Farm Families Are Breaking (Ep. 354)

"Those are definitely factors that contribute — they're adding up. They're just piling up, right? It's like all the stuff you shove under the rug. The rug can only get so big, then we can't handle all the stuff shoved under the rug for so long. But in the end, it's usually about nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares I'm going broke. Nobody cares I'm gonna live in a paper box next week."

"That is extremely eye-opening to me. Because you don't hear that. I feel like all the people that I've heard talk about mental health in agriculture, that has never been said."

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the podcast. Thank you very much for being here. I'm excited. I don't talk about mental health a lot, but today we are going to talk about mental health. Amber Ferguson is here, and she works with Blue Valley Behavioral Health in Nebraska. I don't read a lot either, but that I have to read, because, you know, that's a tongue twister. She is a mental health therapist and a director at Blue Valley, and she has been practicing since 2007. So thank you very much for coming.

You're welcome.

I've been waiting a long time to have this conversation.

It's been a bit that you asked me, "Can we do this?" And I'm like, "Oh, yes, yes."

Yeah, there is just so much happening just kind of in the ag industry and rural America in general. And there's a lot of transition happening, and so I wanted to — it's just a good subject to have on. You know, and I feel like — you don't have to agree or disagree with this — I feel like there's a lot of unlicensed individuals talking about mental health nowadays, that I'm like, "You know, yes, I could reach out to a lot of those people, but I feel like this is probably one area you should be licensed."

I would agree with that. And there comes, you know — yes, there is schooling that has to happen, an education piece that has to happen that gives you the small foundation. But after doing this for over 20 years, you really need to know what you're doing, because it's something that's really delicate for a lot of people. And if you really don't know what you're doing, or you're giving advice, or you're giving suggestions, and you don't have that background — it's a scary thing of, you know, you're literally dealing with people's lives. Life or death.

Yes. That's kinda how I look at it too. And I've heard, you know — like, I do deal with it a little bit if there's conflict in the family or something like that. But I know there are other people in this industry, one person in particular that I can think of, that he's giving a lot of advice, and I'm like, dude, you have so much liability on your hands. Because you are dealing with farmers that are already in a very stressed situation, and you do not want somebody to be committing suicide because of what advice you gave. No, thank you.

Right? Yeah. 'Cause ultimately that's where it is. I mean, when I do crisis sessions, I have somebody that they wanna be done with life. They're it. This is the last day. They come in and I'm done. I'm done with life. And it's like, woo, what do you do? But we have specific protocol in place as a licensed provider of how to do that. We know about what the next step is, when they need to go to the hospital, when I can safety plan with them to ensure that they're gonna have supports, all those type of things. And someone without experience, without dealing with crisis sessions like that, or crisis clients over and over, would not know what to do. At what point, you know, is a person that's depressed at the point that they're suicidal? Are they willing to ask those direct questions? Are you gonna kill yourself today? Who wants to ask that question? Not very many.

Not me.

Right? That's my job almost every day.

So are you dealing with a lot of crisis situations, or are you kind of mixed between both?

So it's mixed. As the clinical director at my office, I often deal with more crisis situations just because of my experience. But I do have, you know, 40 to 70 people on my caseload that I see on a weekly basis for therapy sessions too.

Okay. I got a lot of questions. Before you arrived, you were talking about the fact that you wanted to talk about connections and how important that is in mental health. And that people are kind of feeling isolated. Can you expand on that and why you think that's so important right now?

Sure. Absolutely. That connection starts with the baby in the womb, okay? So a baby is connected to its mother in the womb from conception. So we gotta think about — if and when I do a mental health assessment with any individual, I start there. What was your connection with your parent, whether they're a 75-year-old client or they're four?

Oh, wow.

Okay? So you think about that: a baby is connected to its mother from the very beginning. We need that connection to thrive, right? That happens all the way throughout our life. Now we get separated from our parents, right? But we make other social connections, other emotional connections throughout our life. Everybody needs that.

And thinking specifically in the ag industry, how connected are we to people? For example, my husband — he can be on the farm for two to three weeks, see my daughter and I only. That's the only human connection he's had for two or three weeks. People farming, isolated by themselves on the farm, in the tractor, unless they're coming to town to get parts or something. They don't have many connections. They might not have many friends, many friendships, you know, family connections. We can go into that a little bit later.

But just thinking about that connection — everyone needs that emotional connection, and it comes back to what I do for a living too. I need to make that emotional, social connection for them as a stranger. So my number one piece in meeting an individual: they have to be able to trust me. And how can you trust a stranger? I'm supposed to tell you my whole life story?

Especially somebody in the ag industry. I get somebody, you know, it's a blue collar worker or somebody that drives truck or in the ag industry, and maybe they're court ordered to come see me, maybe they're not, maybe their family's forced them to come to see me, and they're like, "Well, I don't know what I'm doing here, but I'm here to see you." And then it's like, how do I make that connection with them? Because most likely, there's been a lot of family separation, there's been a lot of, you know, like you have talked about, verbal abuse or some kind of abuse from older generations. Or are you just supposed to suck it up? But as human beings, we're made of emotions. We're born with emotions. We have to learn how to deal with them. We can't just stuff them.

And are you seeing more isolation since COVID, because everything is just online? And I don't feel like — like, I obviously have all my meetings online, and I can connect. But we just had our annual think tank, and all of my agents — like, I've grown quite an agency in the last year, and we've all just talked on Zoom. But we all went to think tank except two of them. It was insane, Amber, to see the difference in our next Zoom meeting now that they met in person. It was like, I thought, who are these people? They're so happy to see one another. Right? Because they got to know each other and spend two days together.

There was that connection. And it's way different sitting in person with someone, connecting with them. I mean, in today's world post-COVID, Zoom is great. It serves its purpose. And I do Zoom sessions myself. I do. It does help me, really — not the client — because of my location change or those type of things. But that human connection, that social emotional connection, really needs to be in person.

And I feel like in the ag industry, maybe it hasn't been as much of an issue, because people are — we're still connecting. Even like with what Doug does, you know, he's sitting in a sale barn. Well, there's a lot of people that are not going to the sale barn anymore. And so if I'm a rancher and that was my outing, to go to the sale barn and have coffee and see all my buddies — you know, the only ones doing that now are the old guys like my dad. He's not buying me cows. We just go to the sale barn to see his friends.

