I was a patient of Dr. Park from 2021-2022. At the time, I was unsure if my diagnosis (from 2015 with a different psychiatrist) of bipolar disorder was accurate or not but agreed to take the medication prescribed, in good faith. Around the end of June 2021, I began having severe panic attacks that quickly grew from once or twice a week to everyday, multiple times a day. At the time, I was prescribed Geodon.
The panic attacks were so bad they caused me to run out of my apartment because they made me feel claustrophobic and like I needed to keep moving since every minute felt like an hour. I tried every grounding technique I knew: hot/cold showers, hot/cold baths, pacing around my living room and bedroom, aromatherapy, drink ice cold water, putting an ice cube on the back of my neck, deep breathing, I even tried the tapping method! Nothing worked!
The scariest part was, as time went on, I developed a symptom called vertical/horizontal nystagmus where my eyes would kinda wobble and I felt like I had no control of where my eyes would move. At the peak of the panic attacks, it felt like they wanted to roll to the back of my head, or move all the way to the right side of my head. Eventually, I felt like my body would move involuntarily with my eye movements, too.
I told Dr. Park what was going on. She prescribed Propranolol. It went up in dose. That never worked, it had the same effect as a sugar pill. Next, she prescribed Gabapentin. After a few weeks, I developed a tolerance to that.
She prescribed me a 2 week script of Xanax. This was concerning for me, personally, because I have a history of substance abuse, specifically with Xanax. She knew about this. It concerned me, but I agreed because I just wanted the panic attacks to stop. I actually didn't end up abusing my 2 week script of Xanax, I was able to only use it for emergencies. This tactic stretched out my script from 2 weeks to about a month, more or less.
Now, when these panic attacks began, they only lasted maybe an hour, or so. And then they'd go away. Eventually, they grew to last almost the entire night, affecting my work. At the time, I was a contact tracer for the city of New York; an already anxiety-inducing job. Towards the end of my employment, I began logging off 30 minutes - 1 hour earlier because my panic attacks (that used to start after work, typically right before bed, they were starting during work).
On one occasion, I had to log out of work early and call in sick, because I was having a bad panic attack. On another occasion, my panic attack began at 7:30 pm (my clock out time was 9 pm, and I was working that day) and didn't stop until my roommate went in an Uber with me to a hospital in Brooklyn (at 1 am) and needed two emergency doses of Ativan to finally stop the panic attack. I didn't receive the emergency drugs until almost 3 am. So from 7:30 pm until 3 am, I was having a full blown panic attack.
Hyperventilating and crying in an emergency room, at an ungodly hour, because of spontaneous panic attacks... Or so I thought! Eventually, Dr. Park ran out of ways to treat the panic attacks. She told me that she would begin to taper me off of Geodon, because she knew that Geodon could cause panic attacks...
I only continued to see her so I could be tapered off of Geodon in a safe and controlled way. By February 2023, I began to look into alternative methods to treat my mental health. She doubled down and suggested Spravato, which my insurance didn't cover. She suggested I pay out of pocket for the ketamine infusion treatments... On my tiny barista salary, that wasn't a possibility. So she prescribed me 2 more anti-depressants, on top of the one I was already taking. At which point, I decided to stop seeing her since I was off the Geodon already and decided to risk not taking Propranolol and the one anti-depressant she prescribed, and that I had been taking.
I no longer felt safe with my health and mental health in the hands of Dr. Park. 2 years lost to panic attacks that she could have stopped. I'm okay now. No more panic attacks, no meds.