San Luis Valley cattle rancher George Whitten was halfway through a mental health workshop when he let himself tally up a figure he had never wanted to know — the number of people in his life who had died by suicide.
It was eight.
“You just sort of file that away in a gray box, a place in your mind that it’s there, but it’s not something you want to revisit,” said Whitten, who is 71 and runs 150 cows on land outside Saguache that has been in his family for 140 years. “There’s still a lot there that I really haven’t unpacked.”
All eight of those relatives and friends were from the rural, agricultural community, starting with Whitten’s cousin, who died at 18 after he was sent from the family’s ranch to Brigham Young University. The young man was depressed and wanted to come home, but his father told him to stick it out. Then he went missing.
Seven years later, his body was found in a cave next to a pistol.
“For all those seven years,” Whitten said, “we were waiting for him to come driving in.”
The workshop Whitten attended in February was the inaugural Buck the Trend, a therapist-led, two-day session in Mancos for ranchers, farmers and horse people to dig into the mental health struggles. It’s one of the latest ideas — along with new grants for rural counties and at least two pieces of legislation at the state Capitol this session — to address an alarming rise in the suicide rate in ag communities.
Nationally, the suicide rate for people in the agriculture industry is 3.5 times higher than other professions. Farmers and ranchers are dying at higher rates than the general population in Colorado, too, in a state that has one of the highest suicide rates in the country.
It’s the isolation, the stress of debt and drought and crop-eating pests, and the “cowboy up” mentality that talking about feelings or asking for help is weak.
Maddy Butcher, a horsewoman, author and founder of Nicker News, created the workshop in the hopes of sparking conversation about a topic that’s hard for many people to talk about, but particularly rural, ranching types. The community is built on isolation and stoicism, on sucking it up when things get hard, she said. And there is a lack of skills “around how to deal with your own well-being or somebody else’s crisis.”
Read more at ColoradoSun.com
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.