Gateway making sense of mental health in rural areas

At the Gateway office in Goderich (L-R): Gwen Devereaux, President of Gateway CERH, Tom Melady, a farmer from Dublin, and Alexa Hugill, Marketing and Communications Coordinator for Gateway CERH.

By: Gary West

A Goderich-based organisation continues to take great strides in dealing with mental health in the farming community in rural southwestern Ontario.

Gateway Centre of Excellence in Rural Health (CERH) is headed by Seaforth area’s Gwen Devereaux, who has known through her years of nursing and her extensive medical career that mental health in the farming and agricultural community, is something that is often overlooked.

Devereaux and her husband are also farmers in Huron County, and she believes the stigma attached to mental illness, keeps those who really need to understand what they are going through from accessing nearby resources.

Gateway was founded in 2008, as a not-for-profit organisation with a charitable status, governed by a volunteer board of directors.

Since its inception, Gateway has been committed to provide valuable resources and support to rural communities, addressing their unique healthcare needs and challenges, versus enabling rural citizens to take control of their own health.

Gateway’s mission is to improve the health and quality of life of all rural residents, through research, education and communication.

The organisation continues to foster the growth of the rural economy, through partnerships with five local academic and research centres and seven area hospitals.

Gateway understands the pressures, stress and isolation that a farmer can experience throughout their life.

Tom Melady, a farmer from near Dublin was open about what he went through in his past in a recent interview.

He said he had an episode of depression during a severely stressful cropping year in 1992, and although he says his experience was 34 years ago, he knows the same stresses exist today.

Finances, market uncertainty, human relationships, overextending, loneliness, and cropping pressures – all these create uncertainty, and a load of stress for farmers.

As a friend of Devereaux, Melady said she helped him through his difficulty with conversation and understanding.

Devereaux also rallied farming friends to help him through it, and with her farming experience and a nursing profession, she has brought this knowledge to Gateway. In turn, this has brought focus to many rural health issues that may have been overlooked in the past.

“Farming can be very stressful at times, and when farmers recognise that stress, they and those around them can develop strategies to ease that pressure, put on themselves,” said Melady.

When Gateway began the Farmer’s Safety and Well-Being Program, it also developed SHED Talks (Sustaining Healthy Farms Through Empowerment and Dedication).

These SHED Talks project focuses on building connections and empowering an agricultural community in Huron and Perth counties.

Further, it focuses on the goal of reducing social isolation and lessening the daily stressors that farmers experience.

As the federal and provincial governments have realised the importance of dealing with rural mental health, Gateway has also received $100,000 through the Canadian Cancer Society and MaRs Discovery District Rural and Remote Cancer Screening Challenge.

More information is available at gatewayruralhealth.ca