An NHS mental health nurse has hopes to embark on an international study tour to help prevent suicides in British agriculture.
Mental health
Lucia Slack, who works as an NHS mental health nurse alongside helping her husband Johnny on the couple’s dairy farm in the Eden Valley, has been awarded a prestigious Nuffield Farming Scholarship by the Yorkshire Agricultural Society (YAS) for a project which hopes to address suicide as the ‘biggest hidden danger’ in farming.
YAS is a farming charity which promotes and provides sources of emotional, medical, practical and financial help to those in farming.
Ms Slack said she wanted to raise awareness of a serious issue and hoped the research would help to provide greater provision for mental health support in rural and farming communities in the future.
“I have both personal and professional experience of how stressful the agricultural industry can be,” she added.
“Three people a week die by suicide in agriculture.
“With my background, I really hope to be able to positively influence the industry by exploring effective ways to prevent suicide and promote mental health in agriculture.
“I am truly thankful for this opportunity, made possible by the YAS.”
Her studies will take her to countries where there are high suicide rates within the agricultural industry, such as India and China.
Well-being
She will scrutinise successful programmes that have tackled mental health and wellbeing, focusing on peer support, community engagement and reducing stigma around mental health.
Ms Slack hopes to visit Australia, Japan, the USA, New Zealand and Sweden as part of her research into rural farming mental health.
The mental health nurse said key challenges to addressing suicide in agriculture included raising awareness of support to the ‘hardest to reach’, better equipping allied industry professionals to support farmers they are in direct contact with and tackling the stigma around talking about mental health.
She said: “There are lots of amazing services out there.
“I want to understand what the UK is already doing well and highlight it, but also explore how we can target the market that we are not reaching.
“How can we make people more aware of the support that is out there? I want to learn what approaches are being used to achieve this.”
Allister Nixon, chief executive of the YAS said he was pleased the charity was supporting an important topic that he hoped the wider industry would benefit from.
In the UK, charities such as the Farming Community Network, the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution, Addington Fund and Samaritans offer dedicated emotional support to farmers.
