Thank you.
My name is Mary Ann Doré. I'm a seventh-generation dairy farmer, originally from Brampton, just outside Toronto. Because of urban encroachment, my husband and I moved to New Dundee in 2010. We moved the cows and joined a partnership with my brother and my parents. I met my husband when I was in high school, and he lived in Montreal. He had never seen a cow before we started dating.
I wrote an article with my husband about our story, with his anxiety and depression in 2017. That was the first time we spoke publicly about it. Looking back now, we're better educated on mental health, and we can see a lot of early signs and symptoms that we were not equipped to notice or discuss at the time.
Things that cause me stress are animal health, working with family—that can be the best and the worst part of my job—trying to find time for my daughter when we work from 5:00 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. and trying to find time for ourselves as we keep waiting for things to slow down. We have a hard time scheduling time for ourselves. Financial stress, changes in the market, social media attacks on our industry and the weather are all things out of my control, but they affect me directly.
All of these things also affect my husband, but he also has a history of mental health problems in his family, and his parents divorced when he was young. He moved around a lot and had a lot of financial stress on him as a young person. He did not grow up in agriculture, so he has had a steep learning curve. All of these additional pressures affect his resilience in ways that we did not understand until after we went through a crisis.
After our article was put on the Ag Women's Network website, many people approached us with their own stories about their own struggles. This led to us being invited to speak on a panel with Andria Jones-Bitton about mental health. After that, we joined her working group, which is a workshop of different farmers, industry people and mental health workers, to work on her program. I have been blown away by the number of people who are willing to talk about this once taboo subject and the thirst there is in this industry to finally do something about it.
I am here today on behalf of the Ag Women's Network, which is a five-year-old volunteer-run program that I have been involved with for the past four years. The group is mostly online, with topics including mental health, industry advancement, personal development, unconscious bias, balancing work and family, rural day care and producer profiles. We're starting our second year of a mentorship program.
Our motto is “Cultivating and connecting leaders for a strong agricultural sector”. We have a website with blogs. Our closed Facebook group has over 2,200 members, and our open group for men and women has over 2,400 members. Anytime the topic of mental health comes up, we are always blown away by the positive outpouring of support. It is something that has touched everyone's lives.
From all of our conversations with AWN, conversations with Andria Jones-Bitton's working group through the University of Guelph, and conversations with industry friends and strangers alike, we know there is a strong need for a farmer-specific mental health outreach program. Farmers need something specific to farmers to feel comfortable reaching out. Being understood is very important when you finally make that big step to contact someone when you are in crisis.
There is a strong desire for a national resource that all members of agriculture and their support network can easily access. Having one national resource would avoid duplication and maximize resources. It needs to be simple, and it needs to be readily accessible if you have any hope of people knowing about it and feeling comfortable using the service. A national service would need to be open to everyone involved in agriculture and their support networks as well.
Following closely behind the need to help people in crisis is the need to support their support person. I speak from experience, and I have heard many personal stories of support people feeling overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted from trying to shield the person in crisis from anything that would upset them. In a farm setting, that means taking on more work and more duties around the farm and family to relieve the person in crisis from more stress. It is exhausting, especially when you are stressed yourself.
My hope is that the national service will be so commonplace and available—like telehealth—that they would feel comfortable reaching out before they're in crisis, and their support network could use the resources as well.
Farming is often a solitary job. It could be a nutritionist or a veterinarian who would be your first point of contact to discuss your mental health. They need to know what to do. Groups like 4-H Canada would benefit from teaching leaders the signs and symptoms of mental health crises, and training industry sales teams and veterinarians would go a long way toward sharing information and increasing awareness of those in need. The industry needs to have knowledge of the signs and symptoms of a person struggling and the next steps that should be taken to link that person to the resources they need.
The time has come for us to address mental health as a health concern. Everyone knows someone who has cancer and wouldn't dream of belittling them for reaching out for help, counselling or medicine. The same needs to be said for mental health.
Thank you so much for your interest in agriculture and mental health. This is a topic very dear to my heart.