By Bruce Cochrane.
A Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Guelph says farmers are anxious to begin talking about mental health issues and believe those issues need to be addressed.
A survey of about 11 hundred farmers across Canada, representing all industry groups, conducted by researchers at the Ontario Veterinary College, found 45 percent of Canadian farmers are facing high levels of stress, 60 percent are dealing with some level of anxiety, 35 percent with some level of depression and between 35 and 45 percent are demonstrating signs of burnout.
Dr. Andria Jones-Bitton, a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine and Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Population Medicine at the University of Guelph, says feedback received from participants indicates this is an issue that people in agriculture want to start talking about.
Clip-Dr. Andria Jones-Bitton-University of Guelph:
I think the key recommendation is this something we need to talk about more openly than perhaps we have been doing.
Mental illnesses are a fact of life for our society.
I don't think that we should be looking at them any differently than we do physical illnesses and I think this is something that, the more we talk about, the more we openly discuss and address, the easier we're going to make it for other people who might be struggling to seek help.
I think it's that preverbal elephant in the room and we've identified the elephant now and we can start talking about it.
Dr. Jones-Bitton says data from the study is being analyzed to determine whether certain industry groups, provinces, certain lifestyle factors or demographic factors might impact the risk of mental illness.
She says the information gathered through the survey will then be used to create a mental health literacy program and a mental health emergency response program.
Source: Farmscape