54 Primary Pathways
TRAINING & EDUCATION
Spotlight on mental health By Tony Benny
Ag courses at Lincoln University are not just about learning the ins and outs of farming, but have expanded to include mental health and coping mechanisms.
T
eaching students about mental health is just as important as teaching them science, management and animal husbandry, Lincoln University lecturer Dan Smith says. “Mental health challenges are more common in agriculture than they are in the general public and they’re more common in young people,” Smith says. “As a university we’re dealing with a group of people who are having tough times and we’re preparing them to enter an industry where they’re going to have potentially tougher times, which is why we here at Lincoln University are doing something about it.” Once a Lincoln student himself and now a lecturer in farm management, Smith recently spoke to a B.linc Innovation workshop at the university about mental health and wellbeing. In his uni days, mental health was seldom mentioned but when he was a Ravensdown fertiliser rep he became aware of how big an issue it is. “I saw all of this stress and all of this depression and heard stories of suicide and I was like, ‘What is all of this?’. I thought I knew everything there was to know about agriculture but this was happening,” he says. Mental health is a well-known issue in New Zealand and an estimated 25% of us identify as having personal mental health challenges. Those challenges have an effect on 80% of the population. Those most likely to be affected are in the 15-24 years old age group. Farmers deal daily with stresses that include weather, water, hard work, regulation, family, staff, breakdowns, pests and commodity prices and for some, it’s too much. “It causes farming to be reported as (one of) the top 10 most stressful jobs in the world and mostly caused by isolation,” he says. Smith realised what a lonely occupation farming could be when he
54
54-65 DF Nov.indd 54
Lincoln University lecturer Dan Smith says mental health challenges are more common in the agriculture sector and in particular, affect people in the 15-24 age group.
returned to NZ from his OE. He worked in the UK as a soil sampler but was never far away from people, driving to jobs on a multi-lane highway, seeing planes overhead, trains going by and people walking as he worked in the paddock. He says doing a similar job back home was quite different. “I found myself a month later out the back of Waimate with no human in sight so isolation, particularly in New Zealand, given the way we farm, given the farm types, out the back of Cheviot, in the middle of Arthurs Pass, in Murchison, it’s a very isolated place,” he says. “One of the biggest causes of rural mental health issues in the community is
isolation, time on your own, time to think, loneliness, when you’ve got all these other stresses going on.” Students are known internationally, across sexes and age groups, to be a high-risk group for mental distress too, so when he returned to Lincoln as a lecturer, Smith wanted mental health to be included in what he was teaching. “As much as we’re telling you how to increase your calving rate, how to grow more grass, how to get better crops, how to deal with your mental health is just as important – to me, anyway,” he says. He tells the story of a group of nine young men he watched passing his office, all of them at least 100kg, in the prime of their lives, with a background of farming, four-wheel-driving, hunting, playing rugby and drinking beer. “I was thinking, what if one of them was struggling with mental issues? How hard would it be for him to come out and say to those other eight, ‘I’m depressed. You know I broke up with my girlfriend last month and I’m actually really sad about that’,” he says. “It would generally be very hard for them to come out, so we want to try to make that not so hard by just breaking down those barriers, by just normalising people talking about these kinds of topics.” With other staff, and in consultation with others working in the mental health field, including Farmstrong, Smith has incorporated a mental health component into the three-year BCom Ag degree course. It starts during the first two weeks new students are on campus. They’re told basics like what consent means, how to make sure your drink doesn’t get spiked, what looking after your mates means, along with pointers on personal wellbeing. A programme called Well Mates has been put in place, a peer-topeer activity where the students split into groups to talk about signs, symptoms and tools for dealing with mental health.
DAIRY FARMER
November 2021
26/10/21 1:00 PM
