Sophie Kuijper Dickson, LJI Reporter
Mental health stigma, eroding social networks leaving Pontiac farmers feeling isolated
When Chris Judd was a younger dairy farmer in Clarendon, he would get in his truck and take a drive to visit a neighbour when he was feeling stressed out or overwhelmed by the work that lay ahead of him.
Together, he and whichever neighbour he could find would talk corn prices, or hay conditions, or lament the price of fuel.
Judd said he does not remember ever struggling with his own mental health, but figures that is in part because he felt he was part of a wider community of people, all living through the same stresses.
“To me that’s really important, just to talk to somebody,” Judd said.
“It used to be you’d be driving the horses and stop along the fence and have a chat with your neighbour. Now everybody is isolated in their own tractor. You don’t even see the neighbour.”
This is in part, Judd figures, because the number of active farms in the region has significantly decreased since he began farming about half a century ago.
“When I came home from college there were 101 dairy producers in our county. Now there are 15,” he said.
Bobby Fitzpatrick has felt the impacts of the shrinking farming community as well.
He has spent 63 years farming beef on Allumettes Island.
“We used to have a network that was a lot bigger, but they’re all retired or quit, so now the network is really small,” Fitzpatrick said.
“Now there’s no occupation where people are more alone, working all the time.”
It is no secret that the waning of Pontiac’s once thriving farming industry has had significant impacts on economic prosperity in the region.
Any attention to the abandoned farm houses and collapsing barns scattered across Pontiac’s countryside will reveal this.
But the shuttering and consolidating of farming operations over the last half-century has also had harmful, and in some cases life threatening consequences for the people who have chosen to continue farming in the region.
In addition to the financial, environmental, and administrative pressures that weigh on a farmer today, the gradual erosion of the social support network that once made all of these stresses bearable has meant significant numbers of agricultural workers now carry the brunt of these stresses alone.
And without active social support networks, anxiety, depression and suicide are becoming growing threats to farmers’ health and safety.
Recent research (2023) out of the University of Alberta reviewed results from previous farmers’ mental health studies done in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and India to better understand the risk factors that make farmers vulnerable to suicide.
The study highlighted that “farmers and agricultural workers – individuals who own, operate, or work on a farm of livestock or crops – have higher suicide rates than those working in other occupations.”
It pointed to data from the National Violent Death Reporting System in the US which in 2016, revealed significantly higher suicide rates among people, particularly men, who worked in agriculture, forestry and fishing, as compared to the national average.
It also pointed to results from a national study of Canadian farmers in 2020, published in the peer-reviewed journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, which found that 57 per cent of farmers were considered to have anxiety, 34 per cent met the criteria for depression, and 62 per cent experienced psychological distress.
The final analysis from the Univeristy of Alberta found seven specific stressors that were often linked to suicide, including the desire to maintain a ‘farmer’ identity, financial crisis, family pressures, an unpredictable environment, and isolation from others.
Cindya Labine, a young beef farmer in Clarendon, does not need these statistics to understand the real threat that poor mental health poses to her the farmers in her community.
In 2019, her brother Éric died by suicide in the height of hay season.
He was young – 26 years old – and had only been farming independently for a few years. In the weeks leading up to his death, he was scrambling to get his hay harvested while conditions were good, while also working on two other farms to make ends meet, one of them his father’s.
“That’s the reality of farming, right,” Labine said. “In the summer, it’s a week straight of no rain. You’ve just got to go, go, go. If you stop you’re going to miss out on your best crops and you’re going to pay for it later. That quality of hay is also your revenue. It’s the money you get to put food on the table.”
On top of this seasonal pressure, Éric had just discovered the tile drainage he had recently installed was not working and had to be redone.
Labine said while the immense pressure Éric was under was obvious to anybody, his death shocked the family.
“It was definitely a surprise. No one suspected it,” Labine said. “I think we all have a lot of guilt for not seeing the signs, if there were any.”
She said Éric spoke about being tired, about feeling worn out, but never spoke about his inner world – how he was feeling inside.
“It feels taboo for men to talk about it. There’s still maybe that stigma or that worry of others judging.”
Labine said she is always worried that Éric’s stresses, the burdens that he felt, will get to other people she loves.
On top of farming beef, Labine is also a mother of three young girls and works as a special education technician at Pontiac High School.
“I’m worried for my husband, and that is weighing on my shoulders too,” Labine said. “He has the same work ethic as Éric had.”
