Good: Jamie Lee Curtis, Talking Belugas, Bird Diversity
Bad: Birds when they try to kill Tippi Hedren. Or anyone, really
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Jamie Lee Curtis… again!
Well, sort of. This week we’re rerunning our episode from last fall with Jamie Lee Curtis. At the time of the interview, she hadn’t yet won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for Everything Everywhere All At Once, or as my mother-in-law called it Everyone Everything Here We Go. It was an impressive performance, as was her recent appearances on the tv show The Bear, where she played the lead character’s mother, who is encountering some complex mental health situations.
Jamie’s run on The Bear came out well after the interview I did with her or I surely would have asked about that.
As it is, we talked a lot about her substance use disorder, which is centered around pain pills. I try to pay attention to language in a sentence like the previous one. I avoid saying that she “is an addict” or “has experienced addiction” because for the sake of a mental health newsletter, I think it’s more important to see what she has as a mental health disorder. I also use the present tense, saying that her disorder *is* centered around pain pills rather than saying it *was*. Jamie has been clean for quite a while now but people with substance use disorders will tell you that it’s not a matter of the disorder being in the past, it’s an ongoing thing from which you are always in active recovery.
Anyway, if you missed the Jamie Lee Curtis interview before or just want to hear it again, give a listen.
Der der der der derdeder der der
I was on vacation last week, that’s why there was no newsletter. And I went on an actual vacation! Didn’t just hang around the house trying to clean the garage for real this time. No, my wife and I did something kind of weird and went to Quebec. Because who goes to Quebec aside from people who are already in Quebec going to a different part of Quebec? Nobody is who.
The highlight of the trip was probably the time we spent at Saguenay Fjord. Turns out you can have a fjord even if you’re not in Norway, they don’t fine you or anything. We stayed in a lovely little waterfront town called Tadoussac, from which we went on a whale watching expedition.
I am building up to a video that I hope you will enjoy as much as we did.
After puttering around the fjord for an hour or so, I became convinced that we weren’t going to actually see any whales, which was an outcome I’d heard about a lot from whale watching trips in the Pacific Northwest. First we saw some porpoises, which are not whales but are at least marine mammals.
And then we spotted a bunch of harbor seals. Like maybe a hundred of them swimming around and being fun little guys.
And finally we started spotting minke whales!
I’m getting to the video!
At the end of the stay in Tadoussac, we took the ferry across the fjord to begin our long return home. We were up on deck of the ferry when some people called our attention to beluga whales off the starboard bow! Including baby ones!
And this led my wife to look up videos of belugas, at which point she ran across this video of a beluga that imitated human speech. He had heard divers talking through the water and decided that he could do the same thing. So turn your speakers up, this is a beluga imitating a person talking.
You’re welcome.
FDA approves postpartum depression pill
Yes, it’s bigger news than a beluga whale imitating human speech. I’M SORRY. Refunds for this free newsletter all around.
Zuranolone is approved for use in adults for the treatment of postpartum depression, an episode of major depression that can begin after childbirth or the later stages of pregnancy, which affects an estimated 15% of women in the weeks or months after having a baby.
"Having access to an oral medication will be a beneficial option for many of these women coping with extreme, and sometimes life-threatening, feelings," Dr. Tiffany Farchione, director of the Division of Psychiatry in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in a statement.
So mental illness is not really a niche thing
Not when at least half of all people, all humans out walking around, are going to have to deal with a mental health disorder at some point in their lives before age 75. That’s according to a new study published in The Lancet.
The study included over 150,000 respondents aged 18 and older from 29 countries between 2001 and 2022. The study also noted a finding of different disorders more commonly affecting different genders than others.
“The two most prevalent disorders were alcohol use disorder and major depressive disorder for male respondents and major depressive disorder and specific phobia for female respondents,” the study said.
Yeah, you’re going to want to live somewhere with bird diversity
Because if you do, you’re more likely to stay out of mental health facilities.
That’s according to new research being written about in The Independent.
Lead author Dr Rachel Buxton, assistant professor at the Institute of Environmental and Interdisciplinary Sciences at Carleton University in Canada, said: “Often we consider nature as representing the amount of green space near homes or the distance to the nearest park, but the link between species diversity and health is underexplored.
“Our study shows that if species diversity can affect mental health at the severe end of the spectrum (hospitalisations), it is possible that the decline in biodiversity across the globe may be intricately connected with our anxiety and mood on a day-to-day basis.