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Farming Minds: Developing evidence-based interventions to enhance farmer mental health

 

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Overview

The Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine funded Farming Minds project is a collaboration between Agricultural Science and Psychology at University College Dublin ‘UCD Agri Mental Health Group’ interdisciplinary team and South East Technical University and HSE funded ‘On Feirm Ground’ farmer health training programme to promote farmer health. The project will develop and test the feasibility and effectiveness of a scalable psychological intervention for farmers to target the key areas (i.e., mental health, stress, resilience) in terms of prevention and early intervention. In collaboration with and building on the existing framework of On Feirm Ground with farmer health, it will develop evidence-based interventions that go beyond signposting to support the development of key psychological skills.

Objectives

Objective 1: Draw on previous user experience research by the teams at UCD and SETU to ensure co-creation with farmers, service providers and policy makers to inform and guide the development of an evidence-based intervention for prevention and early intervention of farmer stress, mental health and resilience.

Objective 2: Test the efficacy of a psychological intervention for the mental health of advisors delivered by psychologists.

Objective 3: A process evaluation will be carried out to appraise the number of sessions, protocol fidelity and stakeholder views on barriers and facilitators to implementing the psychological intervention as a non-specialist co-delivered psychological intervention.

Objective 4: Test the efficacy and feasibility of the preventative intervention co-facilitated by advisors and psychologists via a Randomised Clinical Trial (RCT) in real-world settings, i.e., discussion groups.

 

Objective 5: To examine the mechanisms of change (e.g., resilience, psychological flexibility, etc) and key areas that need to be targeted to support farmer mental health (i.e., identity, motivation, compassion, emotion regulation, coping with negative thinking, etc).

Objective 6: To develop a website of resources that can be used by advisors to support the delivery of evidence-based micro-interventions to farmers that can support farmers' specific mental health queries.

Objective 7: To establish a Stakeholder Steering Group (SSG) and engage them in all elements for cultural competence such as language, persons, metaphors, content, concepts, goals, methods, and context.

Objective 8: To ensure knowledge transfer and widespread dissemination of findings nationally and internationally and ensure findings impact policies for farmer mental health such as the HSE 'Sharing a Vision' Mental Health Policy for Everyone, HSE Connecting for Life, and National Organisation for Suicide Prevention initiative.

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