I am sorry you are struggling right now. That said, I am not surprised. Before we decided to discontinue all my meds in 2012, I first found and read basically every relevant paper ever published in English on discontinuing mood stabilizers in bp1. What I found was very scary. To sum up, if one actually has bp1 and then discontinues their mood stabilizer either quickly (over less than a month) or cold turkey, the chance of a big recurrence happening over the next 12 months is virtually 100%. Maybe someday I will explain more about this, but for now, that story is too long and this thread is about you, not me. The punchline is, we stopped my lithium and Abilify over three weeks. I did great for 11 months, then had a massive mixed state recurrence. Hospital. It was horrific.

I don'r ever want to go through that again. I would prefer to die prematurely from a side effect than do that again. Truly. You seem committed to doing this and so, I wish you all the best. But I would be misrepresenting myself if I didn't briefly communicate to you that I am very, very concerned about you. I hope everything goes well.

I suppose if there can be a silver lining here, it is this. Based on the literature, if you don't have a significant recurrence in the first twelve months, well then, you probably don't have bipolar disorder. Obviously, that could be important information, for a variety of reasons. Wishing you well.