Grant to combat mental stress in farm families

Extreme weather and unusually dire economic conditions have produced crisis situations on many northern Midwest family farms, prompting health officials in seven states to launch a federally funded initiative to reduce stress among farm families.

Given the cyclic nature of farming, farm and rural families need permanent social and mental health support systems, not just crisis interventions. The limited amount of services to deal with stress in the farm community has become a major health concern, one that is very difficult to address without extraordinary support. Fred Moskol Wisconsin Office of Rural Health, UW Medical School

Rural health specialists in Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin have received a $370,000 federal grant to create an interstate network to improve the management of stress and the provision of mental health services in rural areas, according to Fred Moskol, the grant author and director of the Wisconsin Office of Rural Health at the UW Medical School.

Moskol cites the following evidence of crisis conditions on farms:

• An unusually high number of natural disasters have decimated production in some states while surpluses have drastically reduced farm income in others. Farm income dropped 90 percent in North Dakota in one year and 40 percent in Nebraska.
• Nearly one in four North Dakota farm households surveyed said anxiety, stress or depression is a major or moderate problem.
• The volume of calls to farm hotlines in the six states has doubled and tripled, with many callers unaware of available mental health services.

“Given the cyclic nature of farming, farm and rural families need permanent social and mental health support systems, not just crisis interventions,” Moskol said. “The limited amount of services to deal with stress in the farm community has become a major health concern, one that is very difficult to address without extraordinary support,” Moskol said.

Planned interventions and programming will differ by state, Moskol said. However, the activities generally link community mental health centers, health clinics, parish nurses, local hospitals, cooperative extension offices, offices of rural health and farm-based organizations.

Projects include training health care workers, church officials and others to recognize and refer stressed individuals; conducting stress workshops for farmers, their spouses and children, particularly teenagers; and helping farm families identify and obtain mental health services.

Two programs of the U.S. Public Health Service Health Resources and Services Administration support the grant: the Office of Rural Health Policy and the Bureau of Primary Health Care.

Information from individual states will be shared to encourage program development. Among the network objectives is strengthening the link between mental and physical health services in rural areas.