Don’t feel Impregnable - look after your Health
Ag Mental Health Week runs from Oct 10 to Saturday, Oct 16. All this week Teagasc Daily will bring you series of 4 short articles from John McNamara Teagasc Health & Safety Specialist, reminding farmers and all working in agriculture of the importance of mental health awareness. Read the second here
The expression of Masculinity traits getting in the way of Irish farmers taking of their health.
This is a major finding of a recent Irish study entitled “That’s Me I am the Farmer of the Land”: Exploring Identities, Masculinities, and Health Among Male Farmers’ in Ireland’ . This qualitative study explored the challenges and stressors facing farmers in Ireland and how changes in farming governance have impacted farmers' identities, masculinities and health. Findings provide unique insights into contemporary challenges and stressors facing farmers and have important implications for informing the design and roll-out of a national farmers' health training program.
Farmers can think of themselves as ‘impregnable’ which leads to them neglecting their health over-time, which in turn leads to health decline. While masculinity is applied generally to males, a trend has been identified of females in agriculture adopting masculine values so adopting health-promoting activities applies to all farmers.
Further information on maintaining and enhancing your health in the
Staying Fit for Farming Booklet here (PDF).
As part of Ag mental health week Conor Hammersley Teagasc PhD Walsh scholar joins Catherine Egan on this week’s Beef Edge podcast to discuss the findings of his study as part of the ‘On Feirm Ground’ project. Listen to the BeefEdge podcast below
See the first article in this series here It's Ag Mental Health Week 2021 about Research on Farmer Health Signposting.
Read lots more here from Teagasc on Farmer Health
Check out the hashtags #AgMentalHealthWeek and #itsgoodtotalk and the Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Agmentalhealthweek/ for events taking place this week.