Suicide Crisis Hits Rural Australia
SIMPSON, Australia — James Guy had been a dairy farmer since he was 15, and at 55, he thought he’d be preparing for retirement. Instead, he struggled to make the payments on a bank loan after the price of milk fell.
One night in November 2016, his wife, Mary, who was working parttime as a nurse, came home to find he had hanged himself.
“When a farmer is looking down the barrel of having to sell his farm or lose his farm or give up the profession he’d done all his life, it’s devastating,” Ms. Guy said, her voice wavering, from her farmhouse in Simpson, a town in Australia’s dairy heartland of Victoria. “They just lose their identity.”
Family farms like Mr. Guy’s have been the producers of Australia’s agricultural bounty, and the bedrock of its self-image as a nation of proudly self-reliant types, carving a living from a vast continent. But as Australia’s rural economy has boomed on the back of growing exports, small farmers have not always shared in the bounty, with many forced into borrowing money or selling their farms.
The emotional cost of these losses has become visible in a slowly unfolding mental health crisis in rural re- gions, seen most tragically in a rising number of suicides.
Nationwide, people living in remote Australia now take their own lives at twice the rate of those in the city: Every year, there are about 20 suicide deaths per 100,000 people in isolated rural areas, compared with 10 in urban communities, according to studies of local health figures. Research shows that farmers are among those at the highest risk. In the state of Queensland, they are more than twice as likely as the general population to take their own lives. In remote parts of the state, the suicide rate for farmers was up to five times that of nonfarmers.
“There’s a mental health crisis in rural Australia,” said Hugh van Cuylenburg, the founding director of the Resilience Project, an organization that promotes mental health. He added that it had reached “epidemic proportions.”
The problem of rural suicides is not unique to Australia. Countries as diverse as India and France also face problems of farmers killing them- selves. In rural Australia, the causes of the crisis vary. Some farming areas have been pummeled by drought. Other communities have desperately needed workers and are turning to immigrants for help.
The crisis seems to be worsening at a time when Australian farm exports are growing. Last year, they totaled 44.8 billion Australian dollars, or $33.5 billion, up more than a fifth from just six years earlier, according to the National Farmers Federation.
But experts say the biggest beneficiaries are corporate farms. Family farms are less able to cope with price fluctuations in global markets.
The problem is compounded by the difficulty of getting help. With just a small number of mental health professionals scattered across the continent’s rural areas, residents have few resources compared with urban dwellers. “If prevention and treatment services got to them earlier, we’d see less deaths,” said Martin Laverty, chief executive of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, a government- backed effort to improve access to health care in rural areas.
The service relies on small planes to cover more than seven million square kilometers of the most rural parts of Australia, flying in doctors and other professionals. Mr. Laverty said the service provided almost 25,000 people with mental health counseling. New funding will allow it to triple that number next year.
“There’s no more important topic,” Mr. Laverty said. “We need to make city folk aware that the food bowl of Australia — the area in which our crops are grown, and our milk and meat is provided — needs their support.”