I didn't try lithium until at least 3 years into my treatment. Neither pdoc went for it first! In fact, with my current pdoc, it was one of the last things on her list! My first pdoc went with lamictal first which for BP II is what I thought was most common...and after lamictal was Zyprexa, so we even changed the class of med...

Depakote is a pretty good drug. I was on it for quite awhile, but eventually stopped because it gave me a really bad tremor. I didn't gain any weight from it at all, and I haven't really heard too much about it being a weight gainer. And a nice effect of depakote, if you have migraines, is it will stop them. It's used off label for migraines, and I noticed that when I went off it, my migraines came back (and I didn't know the migraine stuff until after so it definitely wasn't the placebo effect).