Opinion

JENNIFER CALFAS

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Evaluating WSN

H

ave you ever heard a song 
that just clicked with you? 
Having some involuntary 

bodily 
response 

to 
the 
chords 

or 
lyrics, 
feel-

ing like you may 
have ascended to 
some other musi-
cal 
realm? 
I’m 

not talking about 
the gagging feel-
ing you might get 
when you hear 
“CoCo” by O.T. 
Genasis, I’m talk-
ing about some-
thing real. For a moment, think 
back to a time when a song gave 
you goosebumps, brought tears to 
your eyes or brought forth the feel-
ing of a rock in your stomach. Band 
songs, musical songs and even pop-
ular songs on your iPod can trig-
ger these responses. I talked with 
Chelsea Zabel, a senior psychology 
major, about some of the songs that 
gave her chills.

Two of the songs were from musi-

cals: “Till We Reach That Day” from 
“Ragtime” and “One Day More” from 
“Les Miserables.” “Ragtime” is about 
three families from different eth-
nic and socioeconomic backgrounds 
in New York City at the turn of the 
20th century, while “Les Miserable” 
is a story following an ex-convict as 
he tries to do good despite tensions 
between the French government and 
people in 19th-century France.

For both, the end of Act I is closed 

by its respective song, one imme-
diately after a war uprising and the 
other after *SPOILER* the death of a 

main character. Tensions have risen 
in both plots, and both songs are 
calls to justice in response to recent 
events. Zabel describes the point in 
the show when you are “pre-invested 
in the storyline,” forming connec-
tions with the plot and the charac-
ters. Each song starts with pain from 
a single voice. But strength begins 
to grow when it starts building with 
other singers.

“It starts when you’re already on 

edge, then it just fills out to where 
you can’t think about anything else 
because there is just so much going 
on,” Zabel said. “You’re just inside of 
the music.”

The point of a good musical is to 

envelop you and transport you to that 
time and that scene. Music is there 
to bridge the connection between 
the audience member and the actors, 
portraying not just the plot, but the 
emotions as well.

Now think about a time when 

you created something amazing. 
Whether you built it at MHacks, in 
a wood shop with your hands, in 
the kitchen or with an instrument, 
you were proud, right? You put in 
the time, effort and elements that 
you knew needed to be a part of the 
final product. I immediately think to 
“Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral” 
by Richard Wagner. A percussionist 
in high school, I played timpani for 
this song. After months of practice, 
I had not thought much about “Elsa” 
and let it go (pun intended) with the 
other songs to the back of my mind. 
But come concert time, performance 
ready and played with perfection, the 
song immediately caused me tears 
and chills. It was beautiful; we had 

worked so hard to create such a beau-
tiful piece. Building slowly, the pro-
cessional becomes more robust with 
emotion and volume. Even listening 
to it as I write this, I am taken back to 
that exact concert.

How about popular songs? You may 

have heard it a thousand times on the 
radio when it was nauseatingly repeat-
ed, or some oldie but goodie when 
iTunes was on shuffle. But was there a 
time when it meant something differ-
ent? Zabel remembers a time in sixth 
grade when the song “The Middle” 
came on by Jimmy Eat World. As she 
had heard it before, this song spoke 
to the (then) insecure, middle-school 
Chelsea. Making her cry, she said she 
felt relieved because “the song was 
telling me ‘… everything was going to 
be alright, alright. Doin’ better on your 
own, so don’t buy in.’ Oh my gosh, it’s 
speaking to me!”

Those days when certain songs 

don’t just go from one earbud to the 
other, but actually sit in your brain 
and make you think and react; those 
are the days when you actually hear 
the lyrics.

So here’s what you do now. Go to 

YouTube and listen to these songs, 
think about how you’re feeling while 
listening to it. Listen to the songs a 
couple times if you have to, see how 
your body and mind respond. If you 
remember a song that caused some 
involuntary response in you, I want 
to know! Whether it is a T-Swift song 
or some piece you played in middle-
school jazz band, one day it might arise 
and spark some reaction inside of you.

