Post by whitealice on Dec 13, 2014 16:53:26 GMT -6
wrabbit the crime rates may be considerably low but from what I gather the Pacific Northwest has an immense percentage of cases of severe depression. I considered moving to the PNW (Seattle/ Tacoma area to be specific) until I spoke to many, many of the locals who all complained about how depression is a major problem due to the gloomy weather during large parts of the year. This could have something to do with folks going off the deep end and committing such acts.
As far as Portland and depression, it's been ranked by Business Week as the most depressed city in the US. Based on their criteria and weighting though, I find that rather strange. Here's those factors.
based on a variety of factors including depression rates, suicide rates, divorce rates, crime, unemployment, population loss, job loss, weather, and green space. The most heavily weighted factors were the depression, suicide, jobs (unemployment and job loss), and crime rates. The depression rate is based on drug company data on antidepressant sales.
Depression rate--The data being used to estimate that could be misleading as some drugs that are used to treat depression also may be used to treat other non-depressive ailments. Kind of a sketchy choice there.
Suicide rate--Our suicide rate is 3 times higher than the national average. That could imply 3 times more depressed people or it could be that our depressed people are more likely to commit suicide.
Crime rate-- FBI puts Portland at a rank 24 for total crime against other metro cities. The crime that bumps up our crime rate is larceny/theft. I've never seen, however, a relationship with the mental illness of depression being correlated to increased tendencies towards crime. I asked my criminal justice counterpart and he agreed--he's never heard of that correlation either. Economic depression will do it but not depression overall that either of us can recall. It seems counter intuitive as depressed people are more likely to not have much will to do anything. Period.
Population loss-- Portland's population is growing.
Jobs/unemployment--Our unemployment is actually quite low at 3.5%
Weather--Portland gets a lot of rain. Nuff said.
Green space--We're a park city both having the smallest park in the world called Mill's End to one of the largest parks within a city, Forest Park. Portland is called the City of Roses for a reason. Parks are everywhere here and the city was absolutely planned to be this way.
Portland, itself, has also been ranked as the most livable city in the US by other sources (ie Money, Forbes, Monocle and etc) as have several outlying metro area cities. Pretty contradictory to the Business Week assessment if you think about it--how can the "most miserable" city be so darn livable at the same time? Well, it's all in how you measure it and the age of the data used. While I don't agree with this author's belief that infidelity is the end all be all to all things (talk about a stretch), they did look at the data that was used and found it stale.
www.examiner.com/article/infidelity-makes-portland-the-1-unhappiest-city
Other Sources:
images.businessweek.com/ss/09/02/0226_miserable_cities/2.htm
www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/09/portland_suicides_almost_three.html
abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=95020