Labine said she has tried to convince her husband to take a break, but knows he feels this is almost impossible to do.
Bobby Fitzpatrick, the beef farmer from Allumettes Island, has also come to understand how real the risk of suicide is.
A neighbour of his, a long-time farmer in his 60s, died by suicide less than 10 years ago.
“Health wise, he had no hope of ever getting better,” Fitzpatrick said, explaining his neighbour had struggled with mental health challenges for some years, including depression and bipolar disorder.
“I went to see him one time and he said ‘I’m not well’.”
Fitzpatrick recalled this to be a fairly common occurrence, in fact. His friend often told him he was sick.
“He asked for help and he couldn’t get help,” he said, remembering his friend even went to the hospital to ask they hold him there overnight, but that the hospital couldn’t accommodate him. “I guess you get so hopeless that you don’t know what to do.”
Challenging the stigma
This feeling of hopelessness is what Chris Judd, now mostly retired, has turned his attention to addressing.
He is adamant that talking openly about mental health challenges will literally save lives.
In his decades of farming in the region, as well as his 50 years as president of the Quebec Farmers Association and 40 or so years of involvement with the farmers union, he has seen the tole that farm stresses take on farmers’ well being.
By his count, 140 people have died from farm related accidents since about 1950. He said 10 of these have been suicides.
“To me, that’s too many. That’s why I got involved. Because we should be doing something about it,” Judd said.
In recent years, he has begun working with various community groups including Shawville’s Anglican Church and Connexions Resource Centre to host suicide awarenss and prevention workshops, where he shares information about the different stages of mental health that can lead to one thinking about suicide.
“In all the meetings we’ve put on, the most people that have come have been farmers’ wives,” Judd said.
He figures the men are not attending “because they don’t want to be caught around a place like that because somebody would think they were crazy.”
Gabrièle Côté-Lamoureux is a social worker with Écoute-Agricole, an organization that offers mental health support specifically to farmers in the Outaouais.
She said loneliness is absolutely among a handful of stressors weighing on farmers in the Pontiac, and that most farmers will not seek the help they need on their own accord.
Most phone calls she gets are from people referring a neighbour, friend, or employee to her services. This can be done confidentially, both for the farmer and for the person making the referral.
She said often suicide, homicide, depression and burnout are the result of a collection of smaller problems that buildup and eventually explode.
“Often we get calls because things have exploded,” Côté-Lamoureux said.
By her read, people don’t reach out earlier because they are ashamed to need help in the first place.
“If someone breaks their arm, there’s no question that they would go to the hospital, but when it’s our mental health, it’s a lot more taboo to ask for help to get better, so that’s the big difficulty in outreach,” she said.
This is why Judd is making plans to take a different approach, through casual meetings he refers to as ‘shed talks’.
“A group of farmers get together and sit around on lawn chairs, have a coffee, and chat about all the things that are bothering them,” Judd explained.
“When you think you’re alone, and you’re the only person with a problem, you get really stressed.”
Judd hopes to host the first Pontiac shed talk in the near future.
The isolating stigma around mental health is something Labine is also trying to change.
Since her brother’s passing, Labine has made a very deliberate effort to speak openly about how Éric died, and about how his death, along with her own load of farming stresses, have affected her mental health.
In front of a crowded room at a farmers’ mental health gathering hosted at the Little Red Wagon Winery just last month, Labine spoke openly about how the pressures that come with raising three kids, keeping a farm afloat, and working a full-time job off farm wear on her.
She cried, if not sobbed, into the microphone, describing her struggles with postpartum depression and the urge she has had, at times, to end her own life.
Labine says she decided to share this vulnerability in an effort to break down the stigma that surrounds mental health discussions.
She thinks it’s important to be open about how her brother died because she believes if people understand that it happened to her brother, who on the surface was struggling with the same handful of problems that weigh on most farmers in the community, the reality of the risk of suicide will become more real for others.
Being open, for Labine, is an act of care for her community – the community that rallied to support her and her family when Éric passed away nearly five years ago.
From this experience Labine learned that it’s not a lack of community that is the barrier to more resilient mental health for farmers. The support network is there.
“It’s pretty special and I think not a lot of places have that,” Labine said.
What’s missing, however, is a communal willingness to talk about mental health directly, to stare the beast in the eye.
And even this, she says, is changing.