'Cause that's where he sees his friends. Right. That's where he makes that social connection. That's where he communicates every week.

Yeah. So the sale barns need to exist for connections. They should learn their position.

That's right. They should know their role in the whole industry here.

We can maybe monetize on that. Yeah, but I can see that. What happens in one of my questions too is the verbal abuse. Like, I see this with — I am only home with dad and mom and maybe my spouse, and we're living in the same location, and there is like — this is the heartbreaking stuff for me — is when I see a client that mom and dad just belittle him to no end. And you don't know what you're doing, you don't appreciate anything, you're doing that wrong. It's just constant. To the point that when we put them through underwriting, they will come back denied, or they will come back with a bad health rating. Crohn's, colitis, all these mental health issues. All these things. And wives too. And it can happen to the men, but we see it more with wives. What do you do?

I mean, in that — and you touched on it really well — there's a huge connection between mental health and physical health.

Oh, absolutely.

So I'm always in communication with a primary care physician, their specialist, all those type of things, because those are so closely tied. I always ask all my clients, "Go rule out any medical issues." You know, if they're having symptoms, go rule out any medical issues or get a medical diagnosis. A lot of times what I see when they've come to me and they really haven't done that, they go to their medical provider, they go through all this testing, they still have the same symptoms, they come back to me and they're like, "My medical provider said there's nothing wrong with me." Okay. It's a mental health disorder. These physical symptoms are caused by your anxiety, by your depression, by mood instability, those type of things.

And so then going back to that, you know, kind of where you started with the verbal abuse — is there any clear cut, this is what you should do? No, there's no clear cut solution. Does there need to possibly be a mediator, a therapist, somebody that gets involved to help communicate? Because we were talking a little bit about this earlier: we don't communicate to listen. We communicate — in our head we're already thinking about the next response and we're not even really listening to the person.

That's a huge thing when I build rapport with clients. I just feel it's something super hard to explain, but I'm — for lack of better words — I'm in a therapist zone, and there are no distractions for me whatsoever. I'm totally in tune to that person. So that person's talking loud, I'm talking loud. The person's talking quiet, I'm talking quiet. I use their same frame of reference, I use their same language, all those things, to be very reflective of them, so I can build that rapport with them, build that trust with them.

And a lot of times in a family, that would be really helpful if you had some mediator, some therapist that was willing to sit down with everybody — and everybody would be willing to sit down. That's often not the case.

But what if they're not? Like, what if I'm the kid that is going through this and there's no trust? There's no — like, I was speaking at a tech school last week, and one of my clients is going to the school, and he said he had to show some of his classmates how to drive a combine that grew up on a farm. Because the older generation has no trust in these kids to even teach them how to do that. I know farm families that have gone through the same thing. The kids didn't come back to farm because there was no trust. You didn't do it good enough, or you made this dirty, or you didn't take care of this, or there was no teaching.

Sure.

So there are people that are bound and determined, I'm going to farm, and the only way I can do it is to put up with this. So my opinion, not being a therapist, is leave. Because you're literally killing yourself, because you have Crohn's, colitis, mental health disorders.

Exactly. At what cost is that farm to you? Are you willing to kill yourself for it? And if you're not, walk away.

Because if mom and dad are not going to see — or grandpa and grandma — somebody is not going to see what they're doing, and not want to get the help, and not try to understand, why would you stay?

Exactly. Yeah. And that's a difficult part. If you absolutely see not willing to use a mediator, not willing to communicate through this, not willing to have regular family meetings, not willing to do anything — that you see they're stuck in their ways. This is how it's been for 40, 50 years, two generations, three generations deep. I feel like you have two choices. You accept them for what they are and know that this is how life's gonna be.

And my wife's gonna have to put up with that, or your husband is gonna have to put up with that, if you go back. Like, I've had people reach out to me just on social media and say, "Mary Jo, I'm giving up all this time with my family and they're not understanding and I don't know that I'm gonna get anything." And I mean, it's bad. This, according to them, of course — it's a one-sided story. It's a bad situation, and I'm like, "You have to decide." Like, I'm not a therapist giving advice. Terrible.

You're okay.

But I'm like, you need to go talk to somebody and decide: are you gonna stay, or are you not going to stay? Because you're only 20 years old. You got a long life to live. It's a long time. And I look at it like, go get a job and save money and start renting ground and do it yourself. Nobody said you can't do it yourself. But pick your hard. Doing it yourself is gonna be really, really hard. This is gonna be really hard, with health and mental health issues.

Yeah. Whatever you do in life, it's gonna be hard.

Right. Right?

Right. But are you willing to sacrifice your own mental health, your own physical health, possibly be miserable for 40-plus years, to have a piece of ground, or to have the family farm, or to continue that? And how successful you're really gonna be if you're physically and mentally being put down every day by your family? Is that worth that to you? And that's a huge decision. And like you said, then that person — that 20-year-old, that 30-year-old, that 40-year-old that's stuck in that situation — I would encourage them, go seek some help to help you. Again, the therapist isn't making that decision for you, but just verbally processing that to figure out what is best for them. We can come to that conclusion; they can make those decisions in the therapy sessions themselves about truly what is best for them.

Yeah. Those kids need to go to therapy. I think we're past suck it up, buttercup. I think there are some situations where we need somebody to help us work through that. It's not even just — it's not like you're laying on a bed nowadays. Like, that's not —

No beds. No couches. There's no beds, no couches. I'm not hypnotizing you, not putting electric codes on your head. Nothing of that exists in this world, right?

Yeah. I do think that you need that external person sometimes to justify, I'm not crazy. And this is not a me issue. Because the kids that stay, and the people that stay for that abuse, as you could call it — they think it's them.

Yes.

And they have to be told by a third party, it's not them. Like, it's amazing how many of those people sit in front of me and I will be like, "You need to figure out what you're going to do here. Because this is not gonna change. Your health is terrible. Go get a job, whatever." And the spouse will just look at them, like, she's been saying it the whole time. But they're not listening to her.

