Levine Richard MD

Interesting comments that I have just read. I went to Richard Levine initially in 2007. At that time he was very helpful, suggesting a slightly different class of antidepressants which turned out to be a good choice until it stopped working. I went back about 1 year later telling him I felt my depression coming back, that it was harder and harder for me to feel happy about anything. He said that there’s nothing else out there, he dismissed the use of trying a different medication. Whether this was on closure inspection a sign of professional burnout or actually a true belief that there were absolutely no medications out there, I will never know. I do know however that one should not advertise/​present themselves as a psychiatrist if medication is not one of your treatment modalities. This would put you into the category of therapist, LCSW, MSW, etc.

I had the same experience as Anne R. with the one star below. Dr. Levine completely invalidated my real experiences again and again, and in the end he led me astray, talking me out of going to a day program, taking me off a medicine rather than titrating it up to a therapeutic dose – the same medicine that like eight years later absolutely changed my life (thanks to a good-​if-​gruff doctor, Steve Baskin, who unfortunately has retired).
Dr. Levine did things like leave me sitting in the waiting room while he, leaving the door cracked, spoke on the phone with his broker. The waiting room is or was downstairs from the offices, so I assume he didn’t think I’d come upstairs to hear – but I did, because I’d been waiting long enough that I went upstairs to check with the front desk. Inside the office was just as bad: nothing I was going through was real. Bipolar II? It doesn’t exist, and in fact I was just trying to make myself feel special by wanting to have bipolar disorder (??). In comparison, the aforementioned Dr. Baskin – who has an enormous reputation in this region – put me on exactly the right dose of Lamictal for Bipolar II, and once I got up to about 200 mg, I experienced life for the first time ever in a way. I was suffering horribly when I went to see Dr. Levine, and he acted like I was making it all up. All of it. I’m a writer, and he kept suggesting that I was just some wannabe special snowflake who should just buck up and go get a real job rather than thinking she’s some suffering artiste. I asked him about going to a day program for intense outpatient care, and he said that it would be of no use, because it would be full of people with real problems and real illnesses. He’s treated people with serious mental illness, he said, derisively. When I asked him about switching off of a medicine that I’ve taken two separate times and that caused me to have problems with word retrieval, he said, «That’s not possible.» I even had a friend who’d experienced the same thing. I mentioned that, and she, too, was some fabulist. I don’t know why Dr. Levine is always so highly recommended – I went to see him because he had glowing recommendations on the Berkeley Parents Network. The man seriously starts your appointment late so that he can call his broker. Everything he discounted I later got treated for and treated successfully. I am baffled by any and all positive reviews. Mean, arrogant, and shockingly dismissive. More interested in his stock portfolio than you.

Quite possibly one of the worst psychiatrist out there, despite being well known in Berkeley and supposedly well respected for his practice. There is nothing worse than a doctor who doesn’t believe in what you are experience and tries to minimize the experience you are experiencing on day to day basis. To make the long story short, he basically claimed that my experiences weren’t legitimate because he claimed that his other patients with the same symptoms that I was describing to him acted differently then I did. Well no shit!!! Everyone is different and that is in the medicine world and outside the medicine world. I wasted about 2 – 3 years with this looney bin and don’t recommend anyone come see him or waste your money here because he is pricey. Check out other doctors in the building or in the building across the street, they are highly knowledgeable and will consider your experiences as real as the next patient.

Extraordinarily helpful psychiatrist; particularly helpful in treating my adult ADD. I had a very complicated insurance claim, and Dr. Levine took extra time to comply with numerous requests for more information, reports, phone calls, etc. Very smart, funny, extremely easy to converse with. My first psychiatrist, and I’ve been with him 3+ years — and counting! 100% recommended.