“But what we do here is put those two approaches together, assessing both farmers’ willingness and ability,” she said. “Based on what we heard from people who regularly work with farmers, we found that many farmers appear to be more willing than able to seek help. And that applies for financial and mental health challenges, meaning that they appear more open to getting help than what previous studies have inferred, but run into barriers that makes it harder to get help.”
Instead of asking farmers, the researchers asked “key informants” — people who work closely with farmers in their communities — why farmers aren’t getting the mental health support they need. The research team, including the paper’s first author Sarah Ruszkowski, research technologist in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, conducted interviews with 64 farm organization staff, university extension agents, agricultural service providers and health organization staff in three states, asking them about what they observe farmers doing when facing challenges.
Key informants can provide different perspectives on what they see among the farmers they interact with in a professional and personal capacity, Ruszkowski said. In some instances, relationships of trust and mutual understanding with service providers and community leaders are built over many years and as a result, these service providers and community leaders are uniquely positioned to serve as counselors to farmers.
“Many of the key informants in our study play a key role in developing and/or offering programs and resources,” she said. “As such, they have an acute understanding of how farmers engage, or not, with programs as well as the reasons for engagement.”
Similar barriers affect farmers getting both financial and mental health support, Ruszkowski pointed out. Some of the same factors shape both willingness and ability, she said, such as costs, lack of internet access, time constraints, complexity of program eligibility, cultural norms around independence and self-reliance, geographic isolation, and limited availability of services. Based on these findings, the researchers said, current approaches to providing farmers support for mental health challenges may be misdirected.
“Instead of asking, ‘how do we convince farmers to seek help,’ the focus should be on how we can remove barriers that prevent farmers from accessing help when they want it,” Ruszkowski said. “We also have to be thinking about the potential unintended consequences of programs that focus too much on convincing farmers to seek help and working on themselves. Indeed, some key informants shared that farmers were frustrated when meeting with people who were being overly cautious about the topic because they wanted to discuss their stress.”
On a practical level, Becot explained, the study suggested that programs and resources to address financial challenges should include efforts to help farmers navigate paperwork that can be time consuming and complex. When it comes to programs and resources to address mental health challenges, efforts should be focused on resolving rural health care shortages, reducing wait time to get an appointment and travel time, as well as lowering health care costs.
“Finally, financial and mental health supports should be linked because for farmers, financial stress and mental health are deeply connected,” Ruszkowski said. “Programs should be coordinated rather than treated separately.”
Contributing to the research were Carrie Henning-Smith, University of Minnesota Rural Health Research Center, Division of Health Policy and Management, and Andrea Bjornestad, School of Education, Counseling, and Human Development, South Dakota State University.
This research was funded by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health through the Upper Midwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and the Nationwide Insurance Endowment in the Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences.