A FATHER’S HEARTBREAKING BATTLE WITH DEPRESSION
When Stephen Hughes received the fateful telephone call, it was a shock but no great surprise.
They’d burnt all the rope, removed all the ladders and made the family farm as suicide-proof as possible.
But with Anglesey farmer Elfed Hughes in the grip of mental illness, the attributes that had once served him so well – his work ethic and steely determination – were now to prove his undoing. On September 18, 2015, he was found hanging in a shed at Bwchanan, Llanfechell. He was aged 56.
“He was a strong character,” said son Stephen, a BBC Wales news producer based in Cardiff. “But he had come up against something that was stronger than he was.”
Now, less than two years later, Stephen has returned to the family farm to seek answers. In an attempt to understand why people find it so difficult to talk about suicide, he agreed to take part in powerful S4C documentary Colli Dad, siarad am hynna (Losing Dad, talking about ‘that’) that examines mental health issues and the stigmas often associated with them.
“I felt nervous at first,” said Stephen, 33. “But if this prevents one family from facing what we’ve faced, I think it’s worth doing.”
Elfed was a popular family man who was much admired and respected within Anglesey’s farming community.
He had no previous mental health issues and, until he suffered clinical depression, had never even been to see his doctor. When he broke a finger while working on the farm, he just strapped it up and carried on regardless.
Considered one of the island’s busiest producers, he combined farming duties with building work, running 900 Suffolk mules and 250 Charolais and Limousin store cattle on his 600-acre farm.
According to Stephen, it was this work ethic that may have been his fatal flaw.
“Dad worked very hard, all the time, often 18 hours a day,” he said. “He used to tell us that hard work never killed anyone, but we think in this case it may have. He was burning the candles at both ends for decades.”
Amid all the soul-searching that followed his death, the family alighted on a possible trigger that may have underpinned his sudden mental decline.
In late May 2015, he met a wagon driver in the yard at 1.30am to dispatch a lorry-load of cattle. Exhausted, rather than retire to the farmhouse, he chose to catch a few hours sleep in the farm’s static caravan, knowing he would need to be up early.
Just after 3.30am, a group of holidaymakers arrived at the caravan, their sat nav having taken them to the wrong destination.
When they walked in, the tired and weary occupant was spooked – mindful of recent farm thefts nearby, Elfed leapt to the wrong conclusion and an altercation followed.
“At the time we thought nothing of it,” said Stephen. “We even laughed about it, as the farm caravan is not the kind of facility to attract tourists.
“But within a few days, he was asking to see the doctor. For him to do that, it was clear that something had gone wrong, it was so out of character.”
As Elfed’s condition worsened, younger sons Sion, 32, and Geraint, 27, shouldered the work alongside their mother Gwen.
Stephen began driving up to Anglesey every weekend, increasingly shocked by what he found. But the family had no idea where to turn.
“If you break your leg or someone suffers a heart attack, we all know what to do,” said Stephen. “In hindsight, his life was in severe danger. He was at death’s door, but we didn’t know it at the time.
“In the end I called a mental health charity and they told me to call social services. But as it was out of hours, I called NHS Direct, who told me to take Dad to casualty.”
From here he was sectioned to Ysbyty Gwynedd’s Hergest mental healthcare unit in Bangor. But even after he was discharged, the family feared the worst.
“He was always very open about what he wanted to do,” said Stephen.
“We did everything in our powers to stop it happening. But... it was difficult – put obstacles in his way and he’d find a way to overcome them.”
Suicide is the biggest cause of death for people under 50, with cases occurring almost daily in Wales. And of all the occupations, farmers are among the the most vulnerable, partly because of social isolation and partly because they have the means readily at hand to kill themselves.
Stephen believes there are other pressures too. The weather can be a factor, as can market prices, both leading to huge uncertainty. Farmers’ roles as custodians of family heritage can also weigh heavily.
“After he died, a lot of people asked us if financial pressures or personal matters played a part,” said Stephen.
“It was nothing like that. Dad was a successful farmer who was much loved by his family and who enjoyed socialising. His depression was simply an illness, a chemical imbalance of the brain, and was unlucky enough to suffer from it.
“Towards the end he was obsessing about the farm. You couldn’t reason with him. He began hallucinating, imagining the rams had been injured fighting, when they hadn’t. He said he was too ashamed to take the cattle to market because of the condition they were in, but in reality they were perfectly fine.
“A healthy Elfed would never have turned his back on the life he had.”
Youngest brother Geraint now runs the farm, with support from Sion, a joiner. To make things more manageable, sheep numbers have been cut to 500 and most of the cattle sold off.
While filming for S4C, Stephen learnt the heartbreaking reality that, in most cases, suicide is preventable.
“One expert told me that suicide isn’t inevitable,” he said.
“While making the programme, a lot of Dad’s friends told me they had suffered too.
“If he’d known that, would it have made a difference?”
S4C documentary ‘Colli dad, siarad am hynna’ is on Sunday, May 14 at 9pm.
For support, call the Samaritans on 116 123.