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":289396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[103,61,60,410,411],"class_list":["post-289395","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mental-health","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mental-health","tag-mentalhealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=289395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/289395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/289396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=289395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=289395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=289395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}