World AIDS Day: Bipolar and HIV positive - "My mania made it easier for me to cope with the HIV diagnosis"

Torsten Poggenpohl lives in Stuttgart, where he is a member of the board of the AIDS organization Baden-Württemberg.

World AIDS Day: Bipolar and HIV positive - "My mania made it easier for me to cope with the HIV diagnosis"

Torsten Poggenpohl lives in Stuttgart, where he is a member of the board of the AIDS organization Baden-Württemberg. Just a few years ago, his life today would have been completely unimaginable. His mental illness made him a driven person. Today he also likes it quieter. He is fine with his diagnoses: HIV positive and bipolar and has written a book about it. In an interview with the star, the 42-year-old talks about HIV and how he deals with discrimination.

"I've practiced safe sex my whole life. I've always been the one who had a condom with me. But I've had unprotected sex twice in my life. Once when the condom broke while having sex with my then-partner in 2004 and once with one very familiar people. Although I'm actually such a rational person, I didn't get tested afterwards. I just thought nothing would have happened. When I wanted to open a nightclub in November 2013, I had to get HIV for the necessary life insurance -Take a test. And suddenly I was HIV positive. The test result was very devastating because I was very badly affected. I only had 16 helper cells left in my body against 5,000,000 viruses. My luck was that there were no other diseases were that would have weakened my immune system.

So a race against time began. It wasn't so easy going for me and it wasn't a matter of course that I survived. Luckily the HIV drugs are so good these days that I can sit here and live to be 100 years old.

Shortly after the HIV diagnosis, I immediately got my parents and siblings on board. They all reacted incredibly well and were only worried that their child or brother would die. I come from a town with 7,000 inhabitants in the southern district of Osnabrück, where people are very careful about what the neighbors might say - all the more I was happy about how my loved ones reacted. I just had an incredibly great social hammock - nothing negative came from my circle of friends either.

I myself acknowledged my diagnosis at the time, but due to my bipolar disorder, which I didn't know about at the time, I didn't have time for gloomy scenes or sadness. I was in the midst of my mania - in my head there really was a carnival of synapses, next to which there was no room for melancholy. Today I think that it ultimately made things easier for me to deal with the HIV diagnosis. It took me some time before I became aware of my mental illness, even though the doctors at the end of November 2013, when I was first forced into a psychiatric ward, knew that I had a bipolar disorder.

It was in a clinic of all places that I had one of my worst experiences of discrimination: while my bipolar disorder was being treated in the psychiatric ward in Stuttgart, my skin rash was also treated – at first they thought it could be an allergy to my HIV medication. In the end it was scabies. I was taken to the dermatology clinic. The ward doctor there said on the ward round: 'Ah, so here we have the young man with the war disease who doesn't know anything about safer sex.' Such a statement is simply highly problematic, doctors are there for treatment and not to evaluate another life.

Later I experienced another unpleasant situation. Shortly after my father died of cancer, I was suspected of having cancer. I had a colonoscopy done to rule it out. So I was laying on the table for this exam and the assistant comes into the room dressed like she's going to go to Mars. So fully dressed from head to toe with goggles and all. Completely confused, I asked why she was dressed like that. She wore it for fear of contracting HIV from me. Even at this point, my values ​​were so good that I was below the detection limit. So that means: I can't infect anyone with HIV - not even during unprotected sex. Actually, people in the healthcare sector should be aware of this.

When I seriously started dating again in 2018, it was like a picture book with this man for four weeks: eating out, sitting on the park bench and making out. And before it got serious, I told him I was HIV positive. It was a long talk about all sorts of things and the next time we met he said that his brother had asked him who the pale guy next to him in the photo was because he looked so ill. After that I didn't see him again. It was so deep for me that I immediately called 20 friends to ask if I really looked that sick.

Today, I am strengthened by various experiences, including the Positive Encounters 2018 in Stuttgart - the largest affected HIV congress in Europe - and finally also through my voluntary work on the board of the AIDS Aid Association in Baden-Württemberg. I realized that I cannot change others, only how I deal with the diagnosis and discrimination myself. When dating, I now put my diagnoses at the beginning of getting to know each other. If you have a problem with that, take your problem and leave my life.

And otherwise I can only think of it like my 101-year-old grandmother, who lost a paternity case in 1947. And said: 'Hello, my name is Käthe Poggenpohl. People either accept me for who I am or they cross the street.' Fortunately, I am not discriminated against much in my everyday life and I am now so strong that I can raise my voice for others.

That wasn't always the case: In 2013, I was catapulted from a middle-class life to the fringes of society when I was diagnosed with HIV and bipolar disorder. But all in all I was lucky that many dear people in my environment forgave me how I behaved. With untreated bipolar disorder, it's not always nice to behave.

Bipolar disorder is a neurotransmitter disorder in the brain that disrupts the balance of dopamine and serotonin. You could also say that it must obviously feel like 50 lines of coke at once. The head is so full that it soon bursts. Full of 1000 ideas and thoughts that you want to implement and then another 1000 come in and you start to implement everything and never finish anything. And you completely lose touch with money.

Bipolar disorder and being HIV positive both carry a stigma. And being gay is still stigmatized in some regions. It's not easier when you have two diagnoses. But the nature of the stigma associated with mental illness is different. Mentally ill people like me are often not taken seriously or have to be told that they shouldn't behave like that.

Anyone who suffers such a shipwreck as I did with two diagnoses is turning their values ​​inside out. It used to be important for me to have a career. I was a luxury fragrance salesman and lived in luxury. Today, friendships, health and life satisfaction are much more important to me. Of course I need money to live, but I don't want to climb the career ladder anymore. I'm not as driven as I used to be - I can spend an evening on the couch."

Why is there a vaccine against Covid but not against HIV? Do you have questions about current topics for the editors? Write to questions@stern.de

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