— Sara Shamaskin can be 

reached at scsham@umich.edu.

Visceral reactions

SARA
SHAMASKIN

I 

have an interest in mental health care, 
in both definitions of the word “inter-
est.” I find the topic interesting to read 

about and discuss, and as a 
person suffering from men-
tal illness, it is in my best 
interest for these services 
to be available, affordable 
and transparent. As news 
began to trickle out about 
Wolverine Support Net-
work, a system of stu-
dent-run 
mental 
health 

support 
groups, 
my 
curiosity 

was peaked.

WSN is an initiative of 

Central Student Government (something in 
which I certainly do not have an interest) and 
was one of the major proposals outlined dur-
ing last spring’s student elections. The idea of 
student-led support groups came from CSG 
President Bobby Dishell, who had seen simi-
lar initiatives played out at high schools and 
smaller colleges. WSN launched on Jan. 22, 
and soon groups of 10 to 12 students will begin 
weekly meetings.

As the program slowly unveiled itself, I was 

deeply skeptical. Some students I spoke with 
expressed a lack of confidence in these groups, 
fearing that the issues faced by marginalized 
students would be misunderstood or dis-
missed by their peers. My chief concern was, 
and still is, the concept of loosely trained stu-
dents acting as group leaders, especially if this 
could result in attention and resources moving 
away from professional clinicians.

To further complicate the matter, WSN has 

been strongly endorsed by Counseling and 
Psychological Services, a University service 
with a mixed track record. CAPS has served 
thousands of students this year alone, but it’s 
also the place that — for me and many others 
— told us an initial appointment would be two 
weeks away and a follow-up would take anoth-
er two weeks. I’ve had good and bad experi-
ences at CAPS, and have heard the same from 
numerous peers. As the vital campus center for 
mental health, “half good, half bad” appeared 
to me as closer to failure than success.

A discussion with Dr. Todd Sevig, director 

of CAPS, helped me begin to see WSN (and 
CAPS) in a different light. Sevig, who has 
spent 25 years at the University, called the idea 
of a peer support network “the best thing since 
sliced bread.”

Explaining his feelings, Sevig framed WSN 

as a point of entry, perhaps for a student who 
will use clinical therapy down the road, or as 
the first and only interaction another student 
will need to build better coping skills.

“We try to approach ‘mental health, mental 

illness’ as really resting on a continuum, where, 
really, in some sense of the word or definition, 
all 43,000 students could use help and support 
around mental health,” Sevig explained. “For 
some students, it will be easier to talk to a peer 
than one of us as a good first step.”

Sevig made a good point, and I was remind-

ed that my condition and personal preferences 
lay on a very different part of this continuum 

than most students. As for those awful wait 
times, during the Fall 2013 semester, students 
waited 10 days on average between coming in 
and seeing someone at CAPS. During the Fall 
2014 semester, under a new initial appoint-
ment system, student wait times fell to an aver-
age of 3.7 days — and this is with an 18 percent 
increase in the number of students coming in 
and asking for help.

CSG President Bobby Dishell and WSN 

student leader Nick Raja both echoed many 
of Sevig’s points, describing peer support 
groups as having a lower barrier for students 
to get help. This is a lower barrier than going 
to CAPS, but also a lower barrier to something 
that may be even more difficult for some stu-
dents, like telling their parents.

“It’s an entry point for someone who 

didn’t grow up with a therapist in their home 
town, and its an entry point for someone who 
took a semester off to do inpatient,” Dishell 
explained. “For some people, it’ll be a supple-
ment. For other people, it’ll be all they need.”

Dishell also assured me, “We’re not 

training therapists.”

Raja, who will be leading a student group 

with at least one other leader, spoke similar-
ly, saying, “It’s not therapy, it’s for everyone.” 
He further explained that the leader’s role is 
to facilitate, not to be a counselor, and that a 
large part of WSN leader training was under-
standing how to recommend students for more 
comprehensive treatment.