And I think that's an important piece too: careful who you marry. My husband says the same things in his marketing schools. "Careful who you marry. Are they going to support you through all of this?" And be willing to listen to your partner that's a little bit outside of that family picture. Sometimes we're so engulfed in that. And like you said, when that abuse happens, there's a lot of manipulation that happens. And it's backdoored back to you, to the young person that's coming in — 20, 30, 40 years old. The older generation makes it seem that it's your fault. You're coming in, you're controlling everything, you're taking over the farm, I never got my time. I hear that often. "I never got my time. Well, it was grandma's and now it's gonna be yours. When is it my turn?" You know, and that's usually the parents, right? So they feel like their generation's getting skipped.

Yep. And they kind of are, in some ways. To their point, they sort of are, because things are skipping a generation. And that brings up a whole nother topic that I wanted to talk about. Because I do have a client that it did skip a generation. And man, kudos to those parents. Like, that takes a lot to say, "I farmed this my whole life, and I'm never actually owning it. It's going to my kids." It kind of just makes sense sometimes to do it that way.

So I kind of have dual questions there. One, how is a parent, or the next generation getting it, do you say, "Okay, this is great. I'm okay to skip it"? And then how do we talk to the younger generation that's coming up to say, "You need to understand"? They haven't gotten it. And so they just got it — and by just got it, I mean like maybe 10 years ago. Not just two years ago. But to them, it's just got it. They've farmed it forever and now you're in there. What are you doing with it? What are you doing with it? What are you doing with it? Is there a way to correctly approach that conversation without pissing them off?

I think there's a lot of validation that needs to happen there, and the younger generation struggles with that — to validate your parents. And just telling them, I get it that this has only been 10 years, and kind of using their language. Because the younger generation, just like you said, wants to skip forward. "Well, it's mine now. We're gonna change this. You've done nothing for 20 years. We don't care anymore. We're ripping that all out. We're doing all this. We're turning this into this, this, this." And it's like, "Whoa, slow down a minute." And truly think about what your parents have been through. Like, put yourself in their shoes for a minute. A lot of people struggle with that, and I do a lot of that in therapy as well: put yourself in their shoes for five minutes. Think about where —

Is there a big issue there? I feel like my clients don't have that issue. I feel like they're pretty nice about how they approach their parents, and their parents are mad. And the kids are like, "I just wanna plan." But are you seeing the other side? I mean, I'm not seeing every side, right? 'Cause I'm seeing the kids that are more educated than the ones that are probably more aggressive.

Yeah. And I would say — I mean, I see a lot of that, the younger generation just kind of pushing through, just kinda bulldozing through, right? And not accepting or not looking at parents' perspective a lot of times, or even grandparents' perspective. You know, think about my husband's great grandma. She lived through the Depression.

Yeah. Whew.

Don't make fun of her because she's got her extra clothes in the basement and all her things prepped. It's okay. We just accept her for where she is. That's where she came from. That's what she lived through. We have to learn, you know, to remember those things. Did we live through it? No, I didn't live through it. I'm 45. I didn't live through that. I have no idea what she went through, but don't make fun of her, don't mock her, you know.

Does the younger generation understand that when you tell them that, or are they just locked in?

It's a struggle. I would feel like the younger generation is a little more accepting sometimes if it's pointed out to them by someone outside of the family.

Okay.

Again, right? Someone that has a little more outside perspective. Because it's really hard to listen to. Again, we don't wanna listen to our elders. We don't listen to our parents or our grandparents, like, they're old now, they don't know what we need. And it's like, well, but they do. They have experience. They've lived longer than we have. It's okay to listen to them. We might not agree. We don't always have to 100% agree on everything, but at least everybody wants to be heard. Everybody wants to be listened to.

So what advice do you have for mom and dad who are getting that kid that's pushing? How can they nicely have the conversation so we're not wrecking the relationship?

Yeah, that's difficult. It's like, how accepting is both sides, right? How accepting — and to have regular... And this sounds silly, but you gotta sit down all together at the table and meet. You gotta have family meetings. Especially when there isn't much communication, everybody's kinda talking around each other. Nobody knows what the other one's doing, right? So they're over here doing their thing and they think this, and there's assumptions made everywhere, right? Everybody's assuming what everybody else is doing. But if we truly sit down at the table and we're talking about things and everything's laid out here, and we have those meetings regularly, that communication becomes much more regular, and you don't have to sit down and have the family meeting — it just happens naturally. And that's what we want to happen eventually.

I have found, kind of just talking to people, that the kid you think is gonna be the problem in those family meetings actually isn't the problem. It's the one you don't think is gonna be. Is that correct?

Yes. Yep. When everybody actually sits down — and there's an assumption there, that, "Ooh, this kid's gonna be, oh gosh, I don't even want them here because this is gonna cause a ruckus." Right? They're usually the one, if you sit down and you be purposeful and you're willing to listen, they're willing to talk. The one that you didn't expect was the one that caused them.

And they're probably the one that's a little more worldly, I guess you could say, because they got out of their community. 'Cause I do think — and I've talked about this on a podcast before — I think some of the problem is you don't leave your county. And so you truly think that the world just revolves around this little, you know, one hour radius from you, or even maybe a half an hour radius.

Good Lord.

Yeah. Get out of the coffee shop and the little —

Of a community of 500 people.

Yeah. I really think that that person then left and they're like, "Oh, there's so many more opportunities in the world that's not just what's right here. We don't have to have the scarcity mindset."

Yes. Yeah. And open up that mindset a little bit, open up that paradigm to really what's in life.

Right. But if you're going to be working together, have the communication, or go have a conversation with someone like yourself, so that you know if it's you or not. Or even how to handle that situation. I would want to know, if I'm gonna stay, how do I talk to them? 'Cause the one thing that I have been told in the past is, like, they don't wanna retire. And they don't even know why they don't want to retire, but it's because it's their identity. And so if I retire from farming, I can no longer say I'm a farmer, and that was my identity. Or nobody's going to need me anymore.

Exactly.

And so I have used that with quite a few people and said, "When you talk to mom and dad, you need to let them know that it's not that you don't need them, it's just a shift of responsibility. Let me take the financial responsibility and run the business, and now you get to just do the fun stuff of farming."

