Why Are the Farmers Depressed and Suicidal?

Lorann Stallones, an epidemiologist and psychology professor at Colorado State University says:

For years there was a high level of denial in the farming community that mental illness exists, period.

But there’s been a shift – partly because there’s more people talking about being mentally incapacitated.

Scientific American has recently reported:

Some research suggests that the chemicals that farmers and their workers spread on fields may alter some of these brain chemicals.

Peters and his wife were among 89,000 farmers and other pesticide applicators in Iowa and North Carolina who have participated in the Agricultural Health Study led by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Last month, epidemiologist Freya Kamel and her colleagues reported that among 19,000 studied, those who used two classes of pesticides and seven individual pesticides were more likely to have been diagnosed with depression. Those who used organochlorine insecticides were up to 90 percent more likely to have been diagnosed with depression than those who hadn’t used them. For fumigants, the increased risk was up to 80 percent.

The authors who wrote in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives say:

Our study supports a positive association between depression and occupational pesticide use among applicators… and suggests several specific pesticides that deserve further investigation in animal studies and other human populations,

While previous studies have only asked participants once about their depression – this one asked twice – once years back and again in 2010. It also included a large pool of farmers, meaning that people couldn’t really dismiss the study later for saying it was too small for consequence.

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The group came to the same conclusions when they studied the group between 1993 – 1997.

Startlingly:

Farmers with the highest number of lifetime exposure days to pesticides were 50 percent more likely to later have a depression diagnosis.

Of course, after all these years, no one’s brave enough to say the P-word – Proof. Even though they show that psychological issues in rats is possible with exposure. For instance: tests on rats show altered brain cells, neurotransmitters and production of a protective acid. All important aspects of the complexity of brain and hormone health.

Last year, it became glaringly apparent to researchers that French farmers were twice as likely to seek treatment for depression than those who don’t use herbicides. The rate increases with the increase of years using herbicides.

These are not just acute high exposures, either, like chemical companies like to ‘claim and blame.’ Many past studies have shown that chronic low exposure leads to problems that aren’t obviously until years later. Stallones, who wasn’t part of the main study says “but the association [with depression] held true for those that didn’t report poisoning.”

When there were larger dose poisonings in a short period, the rate of Colorado farmers risk for depression doubled in the next few years and North Carolina and Iowa farmers were 2.5 times more likely in the same situation.

Other health problems linked to depression are also linked to pesticide exposure.

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From Scientific American:

For instance, Dr. Beate Ritz, a neurologist and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that Californians exposed to pesticides are more likely to have Parkinson’s disease. One effect of the neurological disease, characterized by a lack of the chemical dopamine, is depression.

[…]

Several studies have linked suicide to pesticide use. In Brazil, workers that used more pesticides were more likely to commit suicide, and in China, a World Health Organization survey of 9,800 people in the rural Zhejiang province revealed that those who stored pesticides in their homes had more than double the risk of having suicidal thoughts.

Wendy Ringgenberg, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, combed through 19 years of national data and reported that farmers and farm workers were 3.6 times more likely to die of suicide than other professions. However, the study did not examine the causes of suicide.

Interestingly, some of the pesticides linked to depression and suicide in the study are not supposed to be in use. Chemical company giants like Monsanto, Bayer Cropscience and Syngenta say that their products were not included in the study and won’t comment on the bigger picture of brain health and long-term pesticide use. Also left from the study were the newer class of pesticides – neonicotinoids, which are implicated for mass bee die-off as they kill the nervous system of exposed insects.

Ginnie Peters’ husband was using neonicotinoids – his father had chronic depression as well. Peters was exposed to organophosphates by doing his own crop spraying. Peters had chronic insomnia too.

Ginnie is trying to bring awareness about suicide in farmers, linked to exposure to pesticides.

I don’t have ability to do the science, but I have my gut, and what happened to Matt, it had to be the chemicals.