I agree with MickeyCheeky, including her suggestion to have a serious talk about this issue with your psychiatrist. Ultimately, you do have a choice on this issue, but I'd like to emphasize that going off medications cold turkey is often a very unwise move. Patience is tough, but important.

To answer your question, medications are not a mistake for me. They are crucial to my mental well-being. And when I write "well-being", I mean sanity and safety from the illness.

Depression can be quite severe for people with both bipolar type 1 and 2. It can be dangerous and torturous! Mania can be equally dangerous for people with bipolar type 1, or for me, even more dangerous and torturous, especially if it is mania with mixed features. Even hypomania can be quite problematic for many people. Hypomania may not turn into hospitalizations, but it can cause various losses that are regretted severely. Just like mania with mixed features, hypomania with mixed features can be terribly rough. Psychosis? That is something that just must not be left unmedicated, in my opinion.

When I was a younger woman, my severe episodes were fewer and further between than they became when I grew a little older, meaning 30s and 40s. They were also less disabling. For me, my illness is my disabler, NOT my medications, like many people want to say. I won't say that medications aren't or can't be more disabling than the illness for some people, but that needs to be carefully figured out. So often people start to forget what brought them to the point of the diagnosis and treatment. So often the misery of the illness fades into distant memories.

Before I accepted my diagnosis and proper bipolar treatment, I tried to self-medicate, but with alcohol. Self-medicating with alcohol, drugs, or other unhealthy supposed "coping" tools can be extremely destructive and dangerous. I know very few people who succeed well in self-medicating mental illness with such things. Perhaps it seems to work initially, but it is like playing with the devil.

I tried a couple of times to quit meds cold-turkey. It landed me in the psych hospital those two times, and more times because of kindling and other factors. I had a nephew who quit his bipolar medications at around 22 years old. For a couple years life seemed much better, but then his illness came back with a vengeance. We lost him before he could even get back on a therapeutic dose of a moodstabilizer again. It was just one week after his 9th hospitalization.