Dishell, though humble about the net-

work’s goals in helping individual students, 
has made it no secret that WSN has ambi-
tious aims, saying, “In five years, hopefully 
less, it’ll just be something that you do. It’ll be 
engrained in the culture.”

Raja, who wrote an op-ed earlier this 

fall promoting WSN, mentioned the idea of 
“changing campus culture,” a promise that 
seems to be made by countless student groups 
every semester.

I discussed with Sevig how lately, cam-

pus culture has been changing in the 
 

wrong direction.

“Every year, it seems, that the pressure to be 

the Leaders and the Best has gotten higher and 
higher and higher — and that has some conse-
quences,” Sevig said.

One of the biggest consequences, Sevig 

explained, is “a sense of ‘I can’t fail; I can’t 
even do average work.’ ”

On a campus built with the purpose of educa-

tion, students are instead faced with a perfec-
tionist mentality that stifles learning and fuels 
anxiety. This is a culture that all of us are famil-
iar with, and one that doesn’t appear to be going 
away anytime soon.

For now, I’ll cling to some of my skepticism 

about WSN, at least in the big picture. However, 
student leaders backing WSN are going in the 
right direction, as is CAPS under Sevig’s lead-
ership. Hopefully some of this work really will 
“change campus culture” — in that, I would 
 

certainly find quite a high level of interest.

 — James Brennan can be reached 

at jmbthree@umich.edu.

The cycle

JAMES
BRENNAN

A

t the request of those interviewed, all 
identities in this piece have been writ-
ten with pseudonyms.

Emit — a white man in his 

middle 30s — has been living 
on the streets in Ann Arbor 
since his release from a county 
prison, where he served a sev-
en-year stint for an armed rob-
bery conviction. He received 
parole and was expected upon 
his release to rejoin a society of 
which he had never truly been 
 

a member.

“They told me I could go 

to therapy,” Emit said of the 
options made available to him 
by the county. “They did give me a place. But (the 
transition) wasn’t easy.”

Emit was set up in an apartment and was eligi-

ble to become employed through a prisoner reen-
try program. For Emit, however, it didn’t feel like 
a new start, but rather a mere change of scenery.

Emit was outfitted with an electronic tether, 

confined to travel only between his apartment 
and his workplace. Traveling outside of these 
bounds would have been a violation of his 
parole and would have landed him back in pris-
on. After a period of time — alone day after day 
without friends or family in the state — Emit 
felt as if he had never left his prison cell.

“You know what they say: if you put a rat in a 

cage, he drives himself insane,” he said.

The emotional stress and the depression that 

festered with each passing day of his release 
started to get to Emit, especially once he began 
to realize that the wages he had been earning at 

his entry-level job weren’t even enough to cover 
rent for the apartment he had been given.

When Emit tried appealing to his land-

lord, he was told that he would be evicted if 
he couldn’t make the rent payments on time. 
And as a felon with “a real jacked-up criminal 
record,” even prior to his most recent felony 
incarceration, the prospect of an additional job 
was bleak; Emit found himself in a downward 
cycle that he didn’t know how to break. Accord-
ing to research done by the Population Studies 
Center, this is a struggle typical for parolees.

“I quit the job, acting irrational. All of a sud-

den, I had no job, no place. So what am I gonna 
do?” Emit recalled asking himself.

His solution: a return to the transient life on 

the streets he had lived since leaving his home-
town in Maine as a teen.

Not able to leave the state as a condition of 

his parole, Emit chose to settle in amongst the 
homeless population in Ann Arbor. According 
to a 2013 census, 3,000 to 4,000 individuals are 
living without homes in Washtenaw County, a 
number which doubled in the years between 
2011 and 2013.

Emit — shortly after quitting his job — joined 

their ranks. After doing so, he noticed a huge 
difference between his reality on the streets in 
Ann Arbor and his experiences with homeless-
ness in other cities across the nation; the com-
munity in Ann Arbor — both those with and 
without homes — was something unique.

