Ker agrees there is a “hidden problem” around mental health in agriculture.<\/p>\n
Speaking about his own experience, he said it was not until he picked up a rugby injury and his dad retired, that he had to take on his farm, near Wellington, full time.<\/p>\n
“I took on all the pressures and all the challenges within the farming system, but I also delved into farming 24\/7 \u2013 not going off the farm and doing anything,” he said.<\/p>\n
“I got myself into quite a bad spot mentally.<\/p>\n
“I was really struggling, and didn’t feel able to speak to anyone about it, didn’t really know what to do.”<\/p>\n
He said he ended up lonely and isolated, questioning if he even wanted to continue the work, adding his mental health “pushed me further away from everyone”.<\/p>\n
He wants farmers to stop saying, “ah, I’m fine, it’ll be alright \u2013 the sun’ll come out”, and instead speak to someone about their mental health. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ker agrees there is a “hidden problem” around mental health in agriculture. Speaking about his own experience, he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":465167,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[49,48,84,393,394],"class_list":["post-465166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-health","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=465166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/465166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/465167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=465166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=465166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=465166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}