but I'd bet you could find plenty of people who were sedated.

You can always ask to go on at a very low dose and move up. With Abilify we did that because it was my first AP and my pdoc "had a feeling". Which was accurate and I'm not completely sure why she chose it except that I was so freaked out by APs that maybe she thought I'd be more accepting of it. (I worked with psychiatric patients and had some messed up views of drugs based on the way the psychiatrists where I worked used them which wasn't always as recommended. Sometimes they just were shutting their patients up; they got paid the same no matter how much they had to do for the patient each month so it was in the dr's best interest to sedate everyone and the dr just wasn't very ethical on a number of things. Like once he wrote "patient feeling depressed following death of mother." That was true. 4 weeks later he wrote "depression resolved". So why was the patient still crying about her mom with me all the time? And when is grief (new grief) depression? He wouldn't increase her meds and she was having a very hard time with the grieving process with so little support; she was also grieving loss of full use of an arm due to a severe fracture. But she was fortunate he didn't just drug her up even more (drugs being the cause of the fracture in the first place).

Going totally on my abilify experience I'd want to try something else but that's just me and it was truly a rough drug for me; it caused akathesia which a number of drugs have but it also caused low blood pressure and several falls from that. I was only on it a few days. I just found it really stimulating and then the side effects weren't fun. But I can't say I was going to be happy about ANY AP at that time; I just didn't want to go there. I hadn't had overt psychosis yet and was willing to wait for it but my dr felt this was better.

It's important to try to set a time that you'll commit to trying a drug in your head. Obviously you break that if something goes wrong but if it's just side effects then try to get yourself to wait it out for a while and let the dosage be adjusted and the like for a while before you give up. I'm on my 65th cocktail right now and that is one thing I've learned (because I never can just give up a med unless there is good reason because there are a limited number left to try and some of them are more risky than others for me because of prior reactions). I have only quit 2 drugs without staying on them for 6-8 weeks without having a severe reaction and one of them later was shown to not be much of a mood stabilizer at all and the other (Latuda) I really wanted to try again but I needed samples and the sample person didn't get back to my dr in time for me to go on it at my last visit and I absolutely needed to be on something then. So loxapine it is and while it is weird to be on a med I can't even find much about on the internet because it is old and unused (and my pdoc doesn't even remember much about it including when she last used it) it is helping so strange choice by a dr who knows me REALLY well and has reasons to put me on whatever she chooses, it's not hard to wait it out. I get nauseous most nights after I take it and that's about the only side effect (on an incredibly low dose). So waiting it out for a few months will be easy. Committing to the med is almost as important as choosing it because as of now there just isn't a scientific way to choose meds (they are working on it though; I'm in a clinical trial for this).

It's just not an easy situation. I think it gets easier with time though.