Quiet Epidemic of Suicide Claims Frances Farmers.

[elleng]

KERLÉGO, France — A dairy farmer, Jean-Pierre Le Guelvout, once kept 66 cows at a thriving estate in southern Brittany. But falling milk prices, accumulating debts, depression and worries about his health in middle age became too much to bear.

Just 46, Mr. Le Guelvout shot himself in the heart in a grove behind his house one cold December day last year. “It was a place that he loved, near the fields that he loved,” explained his sister Marie, who said she was “very close” to him but did not see his suicide coming.

The death of Ms. Le Guelvout’s brother was part of a quiet epidemic of suicide among French farmers with which stoical rural families, the authorities, public health officials and researchers are trying to grapple.

Farmers are particularly at risk, they all say, because of the nature of their work, which can be isolating, financially precarious and physically demanding.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/20/world/europe/france-farm-suicide.html?

Not the only country with such issues, as I recall.

[OnDoutside]

1. True, there's a fair bit of it in Ireland too. Rural isolation coupled

With farm debt is a big problem.

[angstlessk]

2. Well there ya go...problem solved!

Individual farmers are a log jam for corporate farms...the more suicides the better

[OnDoutside]

3. That has been a continuous fight. Interestingly, I was listening to

a farming program recently here, and there's a government program to encourage train unemployed workers to cross train into farming jobs, to try and increase farming workers.

[angstlessk]

4. Sounds like a good program...if it pays more than slave wages

and if it does, it's an Obama program, and if it is, trump wants to do away with it.

Amazing how we have come to know 'our' new president!

[Warpy]

6. That's also happening in India

It would be interesting to know how many other countries are killing the people who grow their food with debt and isolation.

I know there was a push in Ireland to allow a certain amount of drunk driving on rural roads so that the socially isolated farmers could spend an evening at a pub without being afraid of getting popped for DUI on the way home. I don't know the outcome of that, I suppose the PTB decided it was a bad idea that might knock off too many tourists.

Mechanization might have decreased the work load and made the product cheaper but it made the job damned lonely.

[OnDoutside]

7. Yeah that was from a crackpot member of Parliament from Kilgarvan, a rural village where his family

just happen to own a pub !!! That was never going to happen. Danny Healy-Rae would be like one of those Alabama/Mississippi Republican congressmen.



That's his brother in the background with the flat cap, Michael Healy Rae, also a member of Parliament (I know, I know....)

Rural isolation is a problem though, and the hope, now that the economy is doing better, is that there will be more money provided to work on community initiatives.

[Warpy]

8. They'd fit right in if they were plunked down in West Virginia or Kentucky

far away from the cities.

The problem is that there's no real community to work with, just isolated bachelors toiling away day after day, year after year and getting farther behind all the time. Since few sane women want to cope with an unimproved farmhouse that is stuck in the 1880s, marriage prospects are dim. Maybe that's where some effort could be made, updating the houses and bringing them into the last century, if not this one, making country life a little more appealing to women.

[whirlygigspin]

5. She had a hard life

that Frances Farmer.