IDENTIFYING and treating people with bipolar II and promoting solutions-based reporting were among the wide range of topics discussed at the TEDx Orange talks on Friday.
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The issues were raised by University of NSW Professor of Psychiatry and Black Dog Institute psychiatrist Gordon Parker, and Lis Bastian, formerly of Orange, who started solutions-based journalism site The Big Fix.
They joined a wide range of speakers including Mike Finch who was the director of Circus Oz for 17 years, media personalities Dai Le and Mieke Buchan, and former Waratah and sustainable architect Al Baxter at the Orange Regional Conservatorium.
“Biological depression called melancholia, and bipolar II disorder respectively affect 4 per cent and 3 per cent of the population, which I estimate for Orange would mean 1300 people with melancholia and 950 with bipolar II,” Dr Parker said.
“These are conditions where we can successfully treat about 80 per cent of people with these conditions, and yet probably only half of the people in Orange have been properly diagnosed and treated for melancholia, and for bipolar II disorder only 10 to 20 per cent have had the proper diagnosis.”
To help address these issues, Dr Parker used his talk to call for a screening program to be rolled out across the population to identify how many people are living with the conditions.
“Bipolar II is poorly recognised in the community, it’s even poorly recognised by general practitioners and even psychiatrists,” he said.
“It has the highest suicide rate of all the conditions.”
Ms Bastian, a former curator of the Orange Regional Gallery and owner of The Bookshop Cafe, returned to Orange after 14 years for the TEDx talk, where she also spoke about finding a solution to issues.
About five months ago she launched The Big Fix, listed on Facebook as fixingdaily and more recently she launched a website that will also run the content.
“It’s about growing a grassroots news site about all the people that are trying to tackle the big issues in the world,” she said.
“It’s solutions journalism, I show what people are doing, what the problems are, so you don’t just leave people hanging with something depressing.”
Ms Bastian says although the website is still being developed, it will incorporate stories from all over the world, like the Facebook site, which has 12 stories uploaded each day.
