Who am I?

From a medical point of view, I was a disaster! In my life, I had been hospitalized for more than three dozen times. I even received the last rites three times. Signs of adrenal insufficiency were already found in my thirties. I was treated for hypothyroidism since I was 38.

Only many years later, the correct diagnosis could be made: I was probably suffering from autoimmune polyglandular syndrome type 2, APS-2 for short. APS-2 has a polygenic cause and includes autoimmune adrenal failure along with a autoimmune thyroid disease or type 1 diabetes. Often additional diseases can be diagnosed. In my case, I was indeed diagnosed both as having thyroid disease and adrenal failure as well as other diseases: even so, neither the cause nor the relationship between these illnesses was detected.

As early as a child I was often sickly: I had scarlet fever, from which I almost died. I had measles, whooping cough and bronchitis and many infections of the upper airways in later years. I suffered from jaundice. Still, I loved sport. Yet my physical condition didn’t prove to be equal to these activities, so my highly recurrent sport injuries were undoubtedly due to that fact. At 16, my tonsils were removed. At 13 I was farsighted, which is unusual for this age. Since I was 17 years old, I suffered from gastrointestinal problems. There may be a connection between these severe intestinal inflammatory problems (eg, I suffered from a duodenal ulcer and from colitis) and the then unknown underlying disease, which was treated with steroids. I had to eat tons and exercise to maintain my weight. Otherwise I would have been rather meager, which my mother noticed with concern. Therefore, in her diary, she described me as having ‚that lincolnesque look' (secretly she preferred me that way). Throughout my term I had to take testosterone tablets daily: to maintain my weight, possibly also to treat the consequences of my steroid medication and my underlying disease, although my testosterone level was obviously still high enough to beget 4 children. I repeatedly suffered from anemia. Since I was 21 years I suffered from back problems, which worsened steadily, so I had to wear a corset finally. During the war, my doctor told me not to swim after I was injured while swimming ashore, away from our ship which had been sunk by a destroyer. It took me 10 days to recover from the severe exhaustion.

Even during the election campaign, I was always close to exhaustion. After I was elected my hands were shaking at the following press conference. This time I needed two weeks to recover from it. Nevertheless, I managed to present myself before the elections as a youthful, sporty and dynamic candidate. Today, however, it is questioned whether it was right of me that I had concealed my health condition before my voters. It is indeed very unlikely that I would have ever been elected if I had not withheld the exact circumstances of my health. I even suffered from depression and weeks of diarrhea after I suffered my greatest political defeat. Besides the already mentioned I took a variety of drugs, among others also antidepressants.

Yet my life was marked by an unparalleled success. At the height of my political career, I signed a bill that is still being discussed today and which founded the beginning of the deinstitutionalization of psychiatry in my country and created the basis for a community-centered care of the mentally ill. I had in fact understood, not least because of my biography and blows of fate in my own family that mental illness and intellectual disabilities posed the greatest challenges in our public health policy. Above all, I had understood that the public understanding of mental illness, its prevention and treatment, had not kept pace with the advances in medicine in recent decades. As a result of stigma of the mentally ill, at that time 600,000 people with mental illness and another 200,000 with mental retardation were treated in the national institutions, most of them in permanent confinement. A large part of them was treated with antiquated methods. I had to learn that these diseases meant enduring suffering for the patients and their families. Unfortunately, my plans were never fully implemented until today. Admittedly, the number of inpatient beds was down sized, yet without creating the much needed decentralized treatment in the communities. 

Fortunately, my own nephew continues fighting today to overcome the stigma of mental illness. 

Who am I?