Stormy days for farmers By BBC News Online's Liz Doig. According to the mental health charity Rural Minds, one farmer a week takes his own life. Research carried out for the Department of Health by a team at Oxford University indicated that in England and Wales, farmers' decisions to commit suicide were most frequently the result of a mental health problem compounded by occupational, financial, health or relationship problems. Its findings make grim reading, especially as its focus was a period before the BSE crisis took hold.
Farmers are twice as likely to kill themselves as other men of the same age.
Through the 1998 BSE crisis, the suicide rate averaged out at two farmers a week - usually as a result of hanging or shotgun wounds. Now, the farming community says its financial predicament is worse than it ever has been. Hill farmers and pig farmers especially are now suffering the effects of what has been branded as the worst crisis since the 1930s. Farmers and farm workers by the nature of their work are a pretty solitary bunch. On top of that, they often have the added pressure of feeling obliged to keep a family business running.