And so, like you said, giving them permission to still be a part.

Yes.

Right? 'Cause in the ag world, you know, just like my husband — scared to death to retire. What would I do with myself? Identifies himself with raising cattle. What would he ever do with his life without doing that? He's passionate about it. He's done it his whole life. How could he dare think about not going out to feed fat steers that we're gonna butcher, or he can still carry a bucket? You know? My father-in-law, 70-some years old. It's okay. Let him go feed the calves, let him go drive the skid steer, let him go do something, right? But not just eliminating everything.

And I feel like they don't have hobbies. I don't have a hobby, which is really bad. Really bad. Mine is mom taxi at the moment.

You know, somebody that will change. And I'll have to buy one, too.

I don't have one. I get it. Everybody's like, "Mary Jo, you need a hobby." I'm like, "Uh, nothing sounds fun. Okay, let's work some more." But, like, I look at my dad and he has had zero problem. Like, let's go south. Let's do fun stuff. But when he had to disperse his cattle, he was like, "Okay, well, I'm farming." Like, there was never a — at least I didn't see it — never a down period. Because, yeah, he was known as the Charolais breeder. To us, that was a huge identity of who we were. And it's like, when he dispersed, he just went to farming. But he had always been woodworking, he had always tractor pulled, but he always had hobbies. And I feel like they don't have hobbies, so this is all they got.

This is it.

Literally. Like, Dad probably doesn't have any hobbies. Yeah, he needs some hobbies. And he'll think he should retire.

That's right. That's right. Maybe I could get him to move south someday.

I told Scott the other day, I said, "You know, I've given up hope. We are just going to truly grow old in separate states." Especially in the winter. I really was hoping for a little bit. But that's not happening at all.

Yeah.

Yeah. But I do feel like they've never given themselves permission to have a hobby, because they have to be busy. They have to work in order to have self worth. And so, even on that subject, how do we switch our brain to say, "I am worthy even though I'm not working twenty four seven"?

And that's that emotional connection. You really got to be secure with your own self. And at what point is the ag industry — you gotta look at yourself deep inside yourself. How self-confident am I? What is my self-worth? Who am I? If I took farming, cattle, everything away, who am I personally as a person? And that's one of those things that we really delve into in therapy. Our brains are ultimately wired to think of the negative first. That's just how we're made.

That's not a how-I-was-raised issue?

No.

Really?

It's truly how the brain was made. So what do we have to do? We have to retrain our brain, right? And it can happen from the beginning, right? You have good, healthy parents. They train you, you know, to raise your self-confidence, and they're praising you, and they're giving you good feedback. You have consistency in your life. You have great emotional, social connections growing up with parents, grandparents, all those things, you know, in the perfect world. You're raising a good person and they know their self-worth. They know how self-confident they are.

But truly, when you get to be an adult, sometimes, again, our environment affects a lot of that. People that help to bring our paradigms. And so how negative of a person are we? How positive a person are we? That's directly where that self-worth, that self-confidence comes from. So I work with a lot of people on — we start out, I have some clients, I tell them, "Okay, we're gonna write out three positive things that you do every day." They're about to go crawl out of their skin, Mary Jo. They could not imagine coming up with three positive things that they did. I don't even start with about themselves. It's like three positive things that you did that day. People cannot a lot of times even fathom that, you know?

But this would explain why you can have three kids from the same household and every one of them thinks differently. Why is our brain wired like that?

I know. I wish I knew that.

There's no scientific thing that says —

No. It just, that's how it is.

I wonder if it's like a survivalist, like…

Well, and there is some — now that you say that, there is some, you know, thinking way back when things started. There was a lot of that fight or flight survival mode, all those type of things.

That is so interesting, because I am just sort of by nature a pretty positive person. And I'm like, "Yeah, sure. What's the worst thing that could happen?" I just don't worry about a lot of stuff. And I'm just like, "Why can't people just get over it?" I did not realize it is — I just thought it was an upbringing. I'm like, "Okay, well, you better figure that out, 'cause you came from a bad upbringing." But it would make sense. Or some people start that way and some people don't.

Right. So you think about — and, you know, I was talking about that really healthy child that grows up, right, in a great environment. Now we put some other risk factors in here. We start — you know, even mother used alcohol, smoked a cigarette, any of those things during pregnancy. You think about possible issues in parenting, lack of parenting, neglect. In today's world, screen addiction.

Oh, wow.

I'm not even gonna go there. I mean, there's just all these factors in life, that kids are exposed to negative things. And then we start talking about young adults, their self-confidence, their self-worth. Look at all these things that have impacted that along the way. Then you ask somebody, think about three positive things they've done in a day — scared to death to even think about it. No, I have all these things to worry about. My brain is full of all the worries. How could I think about anything positive? I hear that every day. Or, "Amber, am I crazy? All I do is worry about this and this and this and this. I can't even think about anything positive I've done today, because my mind is racing full of anxiety about everything that I have to worry about."

And for me, as a therapist, I don't dare tell them not to worry. You have to validate that. Like, yep, you're gonna worry. I cannot tell you not to worry. Well, we gotta start retraining that thought process to think more positive, even if we're thinking about one positive thing a day. Sometimes you gotta start slow. Sometimes people can go, "Oh, I could write, you know, 10 positive statements about myself every day. Okay, let's start there." And that's the trick of therapy too. You gotta meet the person where they are. Always meet the person where they're at.

That's so crazy. I just cannot fathom having to worry about stuff all day, every day. I just have this underlying worst case scenario. Anybody asks me advice, I'm like, "Yeah, what's the worst case scenario? You're homeless? Okay. Then we probably shouldn't do that."

Yeah. Right. But if you're not homeless — what's it gonna hurt? It can't be that bad, right?

Yes, yes. Yeah. And sometimes they think of so many things that it just completely stops them in life. And they're just like, "Nope, we can't." Like, I am being mentally abused and being told I'm worthless every day, all day. I can't do this right. I can't do that right. You can't go buy cows because you wouldn't know what you're looking for. You overpaid for that tractor, whatever. You don't know any numbers, you're never gonna be successful. That's a stupid idea to do that, farming that way. Like, over and over. That programming.

