Rural America faces a silent mental health crisis. My dad fought to survive it.
If you or someone you know need mental health resources and support, please call, text or chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline or visit 988lifeline.org for 24/7 access to free and confidential services. Talking to someone is a sign of strength, not shame. Support groups for farmers, like the Farmer Angel Network, can help.
There are more tears on our land than we want to admit.
My dad and I were on sacred ground, back at the small cabin I own on a 40-acre parcel behind the farmhouse where we both grew up. This is land my great-grandpa first fought to get in the Great Depression. Land upon which my grandpa turned out milk cows to graze, and where my dad and I journeyed together. We sat there on the porch with the sun glowing across the honey-brown wood, and the trees whispered of those things we’d lost, and my father quietly broke into tears.
“You did so good, Dad,” I said. “You held on for so long, and now because of you, we have a chance to keep the farm going.”
He had sold our dairy cows the day before. Like the rain that comes when the sun is still shining, my father’s tears showed us feeling more than one thing at once. Hope, because we still had our land as well as my sister’s plans to raise heifers for other farms, beef for consumers and cash crops. Sorrow over no longer milking, and worrying whether the farm would make it.
But there was even more at stake, just below the surface. I’d heard stories of farmers taking their own lives over the loss of their cows, or worse yet, their land. Peering down at my dad, I let the thought surface for a moment, like a knife coming up through my stomach. I pushed it back down, then looked out over the sun streaming across the land before us and said a silent prayer.
This is the silent mental health crisis in rural America. Like so many of the problems I found in my book, “Land Rich, Cash Poor,” on the disappearing American farmer – risks to our food supply, economic devastation and many of our deepest divisions – what rural Americans are experiencing reveals the true depths of a national problem. Here in the heartland, mental health is in its rawest form, hidden because of the way we refuse to talk about it – affecting the country in untold ways.
In fact, America’s mental health crisis is so pronounced in our slice of rural Wisconsin that by the time we sold our herd, a nonprofit called the Farmer Angel Network had sprang up in my home county to help address depression and suicide.
And now our family was living it, right there on that porch.
'I'm a farmer, that's who I am. If I fail, we all fail.'
Mental health problems and their most terrifying form – hurting oneself or others – know no boundaries. But the storm clouds find favorable winds in our most challenging industries, like family farms facing the many economic forces and personal dangers making it harder to get by each year.
More than one-third of Americans have some kind of mental health diagnosis, a number widely considered far higher because of how hard it is to admit and seek services.
According to data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the national suicide rate soared 33% over the past two decades. Agriculture is consistently in the top five most deadly industries. Sometimes that’s mixed with addiction.
Drinking let me look away:My drinking problem taught me a hard truth about my home state
The reasons are as many and as mysterious as reading someone else’s mind. But Leon Statz can tell us more about them than most.
“I’m a farmer, that’s who I am,” he told his family in the Loganville area, just 20 miles from our farm in the hills of southern Wisconsin. “If I fail, we all fail.”
He was voicing what many feel. The farm represents their work, their family, their community, their way of life and who they are. It’s the weight that presses down when you’re not just fighting for your job ‒ you’re fighting for your heritage. It’s hard to simply advise work-life balance with those kinds of stakes.
I know a little about that, watching my dad carry our century-old farm forward, and shouldering my share. The many years of being small for heavy farm work, of animals not taking to me like they did my dad, of more than my share of mishaps with machinery, all piled up. When I chose to pursue a writing career instead – and even as I gratefully watched my sister begin working with him – I could never shake the feeling that I had failed him.
And in farm country, like so many people across the country but especially so here, we don’t talk about it. We come by that honestly. You don’t grow up picking rocks out of fields by hand under the hot sun, as I did, and not learn to put your head down and keep going. Prior generations survived the 1980s Farm Crisis, the Great Depression and more that way.
As I grew up, finding a life of my own was both a comfort and a cross to bear: I was the first in our family to go to college, and the first eldest son in three generations not to take over the farm. The guilt contributed to a decade-long drinking problem that I couldn’t have beaten without therapy.
I eventually found my way back to my roots while continuing my own work, but I still wrestle with it.
Some feel the weight more heavily. As time went on, Leon’s love of farming could never overtake that feeling of failure. And even though he couldn’t control the dropping milk price and the rising costs, the weather, the breakdowns or other hard luck any farm family faces together, Leon took it all on his own shoulders. He sagged into severe depression.
All the lonely people:Lack of social connections hurts Americans' mental health
His dilemma was one that more and more farmers face: between failing to provide for their families by holding on, or feeling they are losing their way of life by selling out. His first suicide attempt came four months after he sold his cows, followed by recovery and a second attempt.
Leon hit an especially hard stretch after learning he couldn’t afford additional acreage he felt the farm needed, as he tried to find a way to make it after selling his cows. Then it began to rain – hard, over and over. Rain is a blessing or a curse for farmers, depending upon the timing, but for Leon’s mental health it was the latter. On Oct. 8 of 2018, his son found him in the shed. He had finished all the chores, so they’d be done when he was gone.
“I don’t think he wanted to die,” his wife, Brenda, who recounted Leon’s struggles and final days to me, said of her husband. “His mind wouldn’t let him be here.”
Darkness can lead to the unthinkable. How we kept hope alive.
So there we were, my dad and I, on that sacred ground. The clanging and creaking of the trailers as we loaded our cows to send them down the road still echoed as we talked on the cabin porch.
I could feel that unspoken specter – the hopelessness that had led farmers like Leon Statz to take their own lives – as I put my hand on my dad’s shoulder, so much stronger than my own, and he leaned in and sobbed. We still had a shot at keeping the farm going, because of how well my dad had ran it. But he thought only of failure.
Lessons of deer season:Deer hunting is dying. That should worry you even if you don't hunt.
We understood on some level, each blaming ourselves – as farm families do – for how the farm and our dad were doing. My sister for feeling we had to change from milking as the economics got tougher and she balanced a second job and kids. My mom for wishing she could have done more after brain aneurysm surgery slowed her down. Me for wondering whether my dad would have gambled on expanding our dairy operation to keep up 20 years ago, if his eldest had been ready to farm with him.
And yet my dad’s burden was heavier. After a lifetime of carrying the farm forward, he was the first generation in 100 years to not milk cows on this land. He didn’t know what he’d do tomorrow, or who he was without knowing.
Thoughts like dark storm clouds. Why should I even be here?
That’s where Leon’s story changed our own. In the days before we sold the cows, and in the days after as we forged ahead, my parents’ friends Don and Dorothy Harms would come out to the farm to talk. Dorothy had become involved with the Farmer Angel Network, which started following Leon’s death. It provides farmer-to-farmer support, raises awareness of the need for more mental health professionals who understand rural America, and more. And in part because of stories like Leon’s, our family knew how important it was to talk. Even though it’s hard, even though many farm families don’t.
And so my dad stood, and ventured off the porch into the sunlight coming down through the trees. And in the days ahead he began to think not just of the family he feared he had failed, but also of the family that still needed him.
I got grandkids here. He began to repeat it to himself, thinking of my sister’s kids still growing up on the farm. I got grandkids here, and I gotta teach them things.
It was the same source of hope that drove our family for more than a hundred years: the next generation. That’s something nobody can take from us.
This piece was adapted from Brian Reisinger’s book, “Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer.” Reisinger contributes in-depth columns and videos for the Ideas Lab at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where this column originally appeared.