MENTAL health hit the headlines before Easter.
Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry pointed out that the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader had neglected to talk about it in their major debate about health care reform.
While our top political leaders may not see mental health care as needing urgent attention, the bush does.
Especially in our changing climate.
And the fact that organisations, who are more comfortable talking about tractors, trucks and dirt (including the likes of the Victorian Farmers Federation and Mallee Sustainable Farming), are now talking up the need for better mental health care in the bush says something.
At their urgings, a major federal parliamentary report into the role government can play in helping farmers adapt tthe effects of climate change, has recommended that rural counsellors and support groups working in this field receive permanent funding.
The report, Farming the Future, was released last week.
"Adaptation is a psychological and social process as much as a physical and economic process," the report says.
Hooray.
Does this mean farmers will start talking about their emotions associated with the changes they're facing?
It's hard to say but the report does shatter the peculiar notion that farming happens in an emotionless, economics-only context, which seems to have been the prevailing idea behind policies that ignore people's health and welfare in favour of profit. (Think handing food patents to big business, taking water from the dry north to the wetter south, and get big or get out.)
One organisation that earned the attention of the report's writers was Tasmanian suicide prevention group Rural Alive and Well. (There is a link - the chairman of the reporting committee was Tasmanian MP Dick Adams.)
It started in Tasmania's Midlands (home of long-established pastoralists) in the middle of drought, when farmer and agricultural contractor John Jones, peeved by the lack of care for rural communities by governments, dared to call a meeting on the great taboo topic, suicide.
He gathered around him women and men who had either a close relative or friend or community member who had taken their own lives.
"I was sick and tired of rural communities getting second and third-grade treatment no matter what the issue was," John, 69, says.
In July 2008 Rural Alive and Well officially swung into action.
Silo thinking was out.
Doctors, hospital managers, farmers, stock agents and churches got on board so that when anyone sensed trouble, a community referral system kicked into play.
Counsellors cold called.
By July 1 last year the volunteer group had enough funds to employ counsellors to service an area equivalent to about a third of Tasmania.
It had grown from the bottom up out of care and empathy.
The question is whether organisations such as these will become like so many rural services - subject to the whims of governments hell-bent on putting their own trademark on things, here one week and gone the next.
Farming the Future pleads for this not to happen.
It talks a lot about the need for science and research, renewable energy and carbon storage but at last, at last, this major farming report acknowledges that farmers undergoing the change that is ahead need mental health care and counselling first and foremost.