No self-worth, zero self-confidence, nothing. Right.

Because you stay there. Like, I would've been gone so long ago.

And to think about how many people just continue to put up with that. And why? To have a piece of ground to say that it's yours.

I was a very mouthy child.

No way.

So I'm like, "Man, I didn't take that shit as a child." And you're taking that as an adult. Yes. For me to be able — this is why I'm not a therapist. Because there is no way that I could sit and listen to somebody. Like, I'm the person that wants to save the underdog always.

Oh, sure.

And so I wanna just come in and just beat somebody up, because that's a good person and look what you're doing to them.

Yeah.

Okay. We got off track, but I do wanna bounce back to the kids for a little bit. Before we get to the kids though — so many people in agriculture, it's a pride issue. We do not want to seek help. I'm sure you have a lot to say on that, but why is that? How do we get past that?

That is still a huge stigma, and I work to advocate for that all the time, even in our rural community. I mean, we live in a farming community, ag community, and it's like, you know, we do have people come in, they're like, "Oh, what's your address? Okay, so we can park down the street, and so nobody will see my truck there." Sure, that's your choice. You know, they'll ask. It's okay. Yeah, you don't want the public or your friend or your family to see your truck sitting in front of our organization.

Okay. I never even thought of that.

Yeah. But, you know, and again, we're not on a busy street, but what if they drive down that street and your neighbor sees you at the behavioral health clinic? Ooh, what's wrong with you? You know, there's still that stigma there across all boards of all people though. I mean, that's not just the ag community. There's still a stigma for mental health everywhere.

I am seeing a lot more people in the general public talking about it. Which is really been helpful. Like, to the point where I'm like, who's not seeing a therapist? I mean, maybe it's just people I know, but I'm just like, who is not seeing a therapist? My God, we need more therapists, because everybody I know is seeing a therapist.

And it is a huge issue. We have a shortage still. We can't get people through college enough, and you have to get your master's degree to a licensure in any state. So you have to get your bachelor's degree, you have to get your master's degree — so seven to eight years of college, and then applying for a licensure. So there is quite an education that has to happen.

But that stigma's getting better. And I would say during COVID, it got really better, you know? I can talk bad about social media all day, but social media, you know, famous people really helped during that time to say, "It's okay to talk about your emotions. It's okay to go see a therapist." You know, that's definitely helped.

The other piece in the ag world is — and for anybody — you have to find a therapist that's good for you. And it's okay to say, "You're not right for me." You go in and see a therapist, you do an assessment, you know, that initial assessment, you see them a couple times, you're like, "This isn't working. I just don't feel comfortable here." I would way rather — and I open that up for my clients — you gotta tell me, if this isn't working in the first couple sessions, if you don't feel like you can trust me, if you don't feel like you can talk openly to me about anything in your life, this isn't right. We need to find somebody for you.

And I think that's really important in the ag world. You know, I see probably more people that are blue collar, truck drivers in the ag world, because I can say — again, they're not there to talk about my life. I don't talk about my life in a therapy session, but if I can say one thing. You know, I got some blue collar, he's a truck driver, he comes in, hauls dry ice for a living. "You don't know anything about my life, blah, blah, blah." And I'll just say one thing. Like, well, you know, my husband has a few cattle. We have cattle on some ice. I knew a little bit about that world. "Oh, you do? Huh. So you do know. You do know about truck drivers, don't you?"

And they are their own special breed.

Right? Yes. I have the in. At that point I built the rapport in two sentences. They're like, "Oh, all right." And then I can build that rapport. They trust me. And again, that's all I need to say. I'm not telling my background or what my husband does or anything. They're not there to talk about my life. They're there to talk about theirs. But if I can get them to open up a little bit, there's that huge piece there.

But how do we get them there? How do we get a farmer that's in a really bad situation? What would you say to them to say, "Hey, just go one time"?

And I'll be honest with you, normally how I get them is through a crisis situation. You know, they've gotten to a point that they're at a mental breakdown, they've had so much anxiety, they think they're having a heart attack. So they're going to the emergency room, deemed no physical issues. The doctor tells them you're having anxiety, referral comes for behavioral health then, at that point. So I would say majority of the time, still —

And do they have a follow up?

Mm, maybe 50% of the time, I would say — unofficial statistics in my brain, but maybe 50% of the time. And if you can get them with the right therapist, to not get turned off at that first assessment, is a huge piece. So I try to do my best, if I know who's coming in, to fit them in with the right therapist. But yeah, to give somebody a chance, that's tough.

Do you see that men want to have men, or are they okay? Is there a gender issue?

Actually, men usually prefer a female therapist.

Okay. Which would make sense. Even on the life insurance side, I see that. It is much easier for me to work with men than it is for a man in my position. I can say a lot more direct things without ruffling feathers.

Yes. Yes, there's the whole — yeah.

That's interesting. I just, it's such an issue. I was like, how do you get them? I have a lady on TikTok that I follow, and her husband committed suicide five months ago, I think, and she's not doing well. Not doing well. She is not going to see anybody, and she now is in a position — like, her TikToks are so scary.

Oh, wow.

And I'm like, "You need to go see somebody." But I feel like it's such a — is this true, that suicide is a very last minute decision? I feel like some of it can be planned, but I've also heard a lot of people say it's a very last minute decision, and I've not seen a lot of last minute decisions with the people that I know that have committed suicide.

I would say most of the time it's pretty planned out, but you never put the puzzle pieces together till it's over. And that's the difficult part. The family member doesn't — after the suicide happens, then they go backwards in time and they're like, ugh, there was this piece, there was this piece, there was this piece. Oh my gosh, why didn't I put the puzzle pieces together? I mean, there are very typically signs there. They're planning it out.

But if we're talking to the person that is planning to commit suicide — do they not think about the people they're leaving behind and how hard that's going to be?

Absolutely not. When a person is to the point that they're so depressed that they wanna commit suicide — if they're sitting in my office, they're done, they've been brought in by somebody else and they have a specific plan, they know how they're gonna do it, they have access to the plan, and I ask them all these questions straight out. This is how I know they need to go to a hospital setting, so that they can be monitored 24 hours. But they have all that planned out. Their blinders are on. All they can see is death. They don't care about anything else in the world. Life is so horrible for them at that moment in time that they can't even think about anything else. Themselves, anyone else, their children, family, their closest friend — none of those people exist to them, because they're done.