In comparison to neighboring Ypsilanti — a 

city with a median household income almost 
$20,000 lower than that of Ann Arbor, accord-
ing to statistics from 2012 — Emit said he’s able 
to get more sympathy from both passersby and 

AUSTIN
DAVIS

police in Ann Arbor. Relative to other 
cities, he’s treated with some norma-
tive level of respect here.

“It’s peaceful … although there’s a 

ton of competition, you can still get 
by,” he said.

He also noticed solidarity amongst 

other members of the homeless popu-
lation in Ann Arbor, a community that 
congregates in designated, clandestine 
spots around the city center. They help 
each other out with places to find food 
and shelter. “Anything you need,” Emit 
said, “someone will tell you where it’s 
at usually.”

I didn’t want to seem patronizing, 

like I was just a curious kid coming 
up and asking his life story at no per-
sonal benefit to him. So I bought him 
a cup of coffee and kicked it with him 
for a bit longer. He joked with me 
at times, describing his preference 
for the bizarre — his preference for 
 

unrestrained freedom.

“ ‘Bizarre’ is one of the excitements 

of life; it’s like a way to experience life. 
It keeps things interesting. It’s the 
randomness. It’s the new experiences. 
You can find everything these days, 
but still random bullshit happens. It’s 
an adventure.”

I considered that, and had to admit 

that I agreed; spontaneity, random-
ness and serendipity are nouns I’d like 
to use to describe my life as well.

But as my hands began to grow 

numb from dictating our conversation, 
I realized that perhaps this was a jus-
tification for Emit, a way to lighten his 
mental burden by assuring himself that 
there are some redeeming aspects to his 
situation. The bags underneath his eyes, 
and his hands, calloused and dirty from 
exposure, contradicted this sentiment.

So too did his future goals.
“It’s time to do something and get 

going,” Emit told me. “Get a job, a 
place, community college, a better job 
and civilization.”

The concept of ‘civilization’ came 

up frequently during our conversa-
tion. After a while it dawned on me: 
despite the humor, intelligence and 
civility with which I’d come to know 
Emit over the course of our conver-
sation, he classified himself as one 
outside of society.

And really, he is. But not for want 

 of reentry.

Emit had to leave to catch a bus to 

meet his parole officer. I left our con-
versation wondering if employers in 
this city — whose community Emit 
felt treated him with respect — would 
respect a parolee enough to give him 
another shot.

— Austin Davis can be reached 

at austchan@umich.edu.

TRAVON JEFFERSON| MICHIGAN IN COLOR

What’s up? Ya’ll good? Yes my dear 

reader, this is an educational article 
despite the few sentences you will 
catch of a different dialect: Black 
English Vernacular (BEV) to be 
exact. I apologize for any headaches 
or bottomless confusion I may cause 
in advance to any “Standard English” 
or “Strict Grammar” readers that 
may stumble across this article. Don’t 
let the confusion of this dialect deter 
you, let it motivate you to learn it and 
become “articulate.” You may come 
across words that looked misspelled 
but certainly, in BEV, these words 
are spelled phonetically correct. For 
instance the word “mouth,” phoneti-
cally speaking, BEV speakers replace 
the Θ sound, which pronounces the 
“th” sound in “mouth” and instead 
use “f” so the word will actually 
be spelled “mouf” that’s basic BEV 
phonology 101 for ya’. All the con-
tractions, the twangish vocabulary 
words that I type up, or any other 
complex Black English grammar that 
I may lose the reader in, my bad. So, if 
you can tolerate my unbearable black 
syntax, stick around and you just may 
learn something!

Growing up in a heavily African 

American/Black American populated 
area, I got the dialect I’m so proud 
to call my own. My BEV is so deeply 
rooted inside my heart that it’s clear 
where I come from the moment I 
speak. Detroit, Michigan, raised on 
the east side to be exact. All my life, I 
was corrected for the way I talked. I 
had to be extremely careful, to make 
sure I pronounce every word with 
clarity and don’t I dare incorporate 
those BEV grammar rules or gov-
erning syntax. Of course, I only had 
to monitor my speaking in school, 
because I wanna sound intelligent 
and I want the teacher to see that I am 
intelligent. My whole thing is, do I not 
 

sound intelligent?

Just because I speak with this 

minority dialect, does that really make 

me stupid? Nah I ain’t stupid, clearly 
the President Barack Obama has the 
same vernacular I do. If anything, my 
BEV is what’s up because it shows that 
I’m multi-dialectical. Yep, I can switch 
between speaking Black, and then 
switch to speaking what people call 
“Standard English.”

So my next question, my dear 

audience, do you know anybody that 
speaks with a BEV dialect? Were they 
speaking clear English but you just 
couldn’t grasp why, for some reason, 
they decided to put that habitual “be” 
in the place of an adverb such as usu-
ally? Did I lose you? Don’t worry, I 
have examples for days: Have you ever 
heard someone say, “She be eating a 
lot?” Or, for more of a direct college 
experience, “He be studying?” Do you 
be confused? I hope so. ‘Cause, now 
that you’re confused, I can pull you 
out of that confusion pit and teach you 
a thing or two. I can teach you some-
thing that linguists have been trying to 
educate people on for years.

Black English Vernacular is not 

stupid, it’s not a dysfunctional piece 
of English, and it’s a dialect that has 
developed a complex system of rules 
and syntax. Seriously, can you really 
say something is dumb or not right 
when it has a full-blown system, 
which if not followed carefully will 
make the speaker sound outright 
wrong and garner the confused looks 
of every natural BEV speaker? For 
instance, if a non-BEV speaker tries 
to use the habitual “be,” they would 
probably say something such as, “He is 
studying,” which makes no sense BEV 
syntax-wise. In Standard English and 
non-BEV, speakers will use the verb 
“to be” correctly, but BEV natives have 
a different way of saying it. For quick 
and easy BEV speakers, we use that 
good ol’ BEV syntax and drop that “to 
be” verb “is” and turn that into a habit-
ual “be” and you have “he be study-
ing.” The beauty that comes with the 
habitual “be” is that it does not have 

no specific time frame. Standard Eng-
lish speakers would hear “Travon be 
studying,” and think that I’m off some-
where studying at that very moment. 
According to BEV natives I could be 
studying now, later, or sometime last 
week, just know I be studying.

My dear readers, BEV is a great dia-

lect where you must possess the cor-
rect rules to speak it, but you need to 
have that slur/paused way of speaking, 
the nice little twang that compliments 
it. Ms. Jamila Lyiscott explained a per-
fect rule in her TED Talk “3 ways to 
speak English” (haven’t heard of her? 
Please educate yourself now) when she 
said her mother mocked BEV saying, 
“Y’all be madd going to the store” and 
Ms. Lyiscot instantly corrected her in 
response saying, “never does madd 
go before a present participle.” This 
is in fact true. Now, you’re thinking 
that mad is an emotion, actually mad 
turned into an adverb that modifies 
adjectives or verbs, for example “that 
was mad cool yo.” Don’t worry my 
dear readers, I won’t delve deep into 
the various vocabulary terms and the 
way how their definitions switch in 
accordance to the syntax of BEV.

My point is, however, next time 

you see that friend/classmate/person 
speaking with a twang and mixing 
up that “Standard English” syntax 
and turning it into another perfect 
English dialect known as BEV, don’t 
downplay their intelligence. PLEASE 
don’t ask them to steady repeat them-
selves, and whatever you do, don’t try 
and imitate the way they mouf’s form 
and shape them words because trust 
and believe, if you don’t sound right 
you will get the straightest, coldest 
and blankest stare of your life. Cause 
guess what, BEV gotta complex sys-
tem of syntax, that to speak it prop-
erly and be able to code-switch into 
“Standard English” makes you what 
me and Jamila like to call articulate.

Travon Jefferson is an LSA junior.

Speakin’ Black ain’t easy

