In all fairness, I only had a single consultation with Dr Novak. His demeanor was pleasant, but I got the impression that he wasn't really listening to my concerns.
I had consulted him for anxiety and depression. I told him that I was thinking about suicide and that I was consuming alcohol almost daily to calm down enough to work or sleep. Dr. Novak said that he didn't think I needed medication at all and that therapy would be much more important to my recovery. Did he not hear the bit about me struggling to get through daily life despite several years of therapy?
While he didn't think I needed medication, he was willing to write me a prescription for an SSRI. Never mind that I had tried 5 different SSRIs and SNRIs in the past and that I had discontinued them each time because of side effects. (SSRIs seem to give me a chronic daily headache that does not get better with time and doesn't respond to the usual headache remedies.)
Why does he think I would react differently to SSRI #6 than the other 5? To paraphrase his response: This drug is FDA-approved for my specific form of anxiety and some of the others I had tried were not.... But my complaint wasn't that the other SSRIs/SNRIs hadn't helped with anxiety (they did), my complaint was that I could not tolerate the side effects.
Uhm okay, different question. If I do experience the same side effects again on SSRI #6, how will he manage them? He gave me a lecture about the importance of doing a very slow taper to get onto the drug... which didn't answer the question of how he plans to manage side effects that persist after several months of treatment.
I never filled the prescription Dr. Novak wrote and I decided to consult another psychiatrist instead. I am glad I did. I found another amazing clinician who I feel heard by and who follows a different medication philosophy.
A few notes about his practice. Dr. Novak's office is located in a nursing home - enter, make a right turn to get to the doctor's offices, enter the waiting room, find a call button with Dr. Novak's name (to the left of the reception window). Dr. Novak will require that you keep a credit card on file which he can charge for your appointments. He was not using electronic prescription software when I saw him - that's good news if you want the power to decide how much of your medical history to share. read more