Farmers, Mental Health, and the Arts
Christopher Weatherly was in town to work with the therapists in the counseling service down the street. He is a licensed social worker, a graduate student at St. Louis University, writing his Ph.D. dissertation on farmers and mental health issues.
In my office, he sat down across the desk from me, chatting about a topic that may seem confined to an isolated population, but one that has broad resonances to our national food system. Out spilled his story of working in a CAFO (Confined Animal Feeding Operation) this winter alongside hog farmers.
“I was really a tourist,” Chris said. “I spent a day rounding up 500-pound hogs, taking them to the slaughtering house, and watching some of them die. It was rough. An unsettling experience. I learned where our food comes from.”
A visual artist, Chris decided to respond by capturing the scene in a painting.
Chris also discovered where farmers come from when they deal with mental health symptoms. They are dealing with not only the weather and markets, but the changing agricultural context including everything from consolidation of land, to trade wars, to inflation, to human and livestock epidemics. The suicide rates in rural communities increased by 48 percent between 2000-2018, compared to 34 percent in urban areas.
“In farmers, there are high rates of depression, anxiety, substance use and abuse, and suicide. In general, farmers are an ‘at risk’ population. The rural context is very different from the urban. And a lot of the structures we have designed for mental health have been centered around the urban environment.”
Chris explained that there are fewer mental health therapists in rural areas, fewer people in general, and fewer farmers than there used to be. Farm and ranch families comprise less than 2 percent of the U.S. population today. There’s also a brain drain effect. Younger people take better-paying jobs in mental health care in urban environments. Stigma is particularly strong—especially for men-- in rural environments where admitting you have a mental health issue means that you have a weakness. And finally, not much money is invested in rural health care.
These factors leave some of the most vulnerable—rural children—at especially high risk. “I worked for a year in rural Indiana in an emergency department,” Chris said, “assessing people at their worse. A lot of children were experiencing severe suicide ideation. Normally, these patients are hospitalized in inpatient psychiatric care. But there’s not a lot of inpatient psychiatric care in rural environments. So, I would be sending children to hospitals, one or two hours away from their communities. And a lot of these children would be coming from very poor families who didn’t have the time or money to make the trip. This mental health care experience was very traumatic for these children—an oxymoron.”
Chris knew that he was generalizing, but he felt that men are conditioned by society to be detached from their emotions. Yet, one way or another, men always express the way they feel.
“Look at drinking and smoking. I’ll be honest with you. Drinking is a lot of fun. It’s one of the best medications for feeling mentally unwell. It’s just a medication that can have really awful and long-term side effects.”
And sometimes it’s a very good thing, Chris said, to be able to push through problems. “It’s just that things can weigh on someone, and that weight can build and build and build, and have negative effects on the family.
“I don’t want to see people suffer,” Chris said. “And I don’t want to see them die. Many farmers don’t see mental health professionals because they don’t feel understood,” Chris said. “I’ve seen a lot of people refuse to go back to professionals because they feel the therapists don’t understand the weights they carry. Mental health professionals are trained to tell people suffering from workplace stress, ‘It’s just a job.’”
But a farm is more than a job. It is a home and often a family legacy.
“Farmers are feeling that inter-generational weight. If they lose the farm, they’re letting go of this full family line that keeps them grounded to who they are. This weight gives them a lot of meaning. They may not know what they’d be without this profession.”
Chris finds a role for arts in his own profession as a therapist. After Chris’ trip to the slaughter house, he turned to painting.
“I’ve been through some things in my life. I’ve felt very alone, not understood. I had an art teacher who so effectively explained what art is. It’s about your expressions. I remember one of the first paintings I did in that class. I felt such joy.
“As I move into my life and career working to be a mental health professional, you feel the weight of the empathy that you employ. You need to have outlets. Or to put into things what words can’t quite explain. Art has been my best friend for all of my life. Every culture has art. Art could be movement, painting, or singing in the shower.
“One of the only mental health treatments that is truly cross-cultural is something called ‘Creative therapy’– employing the arts in therapy. This is especially helpful for people experiencing trauma. Expressing trauma through any kind of creative endeavor can be really healing.”
Chris had painted his experience at the hog CAFO. “It was helpful for me to see what industrial agriculture is doing to the way we eat. It helped me to think in a meditative stance about these hogs and their lives. It helped me to think about my place both in my research and to consider my role in these animals’ health and well-being.”
Anyone having thoughts of suicide, can call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifelife, or for additional help, click: https://www.speakingofsuicide.com/resources/
Christopher Weatherly will join the faculty at the University of Georgia this fall. To view more of Weatherley’s artwork, go to: https://www.teammanfred.art/
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Thank you, Chris and Mary. Chris's story is thoughtful. That painting is a powerful testimony to Chris's experience of witnessing the slaughter.
Thank you for writing about this. And what a painting!