Recall which parts were probably not even worth it

The dogfights were also tracked and recorded by radar. The students who attended the Top Gun academy were the next best fighter pilots in the navy after the trainers, and collectively they were known as the Blue Force. They flew U. Navy fighter jets, again without the missiles or bullets. Each day they would climb into their planes and take off to face the Red Force. In those combats the pilots were expected to push their planes--and themselves--right up to the edge of failure in order to learn what the planes were capable of and what was required to get that performance out of them. Some clients come with relationship issues with their partners -- break-ups, or when both the partners transitioning, or if only one partner transitioning, separation, coming out to family members, etc WHAT KIND OF HELP DO COUNSELLORS GET? Certainly, our work is taxing and complex. So there are certain mechanisms that we have evolved in the organisation over the years, and it's a constantly evolving process, to be honest. It can either be therapy or we have a list of activities that they can use that they think will help their mental health. This operates at various levels: one is that they have access to peer supervision where their senior colleagues are available to them, there is also one-to-one supervision where a person is appointed to help the person through any issues. These are just some efforts to make the environment more friendly for them. As an organisation, we like to believe that we are sensitive to people's needs and each of us is mindful of each other's mental health. The team will encourage frequent timeouts to make everyone feel less burdened . It is a question I can truly empathise with, as a mother myself. It's `all supply' or `no supply' rather than `both all and none'. Manic-depression is the effort to separate, to maintain an elementary differentiation in the place of a more confusing and more painful set of contradictions. And this is perhaps the real sense of bipolar: not the alternation of moods that much contemporary psychiatry is so eager to pathologize but the search for a primary bipolarity, a baseline splitting of traits. When researchers discuss where everyday mood alternations end and bipolarity begins, they miss this crucial point: that manic-depression is precisely about the effort to create extremes, to create a world of opposites.

There is thus no sense in trying to find bipolarity in mood swings unless that is what the person themself is trying to do. What appear to be extremes of behaviour in manic-depression are thus ways of purifying extremes: grey must be separated into black and white. As Terri Cheney says, `mania doesn't just give you the desire for extremes, it gives you the energy to pursue them'. Binaries must be kept distinct, and bipolarity is less a pendulum of moods than an effort to keep two poles apart. Cheney tells us that mania is more than a `disease': it is a way of thinking: `The world should be one way or another . If they weren't gods, they were villains . EMSN applies to all out-of-hospital Medicare services, but it considers the total out-of-pocket costs for all services. Once the EMSN threshold is met, Medicare pays for 80% of future out-of-pocket costs for the remainder of the calendar year. The 2019 EMSN thresholds were about $1,460 USD ($2,133 AUD) for individuals and families and $470 USD ($680 AUD) for specific classes of public benefits recipients, called concession cardholders--for example, pensioners. There are caps on EMSN benefits for certain services, including assisted reproductive therapy, obstetrics, and some surgeries. Recent work suggests that the EMSN program disproportionately benefits higher-income Australians. Physicians and private hospitals are mainly paid through a fee-for-service model, while public hospitals are paid through activity-based funding. In the public sector, value-based and capitated payments to providers are almost nonexistent. Some private health insurers have capitated contracts with private hospitals. The federal government, through Medicare, is the only payer for outpatient physician services. States, Medicare, and private insurance all pay for hospital care. Do some tests of your own. Observe old people. I'll bet you'll find that the ones who have no hobbies or interests look and act a lot older than the ones who do. OK, forget hobbies for a sec.

Think of a person with a defeatist, Been there, done that attitude and one with a zest for learning--old, young. Bottom line, you are either soaking up life or withering on the vine. I heard of a study where they took some old people and placed them in an environment that replicated typical surroundings when they were in their twenties--music, decor, and such--and not only did they start to act younger, they actually started regenerating new cells within their physical bodies where they weren't supposed to be able to. These old people were making twenty-year-olds' cells! What a difference an environment makes, huh? So, if you apply this type of thinking to your feng shui, especially to the Children and Creativity area, you can make a huge difference in how you age. They tried different tactics in different situations, learning how best to respond to what the other guys were doing. The pilots of the Red Force, being the best the navy had, generally won the dogfights. And the trainers' superiority only increased over time, because every few weeks a whole new class of students would enter the Top Gun academy, while the trainers stayed there month after month, accumulating more and more dogfight experience as time went on and getting to the point at which they had seen pretty much everything the students might throw at them. For each new class the first few days of dogfights, in particular, were usually brutal defeats for the Blue Force. That was okay, however, because the real action occurred once the pilots landed, in what the navy called after-action reports. During these sessions the trainers would grill the students relentlessly: What did you notice when you were up there? What actions did you take? Why did you choose to do that? What were your mistakes? What could you have done differently? As parents we unfortunately do not have a manual to guide us on how to handle the growing needs of our child at every stage -- to know at times if how they are behaving is normal or if how we are responding to it is adequate. We rely on our instincts, learning from our own parent's mistakes or when they got it right with us and from extended family members who readily bail out advice whether we ask for it or not. As our child grows, so do our concerns at different stages. I still remember the time when our son didn't walk even at 17 months;

This was very frightening for us to hear and we spent the next month getting him a walker and physiotherapy sessions. Our son did not budge at all and was happy crawling around exploring the world on his fours. And, one fine day he just got up and started walking. He is now a 10-year-old athletic child who is on the school football team, but who would have guessed that back then? While I am relieved that my son didn't have a gross motor delay, I do realise that it was helpful that we followed our instincts and reached out for help when we noticed the delay and provided him with the necessary support and intervention. Unfortunately, what is often seen with emotional difficulties, mental health issues or disabilities of varying kinds is the delay in seeking help -- a concern also shared by Dr Amit Sen in his earlier interview. We can see bipolarity here as a kind of solution. A patient described the onset of a manic episode after seeing a woman who resembled her mother on the tube reading a article entitled Angelic Spirits. This, for her, was a contradiction, since angels were good but she had always thought of her mother as a `spirit' when the latter was possessed with a malevolent force. The many binary pairs that emerged during the subsequent mania could be seen as ways to keep the two separate. Another patient described how, when hospitalized, she had `used symbols' to regain an equilibrium. Sunlight was bad, but the night's blackness was good. She had then used these terms to generate sets, so that all bad things were `symbolized' by sunlight and all good things by blackness. Now, as she stayed awake throughout the night, good and bad could be kept separate. She would try to sleep at exactly those points when the barriers between light and black were most fluid: at dusk and at sunrise. We could remember Spike Milligan and the Elfin Oak. Public Hospital Payments About 40% came from the Commonwealth, 51% from states and territories, and the rest from private insurers and individuals. Historically, Commonwealth payments to hospitals were based on fixed global budgets. The Australian government gave block grants to states, which in turn set capped budgets for hospital networks.

However, the system is in the process of transitioning to an activity-based funding system using DRGs. Public hospitals must provide free care to all Medicare patients, so payment to public hospitals occurs through governmental funding. The actual mechanism for funding hospitals is different in each state, and the process is being reformed because constrained hospital budgets generated significant waiting lists for elective procedures. As one researcher described the problem: Our public-sector waiting lists are caused because we have had prospectively capped funding of the public hospitals. If you get a fixed amount of money determined in advance, then you naturally end up with waiting lists. Find a few things that made your heart sing in the past and make a little space for them in the present. Whether it's big band music, Kool-Aid popsicles, or a jump rope, enveloping yourself with such youthful reminders can literally slow down the aging process. I'm not advocating living in the past here, but merely creating surroundings that make you feel alive and youthful. A client, Alexandria, had the Children and Creativity section of her family's new home missing. An outdoor courtyard with a built-in barbecue engulfed their whole Children section. Although the courtyard was to be used as an outdoor play space for their three kids, the ch'i stagnated and eddied. The missing piece created a weakened condition for the home--not to mention the influence of ch'i-melting barbecue! Alexandria asked me to help the family with their landscape design. These were my suggestions: Complete the space by burying a line of red string across the border of the missing piece (see Figure 26). When necessary, the trainers could pull out the films of the encounters and the data recorded from the radar units and point out exactly what had happened in a dogfight. And both during and after the grilling the instructors would offer suggestions to the students on what they could do differently, what to look for, and what to be thinking about in different situations. Then the next day the trainers and students would take to the skies and do it all over again. Over time the students learned to ask themselves the questions, as it was more comfortable than hearing them from the instructors, and each day they would take the previous session's lessons with them as they flew.