I hope when you stopped lithium you notified your doctor right away. No one knows exactly how these drugs work. All of us have had to go through trial and error to find ones we can both tolerate and that work. Doctors actually do try drugs randomly, i.e. they may judge by prior experiences with a drug or by what they've read about it or by what side effects it's been know to have--what you can deal with and which you can't--but they can't know how it works for you until you've tried it.