'I just cried and cried': Farmers struggle with stigma around mental health

Farmer's livelihoods can be affected by the vagaries of nature, crop or animal disease and even distant wars, but often they find themselves silenced by the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Christi Friesen remembers her husband saying he knew that the cloud of depression over her was finally lifting when he saw her smile at the end of the gruelling 2016 harvest season.

That October had been brutal, with three storms dumping about 20 centimetres of snow on the couple's Peace River, Alta., grain farm. On the morning of the third snowstorm, Friesen felt the wind knocked out of her when she looked out the window to see a blanket of white covering crops she had hoped they would harvest that day.

"Oh my God. I just sat on the bed and I just cried, and I held my head in my hands," she said in a recent interview. "I just cried and cried and cried .... It was an awful year."

Most Canadian farm families are familiar with the stresses that come with agriculture. Their livelihoods can be affected by the vagaries of nature, crop or animal disease and even distant wars, but often they find themselves silenced by the stigma surrounding mental illness.

Andria Jones, a professor at the University of Guelph's veterinary college, has been studying the mental health of farmers since 2016. Along with her student Rochelle Thompson and research associate Briana Hagen, she analyzed the responses of nearly 1,200 Canadian farmers who completed an online version of the Survey of Farmer Mental Health in Canada between February and May 2021.

They found one in four farmers surveyed reported their life was not worth living, wished they were dead or had thought of taking their own life over the previous 12 months. Their research found that thoughts of suicide were twice as high among farmers than in the general population.

Three-quarters of farmers said they experienced moderate or high perceived stress, Jones said, adding that climate change has intensified these stressors by increasing risks of flooding, fire, drought and disease transmission.