Herr Prof. Dr. med. Matthias Elzer

The reason for my visit to Mr. Elzer is a "prolonged depressive phase", which I prefer to call "burned out" aka light burnout. In our first conversation I conveyed my current symptoms to Mr. Elzer: insomnia, loss of appetite, listlessness, very strong forgetfulness, confusion, disruption of the sense of smell and taste, emotional instability (quickly irritated, very overly sensitive and for a short time also numbness) and permanent tiredness. Triggered by some very debilitating events in the near past. In the first conversation I made it clear that I no longer need help, stress myself, no longer turn mosquitoes into elephants and switch off, no longer take work for the weekend or home. In his view, the answer lies in my past, which we will consider in the next session. Mr. Elzer never takes notes during the meetings and still knows in the next meeting what we discussed in the first - I found that very impressive. So in the second session we talked about my past, old scars, forgotten pain and bad memories / feelings came back. I wanted to prepare for session number 3 and spent some time at home with ugly memories. Before I go into detail, just a few key sentences on session number 3: The following offers are available in psychotherapy: 1, 2, 3 .... "In my opinion, you don't need any of this, you can go back to work on Monday." "You have got to know each other a little better now and can certainly deal with it differently now." That my memory and some of the other symptoms were still bad was not even addressed. Finally, he arranged the last of the 4 preliminary talks with me, because "he couldn't offer me more". At that moment I felt like I had had breakfast. I came to him because I needed help because of my self-stressing behavior and he sent me back to the world of work as almost healthy after he also stressed me with conversations about ugly things from the past that did not improve my problem or well-being in any way to have. Finally, he said to me that he found it remarkable that I had not become a sociopath in my experiences ("I am able to enter into relationships at all"), since I had got through everything very well. What else can you say?