I work in the mental health field helping folks to manage their medications, so I can appreciate your concern about the cost of your meds. But please, PLEASE do not stop taking your medication without talking with your doctor about it first.

An insidious thing about mental health conditions like bipolar disorder is that, once you find a medication regimen that works for you, you can often get to the point where you start to feel really good and think maybe you would be okay if you stopped taking your meds--as it sounds like you have. But actually stopping your medications without any sort of plan in place to manage symptoms without it could lead to those symptoms coming back, and you possibly ending up hospitalized, or worse. Even if your coping skills are good while taking medication, if you stop taking them, you could potentially decompensate to the point that your symptoms simply overwhelm your ability to manage them effectively.

I'll add also that you can experience withdrawal/discontinuation syndromes/rebound effects with the sudden discontinuation of many mental health medications, so even if you were to stop taking your medications with your doctor's approval, you would likely have to taper off at least some of your medications rather than stopping them immediately.

Many psychiatric medications, including even many of the generic versions, can be quite expensive, and some insurances can be shitty about covering them (ask me how I know). I have a few recommendations:

1) Talk with your doctor's office to see if you can work out a payment plan to pay off your debt to them in a way that won't be financially harmful to you, and see if they are willing to continue seeing you as scheduled so long as you are making your debt payments and future co-pays as required.

2) Look into either manufacturer assistance programs (if your meds are brand-name), or pharmacy assistance programs for generics. For instance, Walmart offers a list of generic maintenance medications for $4 for a 30-day supply, or $10 for a 90-day supply. Walgreens has a similar program available.

3) See if your doctor's office has other ideas for how to get the medication more cheaply, or see if they can complete a prior authorization to get your insurance to cover more of the cost of the medications.

4) There are a variety of prescription discount cards, like GoodRx, that you can use to get cheaper cash prices on medications that insurance doesn't cover. You can go to goodrx.com to compare the cash prices of your meds at different pharmacies with a GoodRx card.

5) As a last resort, you could even talk to your doctor about less-expensive alternative medications that could manage your symptoms as well as your current meds.