Dr. Astrid Freisen
Psychiatrist – and bipolar disorder
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Dr. Astrid Freisen treats people with mental illnesses. And the psychiatrist has bipolar disorder herself – which at some point she no longer wanted to hide. Here she tells our story – which makes her our strong woman in April.
It was 2010 and I was already working as a doctor in a mental hospital when I started doing things that were no longer normal. I couldn’t sit still anymore. I talked quickly and a lot and couldn’t be interrupted. I hardly slept at all.
Sometimes I was euphoric, but more often irritated and started with every argument. At some point my boss suggested that I take a two-week vacation. Instead, I went to a mental hospital a long way from ours. As a patient.
The roller coaster of emotions
In principle, I already knew what was wrong with me, although I didn’t want to admit it. Every year in winter I had depression, while in summer my mood was high – to be honest: a bit too high. A psychiatrist had diagnosed this as bipolar disorder years earlier: a change between depressive phases with a hopeless mood, and manic phases with euphoric to irritable mood and excessive activity, in between times with little or no symptoms of the disease. But I, who have to deal with mental illness every day, had pushed that far away from me. Until that point where it was obvious.
When I returned to my workplace after my inpatient stay at the clinic, I told my closest colleagues and my chief physician about my diagnosis. Hiding it would not have been an option either, they had noticed. At that time I was still in specialist training and only had a fixed-term contract, so I could have been got rid of. But it was signaled to me that I was considered a good doctor and would like to continue working with me, although it was clear that with the illness I needed a more regular daily routine and, for example, could no longer do night shifts. That was okay for my superiors, I was assigned to the day clinic and so I had no professional disadvantages.
Fight with shame
But I was so ashamed. In mania you do things that do not fit your own personality and are sometimes extremely hurtful for those around you. You only realize it afterwards. And now I would have loved to sink into the ground. I avoided my colleagues and tried to make myself as invisible as possible.
Until at some point I got to the point where I thought: I am a psychiatrist and I keep telling my patients not to be ashamed of their illness. But I hide myself. Why actually? Because as a doctor you mustn’t get sick yourself, especially not psychologically?
I was looking for a self-help group for mentally ill doctors. But there was nothing there. So I decided to start one myself. It took a lot of courage to do that because it was a big step in public. We are now not just a self-help group, but our own department at the German Society for Bipolar Disorders, which I lead. The fact that everyone, colleagues and patients, knows or can know about my illness when he or she Googles me is on the one hand very liberating. On the other hand, there is also the risk that I will attribute every conflict or mood to my bipolar disorder.
There is hope!
I can tell that there are reservations. There are enough colleagues who are of the opinion that one cannot work in psychiatry with such an illness. I think this attitude is mainly due to the fact that many of the patients only experience them in the acute phase of the illness. A bipolar disorder can be treated well with medication and supportive measures such as a regular sleep rhythm. I haven’t had a serious phase of illness myself since my stay in the clinic in 2010. Sometimes I tell the patient that too, although I usually don’t talk about myself: When I notice that they are very desperate and think that they will never be able to lead a normal life again with the disease.
Mental health is important – and concerns everyone! That is why we will post the topic for a week from April 19th gettotext.de/ mental-health in focus.
Dr. Astrid Freisen works as a specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy in a day clinic and heads the “Self-Affected Professionals” section at the German Society for Bipolar Disorders eV (DGBS).
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