Why Is It So Hard for Farmers to Ask for Help?

Last night, at a screening, I met a woman named Alison. She was born in the same rural community where she now works as a nurse. She has spent her life there, and there was something quite beautiful about that to me. That she grew up in this place and chose to spend her working life caring for the people who live there.

During the discussion, she answered a question I have asked hundreds of times: Why do farmers find it so hard to reach out for help when they are struggling with their mental health?

I have heard many answers to that question. Pride. Stigma. Masculinity. Isolation. The belief that you should be able to sort yourself out.

But Alison explained it in a way I hadn't really thought about before.

She talked about exposure.

Someone living in a city might interact with dozens of people in a single day. They sit on a train beside strangers. They hear conversations in cafés. They work alongside people from different cultures, religions, professions and backgrounds. Without deliberately seeking it out, they are constantly being exposed to lives that are different from their own.

Someone beside them on the train might say they're going to see a psychiatrist. Another person might be talking about trying out Chinese Medicine. Someone else is going to a Sri Lankan restaurant they have never heard of. None of these moments is particularly significant on its own, but collectively they continually remind you that there are thousands of different ways to live a life.

Your idea of what is "normal" is constantly being stretched a little.

A farmer can live very differently.

There are farmers who might only properly interact with one or two people in a day. Sometimes those people are their own family. They may farm the same land their parents farmed, who learned from their parents before them. Knowledge is passed down through generations, but so are beliefs, behaviours, expectations and ideas about what makes a good person.

That continuity is one of the beautiful things about rural life.

But perhaps it can also make some beliefs incredibly difficult to challenge.

If your father believed asking for help was weakness, and his father believed the same thing, nobody necessarily sat you down and taught you that belief. You absorbed it. It simply became part of how you understood the world.

You become your environment.

That doesn't mean rural people are incapable of change or that people in cities are somehow more enlightened. Far from it. It means all of us need our assumptions challenged occasionally, because otherwise we can mistake the world we inherited for the only way the world can be.

And perhaps that explains something about mental health in farming communities.

Farmers are extraordinary problem-solvers. Something breaks and you fix it. An animal is sick and you work out what is wrong. The season changes and you adapt. The crop fails and you make another plan.

You spend your life solving problems.

But what happens when you are the thing you cannot fix?

What happens when the problem isn't a broken tractor, a sick sheep, a drought or a bank balance, but something happening inside your own head?

Suddenly the skills that have made you incredibly capable in almost every other part of your life may not be enough.

For generations, many rural people were taught that the answer was to keep going. Don't complain. Don't burden anyone else. Sort yourself out.

Seeking help could be interpreted as admitting that you couldn't.

And therefore as weakness.

But now that inherited belief is being challenged.

Why is asking for help weak?

Why is seeing a psychologist fundamentally different from seeing a cardiologist?

Why would we expect ourselves to know how to treat an illness of the mind when we would never expect ourselves to know how to treat an illness of the heart?

Those questions seem obvious once somebody asks them. But somebody has to ask them.

And that was the part of Alison's answer that stayed with me.

Because I think being challenged is actually important.

We often don't like it. None of us particularly enjoys having something we have believed our whole life questioned. But sometimes having our world challenged is exactly how we grow.

I see that happening with mental health in rural Australia. Something that was once whispered about is slowly becoming something we can talk about. Beliefs that survived for generations are being questioned, not because everything our parents and grandparents taught us was wrong, but because the world changes and sometimes we need to change with it.

Leila