So that's the difficult part.

Most people will say, how did they not care about their family? That's a very selfish thing to do. Like, you hear that all the time.

We hear that often.

But I think that that's easy for us to say when we're not in that position. And I don't feel like that's the right answer.

Exactly. Yeah, because they're not thinking about that. And if you haven't experienced somebody that's been at that point in their life, you just don't get it. Again, those blinders are on. They can't think about anything else.

And on the side that I'm seeing, and the side of what I do, I feel like a lot of the depression, anxiety, suicide comes from financials. Am I out of line to say 99% of that boils down to financials?

I would say not all of that, and I'm gonna go back to the word connection. Even if, like you said before, you were kind of joking like, "Oh, you'd be homeless," right? You know? So yes, there's a huge financial piece there in the ag world especially, I feel like, but there's that sense of isolation. So you put those things together. It's usually a combination of things. But when people are talking about the end of life, the finances go out the door. Like, if somebody's sitting in my office and they're suicidal and they wanna end their life, money is nothing to them. Just like the people around them. It goes so far beyond that.

The bank calling a note, or them possibly losing land that they had inheritance — we have that as a question for you too. Okay, I have all this family history on my shoulders and now I'm the one that's gonna lose it. But that again comes back to finance, because of the money issue. So the money's not the issue, but was it the driving factor then?

I would feel that it was the driving factor.

Okay. But at some point we've crossed the bridge.

Yeah, they're just so far. I mean, those are definitely factors that contribute — they're adding up. They're just piling up, right? It's like all the stuff you shove under the rug. The rug can only get so big, then we can't handle all the stuff shoved under the rug for so long. But in the end, it's usually about nobody cares. Nobody cares. Nobody cares I'm going broke. Nobody cares I'm gonna live in a paper box next week.

That is extremely eye-opening to me. Because you don't hear that.

Right. And most people aren't gonna, you know —

I feel like all the people that I've heard talk about mental health in agriculture, that has never been said. Because you need to be in their head to understand that. And unless you're sitting with people every day and talking about that like you are, you are not understanding where they're at.

Exactly. And there's just that experience piece that comes with being a therapist, of how to get that out of someone even when they're at that point in their life.

That could be scary information.

Yes.

But if somebody is at that point, or somebody's getting close to that point, that's a really good thing. Like, if they're listening to this podcast, then knowing that there truly is help to get you to the other side of that.

Yes. Absolutely. We can get through it.

'Cause I think — do they think that there's no way, like, nobody's gonna be able to help me out of this? And so they're truly hopeless, that even if I go see you, you're not gonna be able to help.

Yeah, what are they gonna do? What are they gonna do?

But they don't know. They also don't know what you do.

Correct. Correct. So they're often dragged in by some family member, a mom, a brother, a wife, whatever, and they're sitting in my chair and they're like, "So what are you gonna do? You're gonna convince me not to kill myself today?" I mean, I've heard that so many times. "What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do? What are you gonna do, lady?" And it's like, "Okay, well." You know? That's sort of my job. So, yep, that's what we are for.

But, you know, a lot of them, when they come in as a crisis session, I don't have the rapport with them. If I've seen a client for two to three years and they come in and they're suicidal, it's a way different session with them, because I already know all their triggers. I know their life trauma. I know all the things that they've been through. But I come in cold as a new person, been drug in there. You know, had clients come in like, "Yep, tried to kill myself like five times. What are you gonna do about it? I'm gonna get it done this time. You think you're gonna stop me?" And so those are the more difficult clients, I will tell you. But in 20 years of doing this, I've never had a current client commit suicide, and have prevented a ton of them.

I would say that's a success. I would say that that is probably not the norm.

Yeah, it is not. And I also supervise a lot of therapists — I have like 40 therapists in my practice that I supervise, just because I'm experienced. And that happens, and that's tough, because we have emotions too, right? We're people. So you think about what your responsibility is, and then you get that worry of what if I would've done something different, you know, that type of thing.

No different than a doctor losing a patient.

Yeah. You know?

Yeah, what did I do wrong? And then, in a small community, you then get to see the family. And you know that you were helping them. And so that's also hard.

Absolutely.

I did not know this about you — because, you know, we talked via email, but I just kinda fly by the seat of my pants, Amber. I didn't realize that you worked with kids. Like, that you specialize with trauma with children. And so we're seeing just a massive amount of mental health issues with kids. And I feel like — and I don't know if it's just because it's being exposed more, if it is social media — but we're seeing a lot of that. What can we do as parents, or what can parents do to kinda watch that, avoid it, help it? What's your advice?

Sure. I think all of the above. It's more exposed. In today's world, we're better educated, so we're catching it quicker. You know, there's a lot of preventative things that we try to do in the mental health world, but then there's the social media piece. You know, you're talking about sexual trauma, those type of things. Everything is so much more accessible.

Another huge thing that I feel is really something, and people don't think about this: when I was a kid, when you were a kid, impulse control was automatically just taught by the world that we lived in. Things were a lot slower. For example, when we watched a TV show, you had to wait till five o'clock on Friday night to watch Dallas with your parents.

That was the first show.

Right? Or you had a videotape, right? A VCR. You had to wait to rewind it all the way back to the beginning, right? We had to wait for things. So impulse control was kind of automatically in our environment. We were made to wait for things. There wasn't that much fast food. You went to town once a month to buy this big thing in groceries, you didn't go to the grocery store every day.

So think about that as compared to today's world. Everything is instant. Everybody goes out to eat. There's fast food restaurants everywhere. You can watch any TV show, any program, whenever you want, instantly. There's no rewinding, there's no fast forwarding, it's all digital. We have everything in the palm of our hands. Every one of our kids has a phone. We have the internet. We have calculators. We have social media. Everything is instant. There is no impulse control in today's world.

And we had commercials. And now you can skip a commercial.

Yeah, you can pay more to not have any. Right? You just pay more money, mom. We don't need that. You have a five-year-old with a cell phone in their hand. Why does a five-year-old need a phone? You do not need a phone at five. You're not going anywhere to call your mom for a ride.

