Jones Janice A MD

I signed up for Unilocal just to warn people away from Janice Jones. She was not just an unhelpful psychiatrist, or a cold one: she was a juvenile, traumatizing, nasty person who left me in pain. And it pains me to give her one star. After she gave me a diagnosis and I did what I think most of us do – Google the medication she gave me as samples – I called her to ask if she would let me try a different medicine. I happened to have a sibling who was in grad school for psychology, and that sibling had a good friend who was doing a thesis on the very illness I had, plus the current preferred medications. For Bipolar II, the mood stabilizers prescribed for Bipolar I are often unhelpful; again and again I read or was told that I should ask my doctor for Lamictal. Pretty common behavior for any patient. When I called Janice Jones to ask, perfectly nicely, if I could try Lamictal instead, she literally started shouting, «You think you’re smarter than me?! Who has the degree? Who is the doctor here?» I was so shocked I couldn’t manage anything but to say «That’s so mean» and burst into tears. I was suffering with incapacitating depression, and this was an awful moment that still upsets me to this day. Even before her unprofessional outburst, I’d been feeling that she wasn’t helping me, and that it was all a waste of time. By the end of our relationship, she’d begun kind of «competing» with me, if that’s the right word for it: she’d start going off on these metaphorical tangents and showing off her vocabulary, talking how I talk as if the way her patient talked was threatening to her or something. It wouldn’t even be about me or mental health at all; it was just her trying to sound «smart» or «literary» or something (I’m a writer, and I guess I speak in a distinctively writerly way, because it was like she was imitating me. I vividly remember her going off on a weird reverie about butterflies.) Such behavior would be baffling from any doctor, but from someone who’s supposed to be helping you out of a terrible, suicidal hole it’s just unconscionable. I chose her blind out of a list of people covered by my insurance, and I wish there had been information about her out there. This was pre-​Yelp. I wanted to write this should anyone else be looking at a list and thinking, «Janice Jones, she’s close to me.» Fly to Guam before you see her. I can honestly say that she contributed to my depression and left me even mildly traumatized. When you’re close to suicide and the person who you’re paying to help keep you alive and give you the kindness of even just pretending to care about you, such misbehavior can have very serious consequences. I will also be complaining to the APA, but I wanted to get this out there for any of you who might be considering Dr. Jones. I should have written this a long time ago, but I hope this review can at least help somebody in the future.
There were issues with her medical-​side treatment as well, such as her urging me to get a urine test for neurotransmitter levels. After leaving Dr. Jones, while I was looking for someone new, I asked my GP if he could do some of the tests she’d recommended. He told me they were of no use – the neurotransmitter test, for example, is useless. Something like 95% of serotonin is in the stomach. She’s basically quackery + cruelty + competitiveness. Flee this lady!