General News
3 March, 2023
Country folk unite to tackle mental health
RURAL mental health challenges confront the whole community. Isolation, climate change impacts and lifestyle factors are all risks that can lead to much higher rates of often undiagnosed mental illness in rural and regional Australia. During the...
RURAL mental health challenges confront the whole community.
Isolation, climate change impacts and lifestyle factors are all risks that can lead to much higher rates of often undiagnosed mental illness in rural and regional Australia.
During the Millennium drought Wimmera-Mallee leaders embraced the challenge to reduce stigma and identify potential mental health problems early.
A Mental Health First Aid training program, auspiced by the Wimmera Primary Care Partnership, helped people to better identify those at risk and refer them to the relevant services.
“It helps people in the community to identify potential issues and seek help before it gets to that crisis stage,” Geoff Witmitz from Wimmera PCP said.
“Growing up in the Wimmera it was not something that you discussed."
During the drought years of the early 2000s so many in our region, particularly in agriculture, were under so much stress.
The community realised the seriousness of mental health issues and that they had to be talked about.
We’ve slowly been destigmatising mental illness and it’s now a subject those at the local football club or the local men’s shed are happy to sit down and have a conversation about.
The Mental Health First Aid program was set up in 2016, but Mr Witmitz said he could trace its origins back to the drought of 2014, and to increased understanding and discussion about mental health throughout the latter stages of the Millennium drought.
“I can clearly remember a drought meeting at the Boolite Hall near Minyip and the people said they wanted some sort of help to be able to make a difference in terms of mental health," he said.
"There was real concern about how some in the district were coping and with help from Dunmunkle Health we got some sessions up and running.”
Community, local and state government and services all combined to lobby for funding to train up local people who could deliver the training.
“We had over 1000 people go through our workshops at some stage over a five-year period, which equates to about 3 per cent of the region’s population," Mr Witmitz said.
“In nearly all our communities there is someone that will be able to pick if something is not right, whether it is the classic signs like withdrawing from social interaction or the more severe manifestations like threats of self-harm or suicide.
"The next step is being able to point the way to professional help and telling people that it is OK to seek that help to get better, like you would with a physical ailment.
“The training has saved lives through the region. Having a local, who understands the difficulties people are facing, be that first point of contact can be invaluable in getting some people to act.
“Given the lack of formal mental health services and GPs in the region and the lengthy wait times to access services, we think having these ‘community champions’ that can help identify symptoms and then direct people to a service like our Rural Outreach program is a great way to fill service gaps.
“It’s run on a minimal budget, with help from local organisations in developing the instructors who can deliver the course as part of their job roles."
Mr Witmitz said training modules ranged from 40 minute awareness, four-hour conversations around suicide or self-harm to two-day full courses. Courses can also be tailored specifically for workforce and community need.
“Given we’re such a strongly agricultural region and there can be so much situational stress in tough climatic years, having more support will benefit the region as a whole,” he said.
Mr Witmitz said skills and resilience learned through the drought would be critical in dealing with the Covid recovery.
“Stress and trauma from Covid are huge, but we may find ourselves at an advantage having dealt with many of the same themes during previous climate related disasters."
He said the Wimmera-Mallee still lagged in terms of access to digital services.
"The pandemic has showed how useful sourcing information and attending meetings remotely can be, especially in our region with its sparse population and big distances between towns.
"We all just need to be able to get online and access these things.”
But - like they have with climatic challenges - this resilient community is bound to rise to the challenge.
“We’ve shown that we are capable of being innovators in the Wimmera-Mallee and people have shown that if there’s a chance to improve the community’s resilience, they are willing to seize it, no matter what the format.”