Addiction doctor, trauma therapist, osteopath – Berlin general practitioner Dr. Dietrich Sternberg leads an extremely busy life. For many years, the now 73-year-old man ran a family doctor’s practice in Neukölln, where he treated people from around 180 countries. At this point he also decided to obtain a certificate of specialization in the field of addiction medicine. “At some point, I became powerless with normal family doctor medicine,” he explains. He now runs the Berlin Trauma Institute as a private doctor together with his wife.
When not practicing in Berlin, Sternberg travels to the poorest regions of the world for charity projects – Sudan, Malaysia or southern Lebanon. During one of his numerous missions abroad, he met Indian missionary Mother Teresa.
In 2020, it trained teachers and social workers in Sierra Leone’s slums in trauma therapy, who cared for people who suffered the consequences of the civil war and the serious Ebola fever epidemic in the West African country. The project was supported by the German Ambassador to Sierra Leone, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development. More recently, Dietrich Sternberg took care of orphans in Kyrgyzstan. He would like to continue this work next year.
He has now written experiences from his exciting career into a book for the first time. “Madness comes to an end” is the name of the work, the “first trauma-psychological novel in Germany”. Sternberg describes the work as a combination of autobiography and thriller. The book is about a group of doctors who start a humanitarian project in sub-Saharan Africa and end up in a cycle of kidnappings, torture and rape. In the end, the protagonists embark on a journey through the world of healing trauma. The doctor remembers that he had already written the first pages of his debut on paper at the age of 20. “I had great pleasure preparing this mix: exciting fiction, more autobiographical, more pearls of knowledge that I fell in love with.” (kaha)