Dysmorphophobia: This is why many people think they look stupid in photos

It happened again. I diagnosed myself - dysmorphophobia. And it happened like this: I saw Günther Oettinger 's twin brother. The older ones among us will remember. Günther Oettinger was once Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg , EU Commissioner for various matters and advisor to Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán . He is considered the inventor of the debt brake and the Swabian dialect in English, "ju anderschtänd". I was his twin brother.

Separated at birth, this thought occurred to me when I found the photo in my emails. At my company, all employees had to be in front of the camera, with a new profile picture, because people change over the years. I immediately had a strange feeling because the photographer didn't want me there while he was going through the portraits of me that had just been taken on his laptop. I now had the reason in my inbox: Günther Oettinger.

Disturbed body perception: Anything but a quirk

It was certainly no coincidence that a snapshot the night before threw me off track, a selfie of my best friend and me in a bar for our class chat group. I looked as if I had rushed to the bar straight from dental surgery, the tampons still in my mouth, scarred by the anesthesia. I could hardly bear the sight of myself. I realized that I was no longer able to look at myself in photos in general, which everyone I asked about it thought was one of my many quirks. I saw it differently, I had a serious problem.

A few clicks on the internet later, and the case was clear. A dictionary for the medically semi-literate described an exciting clinical picture in which sufferers have a distorted perception of their own body. I was lucky that I had been spared serious consequences. For example, the false belief that I was giving off an unpleasant smell or that I had a serious skin disease. I was also not yet at the point where I tried to cover up the supposedly disfigured parts of my face with excessive make-up.

The dictionary told me that this is called dermatological non-disease. Or dysmorphophobia. I had to remember the term etiopathogenesis because it feigns profound knowledge, although it stands for nothing other than a scientific explanatory model for the causes, origin and development of diseases. In my case, it was probably a disturbed intrapsychic body representation. Whatever that was, I didn't have to put up with it forever; there were reports online about treatment successes.

So I looked for approaches to therapy, came across a number of specialist clinics for dysmorphophobia and finally discovered on the website of one such facility a note that the problem could be solved relatively quickly using behavioural therapy. I just had to recognise harmful thought patterns and behaviours and work out alternatives.

So I did that. And as it turned out, it was successful. I realized that it wasn't all that bad. That an estimated two to three percent of the population suffers from this non-disease, more women than men, by the way. So I wasn't alone. Or to put it in the words of my twin brother Günther Oettinger: We're all sitting in the same boat.