Bringing mental wellness forward

“Employees must stop crying before returning to work.”

The decal, spotted recently in the washroom of a small-town veterinary clinic alongside the soap dispenser, may be the best mental wellness notice out there.

With its echoes of the mandatory hand-washing signs in many workplaces, it addresses the many other reasons beside bodily imperatives that send workers to the privacy of the bathroom.

Within the agriculture community, veterinarians are among those facing exceptional levels of stress. A study in 2019 by the Centres for Disease Control in the US found that the pressure veterinarians face in the course of providing care as well as from the financial pressures of high student debt and low professional margins pushes one in six vets to consider suicide over the course of their career.

Based in San Francisco, the US charity Not One More Vet has worked to boost awareness of the challenges vets face, which accentuate the mental health challenges within the farm sector as a whole.

Research by the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph four years ago found that one in four farmers felt their life wasn’t worth living, and like veterinarians, many find it tough to access adequate mental health care – either because of the stigma associated with doing so, or a lack of knowledge about where to turn.

The path to care has been made easier in BC by AgSafe BC, which recently reported that it had delivered 1,000 hours of counselling last year through its AgLife counselling initiative in partnership with the BC division of the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA).

Delivered confidentially and free of charge to anyone working in the farm sector, it supports employers and workers, both domestic and foreign, employed in BC.

CMHA designates May 5-11 as Mental Health Week, an opportunity to foreground the importance of mental health as well as take steps for those to seek the support they need.

Besides the national 9-8-8 crisis line for those considering suicide, the Canadian Centre for Agricultural Wellbeing earlier this year launched a 24/7 support line specifically for farmers.

Rooted in the earlier work at the Ontario Veterinary College and developed with the assistance of $1.1 million from the federal government, the National Farmer Crisis Line (1-866-FARM-01) offers free, confidential help for farmers, families and farm workers.