Gotta try them all, you know. Made a bucket list, starting from the least to the most toxic.
Seriously, it might be impatience together with a very long time it takes to up and lowers doses to therapeutic levels and back.
If there are no serious side-effects, to get a clear picture of whether meds work or not you often have wait through a few episodes. It just takes far too long to do all this by trail-and-error. Subdivisions of BP and other psychotic disorders—based purely on biochemical and genetic factors—should be made to be able to research efficacy.
Now we are far too much just means for naturalistic, bad/flawed experimentation. Just scientifically flawed. The knowledge about differences between people with BP might be there, but not the time and scientific rigour needed for reliable experiments, thus better treatment.
Do experiments very well and just once, now really, already!