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Ellen Forney shows things can be different than what you think
It’s easy to think that a mental disorder is with you from the very beginning of life. That you always had it but it was just covered up by a lack of awareness as a kid and then a bunch of denial as a teenager and on into adulthood, culminating in the final admission that, yes, I’ve been this particular flavor of bonkers all along.
Not so, submits Ellen Forney, venerable Seattle-based comics artist and guest on this week’s podcast. Ellen developed bipolar disorder when she was already well into adulthood, an adulthood that involved her being mostly fine all along. Until she wasn’t. In her late twenties, Ellen started having manic episodes that lasted for weeks. Constant energy, dancing alone in her living room, hypersexuality. Like a lot of people with bipolar, she figured that this was simply her living her best life, even as she had to shed a lot of old friends who couldn’t keep up.
The problem came with the other pole: a crushing depression that left her incapacitated for extended periods of time. That’s what led Ellen to finally get to a psychiatrist, who read her the criteria for bipolar, which lined up precisely with what Ellen was experiencing.
Now, Ellen Forney has written books about her bipolar experience and is helping others navigate these choppy waters.
The mayor of Portland wants to make it easier to commit people involuntarily
Mayor Ted Wheeler said as much at a recent public forum.
“When I see people walking through the elements without appropriate attire, often naked, they are freezing to death, they are exposed to the elements … I don’t even know if they know where they are or who they are,” Wheeler told a room full of business owners recently, “They need help and they need compassion.”
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Wheeler’s plan to tackle the growing crisis on the streets includes a “90-day reset” in the industrial eastside of the city, which would boost the number of law enforcement in the area and likely result in more homeless camp sweeps. It’s a similar approach to what was used in Portland’s Old Town neighborhood earlier this year and a strategy some have criticized as compounding the problem.
Wheeler also said he fully expected his idea to be ripped apart by people arguing that it’s inhumane to simply lock people away and that it doesn’t solve the problem. And there was some of that.
Terry Schroeder, a civil commitment coordinator with the Oregon Health Authority, has been working in this arena for more than four decades. Civil commitments, he said, were never intended to solve the problems society is facing. “It provides a false sense of something is going to change by saying that …” he said, adding, commitments were never meant “to address the homeless and drug addictions and the other kind of social issues we have.”
There were also people cheering on the idea.
“We are in the middle of a shift from where the majority of people who were once sympathetic to the homeless are now angry,” said Jason Renaud, with the Mental Health Association of Portland. “And people are angry at the homeless and blame them. It’s a shift that comes from the county, the city and the state not doing anything about this problem, to the point where people get mad.”
Shy, quiet, somewhat subdued birds could be heard more easily in the pandemic
In the early days especially, when us humans weren’t out there making a lot of racket, bird songs didn’t need to be so loud and shrill to be heard. As a result, bird songs changed and now the ornithologists aren’t sure if things will ever go back to how they were. THE BIRD JUKE BOX HAS A BUNCH OF NEW RECORDS NOW, YOU GUYS.
It’s not all good or neutral news, either:
In quiet, rural environments, birds tend to sing at lower frequencies at which they can maximize their vocal performances with trills and twitters. But in urban environments, the low frequency noise of traffic gets in the way. In order to be heard, birds subconsciously raise the pitch and volume of their songs, a phenomenon called the Lombard effect.
While birds are easier to hear due to the Lombard effect, when they raise their voices the quality of their vocal performance goes down. They can no longer fill their songs with warbles, trills, and flourishes. Without them, the birds are less effective at defending breeding territory from encroaching bachelor birds. There is one thing they do better, though: they are easier to hear over long distances not just by other adult males or randy females, but by juvenile birds learning to sing.
Here’s the thing, you guys…
Well, here’s A thing. I had a big Life Thing come up (everything’s fine) so this edition of the newsletter is not digging so deep on mental health topics. Plus, I think we all understand by this point that There Is A Mental Health Crisis Going On and that Young People Are Hit Hardest.
So here’s a Christmas song: