About me
My name is Annett Oehlschläger. At the age of 47, I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and at first I didn’t understand what that meant. I had never heard the term before.
Between the ages of 47 and 54, I was in various psychiatric clinics a total of 24 times. That was a total of 571 hospital days. During this time, I learned very intensively as a patient how our highly developed medicineto deals with mental illness. This treatment consists primarily of psychotropic drugs and psychotherapy. Of course, these have their place. I needed the medication to be able to undergo therapy and the psychotherapy to learn to accept my illness. After eight years, I had done everything the system offered me, became more stable, but not the way I wanted to. I felt I was the system couldn’t offer my any more and looked for other ways.
More by chance, I discovered that there are other ways to strengthen the psyche than the ones I had previously known. Namely, by giving my body everything it needs for a stable mood and good drive. So I studied my illness even more intensively, read over 200 books and scientific studies, exchanged ideas with experts in various fields and found many building blocks of stability that I can determine and influence myself. This is how I found my way out of the labyrinth to lasting stability.
I have written down my knowledge in two books because there has never been such a summary before. My first book is entitled “Stability you can eat!?”and shows what options patients have to escape the vicious cycle of mania and depression. My second book is called “Stability as a way of life” and deals more with the “psychiatric system” and the use of psychotropic drugs. I also explain the deeper connections between brain health and our mood. I also advise sufferers and give talks at a bipolar day clinic in Berlin and have developed a 13-hour online seminar in which I share my knowledge in an understandable and structured way.
As you can see, it is important to me to share my personal experiences as a patient and my accumulated knowledge with you, so that you too can find a way to live well with the disease. I therefore see myself as a “guide” (in German “Pilot”), so that you too can go from being affected to being an expert.