But that's instant. And screen time — and I read a lot of research about screen time and children — causes a lot of mental health and behavioral health issues. I've done some, I don't wanna say experiments, but like behavioral training with young kids. Take the phone away, give them the phone or screen time 20 minutes a day. When a kid's had unlimited screen time, you cannot cut it off cold turkey. They will literally crawl the walls, probably become suicidal, behaviorally out of control. I see that so often. Doesn't matter if they're five or 17. They're so addicted to that screen, whether it's a tablet, a phone, TV, anything that has a blue screen. If they're getting it unlimited, I cannot say to the parents, "Cut it off completely." It will be out of control. Your child will be hospitalized. Like, it will be detrimental to them. It's such an addiction.

Wow. So how do you decrease it?

Yeah. So you just gotta incrementally decrease it. So if it's unlimited, we go to — and your phone tells you how much your kid's on the screen. So look up literally how much they're spending a day. Decrease it by an hour or two every day till we can get it down to like an hour a day. You'll immediately see the behaviors, if we chart them, go down.

I kind of read something that said that when you decrease screen time, it actually will take a kid from ADD — they won't need meds, because it's actually the phone that's creating the ADD problem.

Yeah. ADHD really has to be apparent before the age of four in a child. It's a developmental thing in their brain, where their brain is made differently. It's not created by environmental issues. So people like, "Oh my gosh, I just developed ADHD at age 30." No, you did not. You can't be diagnosed with ADHD when you're 30, unless you had it before the age of four. And it was just never — and now there are sometimes, I can diagnose an adult that's never been diagnosed. I just saw one that was like 50-some this last week, and I'm like, "You've lived with this your whole life." Your poor thing. You've been ADD your whole life and you've never been medicated and you've just been trying to stay busy and never realized why you have 150 tabs open.

They have 150. But anyway, going back to the kid thing.

I never just have one. I don't know how your brain is.

Well, it's pretty hard to have one.

One would be pretty sweet.

Exactly, right? Yes, yes. When I'm in therapy mode, I have one. Which is a skill to learn though. It's a skill to learn as a therapist. It really is a skill to learn, but anyway.

I just feel like we have — I kind of feel like we can stop some of the madness, the depression, the anxiety in these kids.

Mm-hmm. There's things that are very preventable.

Yeah. And there's so many bad things that are just a reason kind of for social media. Now, granted, right, we had Playboy magazines and we had all the naughty stuff too, that contributed to the sexual assaults and all those sort of things. But I don't know that it was — it wasn't any harder to get. It was a little bit harder in the aspect that you had to drive to town to the gas station to get there.

Right. And you had to sneak into dad's bedroom, or, you know, the filing cabinet in the shop on the farm. It wasn't instant in your hand.

Right. And you couldn't just look so fast. All day. Exactly. Do you see a lot of the porn addiction stuff? Do you guys do a lot of mental health for that too?

Yes. You treat it similar to any other addiction at that point, just like substance use. It's highly addictive because it's so accessible — adults, kids alike. And we often see within families, within one family unit living in the same house, sexual abuse toward a sibling because of kids looking up pornography on the internet, on a phone, on a tablet, on a computer, those type of things.

That's so scary. So do you recommend then people would take away their kids' phones at night? Like, how old do you think a kid needs to be to have a phone? Do you have a set —

I don't have a set age. I'll be honest, as a parent, my child, when she was going places without me or to a practice — actually the first thing she ever went to was, she tried out for theater. And at eight, she could go to the theater and I did not get her a phone, because I was like, "I'm picking her up," all those type of things. But there's a lot of preventative things that we did with her as a parent, and that included sexual abuse, talking about it. At eight years old, she knew what her private parts are, and she knew what sexual abuse was.

And, you know, just to use it as an example, a lot of parents like, "Oh my gosh, why would you wanna talk about that with your kids? Oh my gosh, it's so weird." And what's not weird — it's way easier to prevent it than to react to something that's already happened. And who as a child you can trust?

It's a perfect example. We're Catholic. We're walking down the street one day, left the theater. My daughter sees someone that has black clothing on with a white collar. She says, "Mommy, look, there's a priest." We live in a rural community. We only have two priests in our church. There's one church in the entire town. That person is not one of those priests. That person was walking around mimicking looking like a priest. At that point, we went to the car, had a discussion about how people can impersonate somebody that you should trust.

Wow.

She went to a Catholic school. That was someone she looked up to. That was Father So-and-So. They're in charge of the church. They're the principal at my school. "Mommy, why can't I trust that guy that looks like that, when our father in our church looks like this?" It was one of those discussions of, you know, it's really difficult to figure out who we can trust as a kid and not. And if you're not having that communication with your kid, how are they gonna know? They're not adults. They don't know what we know, and that's our job as a parent to teach them.

I taught Hailey early — like, I don't remember how old she was when we gave her a phone, but I was like, "You're being groomed." She was on one of her games, Roblox or something.

Which is awful. Awful. Every parent, please stay away from Roblox. Do not let your child play that game. So bad.

Yeah. And granted, Hailey's 20, so it's been a while. But I was like, you need to pay attention to what questions they're asking, you can't share your location, whatever. So this person was asking her a lot of questions, a lot of questions, and she's a blabber mouth, so she would come to me and tell us everything, you know? And I was smart enough to know to not be alarmed, right? And to not freak out about it. And so I would just gently have some conversation. And pretty soon he asked for her address.

And she was like, "He asked for my address. I'm done talking to him."

It was like, that was her breaking point, right?

But she knew to set the boundary.

Yes, because I had already been having that conversation. And even, like, the first time she got Snapchat, because I waited forever — I was like, "Your location's on there." And she's like, "It's not…" I should not say this in a podcast, but she's like, "Mom, it's not a big deal. It's not a big deal." I'm like, "Yes, it is. They could come and steal you, and then they're gonna rape you, and they might sell you for sex, and then we're never gonna be able to find you." And she was that kid that I could not just say no to. I had to explicitly tell her every bad thing that was gonna happen.

The specifics.

And then she was like, "Okay." Absolutely no location on. We're not using Snapchat.

