A booming economy with a tragic price

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May 20, 2018 8:18 PM

SIMPSON, Australia — James Guy had been a dairy farmer since he was 15, and at 55, he thought he’d be preparing for retirement. Instead, he struggled to make the payments on a bank loan after the price of milk fell and never recovered.

One night in November 2016, his wife, Mary, who was working part time as a nurse to help make ends meet, came home to find he had hanged himself.

“When a farmer is looking down the barrel of having to sell his farm or lose his farm or give up the profession he’d done all his life, it’s devastating,” Mary Guy said from her farmhouse in Simpson, a town in Australia’s dairy heartland of Victoria. “They just lose their identity.”

Family farms like James Guy’s have been the producers of Australia’s agricultural bounty, and the bedrock of its self-image as a nation of proudly self-reliant types, carving a living from a vast continent. But as Australia’s rural economy has boomed on the back of growing exports, small farmers have not always shared in the bounty, with many forced into borrowing money or selling their farms.

The emotional cost of these losses has become visible in a mental health crisis in rural regions, seen most tragically in a rising number of suicides.

Nationwide, people living in remote Australia now take their own lives at twice the rate of those in the city: Every year, there are about 20 suicide deaths per 100,000 people in isolated rural areas, compared with 10 in urban communities, according to independent studies of local health figures.

In very remote parts of the country, the figure is closer to 23, the studies say.

Research shows that farmers are among those at the highest risk of suicide.

In the state of Queensland, studies have shown that farmers are more than twice as likely as the general population to take their own lives. In remote parts of the state, the suicide rate for farmers was up to five times that of nonfarmers.

“There’s a mental health crisis in rural Australia,” said Hugh van Cuylenburg, founding director of the Resilience Project, an organization that promotes mental health across Australia.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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