Kenny Elphinstone is working with RSABI.
An Aberdeenshire farmer is working with a Scottish charity to share a mental health message of positivity and hope with fellow farmers throughout the country.
Kenny Elphinstone, who has battled with depression for much of his life, talks openly and positively about his mental health journey in a short film produced as part of RSABIs suicide prevention work.
In the video, filmed on his farm, Kenny shares his battle with his mental health which reached an all-time low a few years ago when he attempted to take his own life.
In the months running up to this, his mood fluctuated between a state of hyperactivity where he had to be flying on with work all the time, leaving him exhausted and not sleeping properly, to feeling so low he could barely function.
“I would say the best way to describe the way I felt was trapped. Every day was a struggle and one particular day I was home alone and I thought this is never going to get any better and I couldn’t see any way out,” he recalls.
After a hospital visit, Kenny was back home and, initially, he still really struggled with his mental health but things started to improve. A major part of his recovery has been the support he received from friends and his wife Jill in particular.
“The person who helped me most without a doubt was my wife, Jill. She got me out of bed in the morning and got me going and she kept me on the straight and narrow once I was back on my feet,” he added.
The importance of sharing how you are feeling with someone you trust – and not bottling things up - is a huge factor in making it through the really hard times, Kenny says.
He is encouraging farming folk who are feeling low or lonely to find someone they trust to talk to, or contact an organisation like RSABI. And, he said, a little kindness and compassion can make an enormous difference to someone feeling low.
“On a scale of one to 10 I would say kindness is at least a nine. If you’re really struggling and you find someone who is kind and prepared to listen to what you’ve got to say, it will make you feel a lot better,” Kenny said.
He also urged farming families to prioritise and make time to discuss the future and to be prepared to make changes to their businesses to plan for the future before the mental health of family members starts to struggle as anxieties really start to creep in.
“If you are in business with others you really need to make time to get things sorted and cut and dried. Putting things off will only make the situation worse, especially in cases where you are not all singing from the same hymn sheet,” he said.
Kenny also emphasised that working regularly on your own can really impact farmers, highlighting just how vital it is to get off the farm and catch up with other people.
“The nature of farming means that you can spend time on your own and that really doesn’t help, so its important to meet up with others. Some people will say they don’t have time to go to events but it is so important to get out and about and catch up with folk, especially if something is going round and round in your head,” he said.
Kenny has learned a great deal about how to keep his mental health good in recent years and the steps he needs to take if he starts to feel his mental health deteriorating, or starts losing sleep.
Listening to music is something he finds relaxing and a very valuable distraction and he is very aware of the importance of speaking to someone about how he is feeling.
For a while, when he was struggling, he lost all enjoyment in farming. Thankfully Kenny now has that back again, and says lambing and ploughing are his two favourite jobs to do on the farm, along with working with other people.
RSABI has recently recruited a full-time member of staff working on Suicide Prevention, thanks to funding from the Alistair and Margaret Miller Trust.
Next month the charity starts a major research project with Glasgow University aimed at understanding and preventing suicide within Scotland’s farming and crofting communities.