But then it was justified, like she knew, oh my gosh, this is a safety issue.

And when I tell people that I would go to those extremes, they think I'm the most horrible person on the planet. And I'm like, you know, she can't 100% comprehend that. But at the end of the day, why are we hiding it? 'Cause this is exactly what's going to happen to her. If I am not going to be able to find her — and I was so clear, I was like, "And I'm gonna be at home and I'm not gonna be sleeping and I'm gonna be worried sick because we don't know where you are."

Yeah. And that happens. I see those kind of clients that come in, have been sex trafficked, human trafficked from a rural town, picked up at our local movie theater, 15.

Wow.

By a stranger, met off of Roblox, on social media, had them on everything. Supposed to be going to the movie theater for a date. No date happened. Child went missing. Child safe today. But those things happen, and that was a news article, so, you know — the public eye. But those things truly happen in rural communities. You don't have to live in a big city in the United States to think that human trafficking doesn't occur. It occurs in rural communities, too. And it's so easy because of social media. They can make that connection with a kid. And again, I'll go back to the word connection. Who doesn't want an emotional connection? And if you have a kid that's been neglected, abused, and has no connection with their parent — who best? A sexual predator is right there to make that connection with them, to pick up on it and do whatever they want with your child. And that can happen so fast.

That is so scary. And I have heard that it just, it happens everywhere. I pay a lot of attention to sex trafficking stuff, to the point where this girl is not going to Walmart and looking in every van. Like, I am paying attention.

That's situational awareness.

Another thing — we walked out of Walmart two weeks ago and I'm scanning my groceries, and there's a lady standing at the front of the store, but she looked like she was an employee, but she didn't have a vest on, right? And I saw her walking, and her eyes were all red and her nose was red, and I was like, "Oh, that lady's crying." And then she just stopped in front of the nail place. And I was like, "What is she doing? And why is she crying?" And then she was wiping her face, and you could tell she had labored breathing. Like, if I missed an item, it's because I was a little bit preoccupied, right? And Scott is, like, in man land. Like, he has no clue what is happening.

And so I just keep watching her, and we get done and we pay for everything, and Scott takes off in front of me, and I walked past her and then I backed up and I said, "Are you okay?" And she's like, "Oh yeah, I just have a cold." And I was like, "No, you don't." And I figured out that she worked at the nail place. You know, so I was like, "Why is she standing there? That's weird. Is she trying to scam somebody because she's crying?" And then I figured out she's standing there because she's supposed to be working and getting customers. And so she's standing out front. And then when she lied to me, I thought, well, she's definitely not a scammer, because she's lying to me, you know?

Exactly.

But Scott's like, "What are you doing?" And he goes, "What's wrong?" And I'm like, "That lady was crying and something is wrong, and she has lied to me." But I feel like people don't pay attention.

Yeah, just that situational awareness. And our daughter too — sometimes she's better than I am at this point. My husband's done really good at that. He is a great parent for that. And one day we're in Walmart, our local Walmart, she's like, "Mom, those two guys are following us." And I was like, "What?" She's like, "They're following us." So I'm like, "Are you sure?" And we're facing forward, we're still going through Walmart. And I'm like, okay. We're going right to the checkout. We went there and we went right to the service desk and stood there, and boom, there we go. She's like, "See, I told you." I was like, "Whew." But again, we have taught her those skills.

And then again, as parents, do not be afraid to have the conversations. And if you're afraid to have the conversations, find somebody that's willing to help you with that, because that's so huge. Again, they're not miniature adults. You can't treat them like an adult. They don't know everything. But we're there to teach them. That's our role, and it's not the school's role to teach them everything.

Oh my gosh.

The school's role is to teach them academics, okay? They need to teach them math, science, English — yes, social skills, yes, sharing with your friends when they're in elementary school, those things. But that's my opinion.

And I share that too. Because I think it's the parent's responsibility to also know what's happening in the world. Be aware of what's happening with sex trafficking. Be aware what's happening with social media time. Be aware of what's happening. Get out of your county.

Yes. Right? Get out of your shell. Get out right in front of what's in front of your nose. And I do have a lot of parents like that that come in for therapy. They're completely clueless as to even what they're supposed to be educating their child on. And that's okay, but at least they're coming to me for help to ask, what do I need to be talking to my kids about? Do you have a curriculum for me to help them? What things do we need to talk about?

And to be building their self-esteem. So as they get into adulthood, they can set those boundaries.

Just like your daughter did. She set the boundary. And my daughter is very good about setting the boundary. She's like, no, you're treating me like that — I don't care if you're an adult or a kid. That's not happening. I have way more self-worth than that. And she'll tell somebody, "I have way more self-worth than that. You're not treating me like that. I'm choosing not to be around you."

And adults need to do that as well. Like, going back to even what we were talking about, that you're being mentally abused or you're being talked to like that day in and day out. And it can go both ways. Mom and dad can be doing it to the kids, but I've also seen it where the kids are mentally abusing dad and telling them, "You don't know anything. You're stupid. You're doing this wrong."

You're done. You just need to be done.

Yeah. You're too old. It goes both ways. But at that point, mom and dad aren't setting the boundaries.

Correct.

And boundaries are healthy. Oh my gosh.

Yes. It's okay.

And I don't care if you're 70 or 30. If you're being told no and you're throwing a temper tantrum like a two-year-old, we have problems.

Yeah. This is an issue.

Yes. Yeah. I don't think I have anything else. Do you have anything that you would like to add that we did not talk about?

I feel like we kind of went through a lot of things.

I feel like we could be here another hour.

I could. And I was gonna say, I could talk about mental health all day. So no, we're good. I just would encourage anybody: it's okay to seek help, find a therapist that works for you. It's okay.

If I go to a therapist, how many sessions do I have to be in before I say, "Yeah, this isn't working"?

I would say your first initial session, if you go once or twice more, max three times — if it's not working after that, you need to find another provider.

Okay.

Yeah. For sure.

Well, thank you very much. This is your first podcast, right?

Yes.

You did a good job. You're like a pro.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

All right, guys, that is all I got for you. You know the routine. If you have comments, questions, concerns, maryjo@withoutthebank.com. Otherwise, you have a fantastic rest of your day.