I have taken tegretol retard 1400mg for the last five years and it has been a good mood stabiliser for me. I experienced drowsiness at the beginning but this wore off, the best thing to do is to tirate the dose up gradually. I do not have any side effects from it now. However it was not enough on it's own to hold back a manic episode last year when I took a job with irregular shift patterns. I needed the extra help of seroquel for that. I would reccomend it, bearing in mind everybody has an individual reaction to medication.
tegretol is supposedly the safest among the 3 classical drugs for BP. the other 2 are lithium and valproex. Tegretal is not used much in the USA because of drug interactions and sometimes replaced by it's weaker cousin trileptal. i tried it myself 2 years ago but couldn't tolerate because of the headaches it caused me. However i assume it's better than the other 2.
look nothing of the sort as which is better than such and such it's all related to the person. ask your pdoc better