Psychiatry, Psychotherapy & Psychosomatics

Psychiatry and psychotherapy deal with the recognition and treatment of mental disorders. The latter are very common, occur on their own or together with physical disorders whose course and chances of recovery they influence.

Especially chronic physical disorders are often accompanied by mental disorders. Treatment can be by medication or psychotherapy. Which way makes sense depends on the conversation between the patient and the doctor.

In unserem MEDIZINICUM Hamburg arbeiten Spezialisten aus den Fachbereichen der Psychiatrie, Psychotherapie und Psychosomatik. Wir arbeiten in unserem Team, bestehend aus 75 erfahrenen Medizinern aus über 30 Fachrichtungen interdisziplinär zusammen, um Ihre Symptome ganzheitlich zu betrachten und eine zielsichere Diagnose stellen zu können.

Help with mental disorders

depressions

Depression is very common, almost every second person suffers from depression at least once in their life. The loss of quality of life is in the foreground, and the tiredness of life that often occurs at the beginning of the disorder is particularly problematic!
Symptoms: loss of joy, drive and interests, feeling of being worthless or unimportant, concentration and memory disorders, loss of appetite, no interest in sexuality, sleep disorders, tiredness of life.
The causes are usually manifold, various stress factors that lead to an activation of the stress system add up over weeks and months; as a result, there is often no clear cause or "reason" recognisable.

Depression can be treated well if it is started in time. It is important to relieve occupational or emotional overload, often by taking sick leave, to treat sleep disorders with medication; the actual therapy can be medication or psychotherapy through specific psychotherapies. If depression occurs together with physical illnesses, the treatment strategy should be worked out jointly by the physical physician and the psychiatrist.

anxiety disorders

Anxiety, with or without cause, is almost as common as depression, and often occurs together. The most irritating are panic attacks, seizure-like fears of loss of control accompanied by threatening bodily sensations for which there is no obvious reason. Fears with specific triggers - fear of heights, spiders, snakes, etc. - are easier to control. Social phobias can also be very debilitating if you cannot talk, eat etc. in the presence of others, especially strangers.

The obvious avoidance behaviour is not a good idea because avoidance seems reasonable at first glance but has a strong tendency to expand, so that eventually you are not able to do anything at all on your own anymore.
The treatment of choice is behavioural therapy, in which the individual fears are systematically reduced with clear, transparent treatment procedures.

alcohol or tablet abuse or dependence

Although it is hard to imagine our daily lives without alcohol, it should not be forgotten that it is toxic , i.e. it can damage almost all organs depending on the dose. You notice this, among other things, because you tolerate less as you get older. Moreover, some people should not drink alcohol at all because they become dependent .

Painkillers and tranquilizers also damage your organs if taken permanently and make you dependent in the long term. Weaning therapies for alcohol and tablets cannot usually be carried out on an outpatient basis.

insomnia

You usually only realise the value of sufficient and regular sleep when you no longer sleep well. Sleep disorders can have very different causes; various specialists work on this issue at the Stephansplatz Clinic.
Generally speaking, the more regular you are, the better you will sleep.
It is completely normal that stress, losses or acute existential worries affect your sleep. Longer-lasting sleep disturbances are often an indication of an incipient mental disorder, e.g. depression. Apart from herbal remedies, all medicinal sleep aids should be taken with the utmost caution and only under close medical supervision because of the risk of dependence.

age-related illnesses

A number of other mental disorders, such as obsessive-compulsive disorders, post-traumatic disorders, emotionally unstable disorders or psychoses can of course also be diagnosed and treated at a high level in the clinic at Stephansplatz.

Prof. Dr. med. Josef Aldendorf is a proven specialist in psychiatry and psychotherapy. As an author, he understands how to bring complex interrelationships in these areas comprehensibly to the point.

Why do psychiatrists also work at the MEDIZINICUM?

Physical illnesses do not leave our soul cold

Dear patient,

You may wonder why, on our website, among all the internists, Orthopaedists, Gynaecologists, Ophthalmologists etc. in the MEDIZINICUM Hamburg there are also two psychiatrists. The reason is quite simple.

Physical illnesses do not leave our soul cold. Especially when such illnesses can be treated well, but still do not go away completely, but persist in a more or less pronounced residual symptomatology. We would like to be intact, and chronic movement restrictions or pain are a recurring annoyance, an incentive to constantly think about it. Sometimes such physically experienced symptoms trigger feelings, even strong feelings, anger, despair, fear. We do not want to have this disease, feel demoralised by it, fear the worst for the future.

Now it is a thing with feelings. They have guaranteed our survival in evolution, arise to signal to us that something important, sometimes even threatening, is happening. They are also an indication that our soul is processing an event, a difficult interpersonal encounter, but also an illness.

Illnesses are not easy to deal with

Illnesses are not easy to deal with, nor do they simply go away again. Therefore, it is perfectly natural that they trigger strong feelings in us. But if we have dealt with them intensively enough for a while, they should then go away. A problem rather arises when we avoid them because, for example, we do not want to consciously deal with an illness, but think it is better not to think about it at all.

Unfortunately, this does not work at all, the problem is not solved, the obvious strategy of not wanting to think about it is no good. Because as we should know since Sigmund Freud's times, our soul has an unconscious part. And in it, emotional issues that we don't want to get to, that we push away, put in the basement, so to speak, continue to work. They don't give you any peace, which you notice, for example, when you no longer sleep well, but wake up around three or four in the night and brood. Brooding means that your thoughts get stuck on a point that worries you, taking up more and more space until you are really desperate and don't know what to do. It also wears us down when we can't sleep. Brooding never leads to a solution. That's why it would be better if we could just let it go. However, this usually does not work, but when this symptom returns in many nights, it is often the beginning of depression.

Depression - a normal disorder

Depression is the most common mental disorder, almost every second person has it at least once in their life. Depression thus occupies a somewhat strange special position: on the one hand, it is a clearly defined disorder according to the international classification of diseases, and on the other hand, it is so common that it cannot actually be described as abnormal. A normal disorder! It has the advantage that it can be treated easily, quickly with medication or, if it takes a little longer, with psychotherapy. The changes in mood, drive, concentration, the deterioration in quality of life, the "grey colour" in which everything seems to be immersed and also the sleep disturbances are therefore not signs of increasing age, decay, or unavoidable accompanying symptoms of a physical illness, but can be treated well. You can get rid of them with the right treatment!

This is the good news and the reason why there are also two psychiatrists working in MEDIZINICUM.

Prof. Dr Josef Aldenhoff