Ted Matthews is the director of MN Rural Mental Health and is based out of Hutchinson, Minnesota. Ted is a mental health practitioner with more than 30 years of experience in counseling in rural areas. His focus for the past two decades has been farmer mental health support. He has been the director of mental health services during five natural disasters. Matthews provides outreach training and public speaking related to farm stressors, nationwide. He also has extensive counseling experience in the areas of PTSD, crisis intervention, family issues, suicidology and domestic abuse. Featured on the Huffington Post, MPRNews, CNN, AgriNews, Successful Farming, Prairie Farmer and many others, Ted offers his expertise to help the general public better understand farming culture.
The high rate of suicide among the farming community is alarming, but it is not entirely tied to the plummeting commodity prices as most believe. There is no question that low prices for milk, soybeans and corn have increased farmer stress throughout the country. What few understand are a number of
I honestly don’t think you can call a farmer anything worse than “lazy.” If I am already working too much, too many hours, too hard, and I’m too tired, and then I think of myself as lazy for not getting something done, then I may push myself even harder. That’s when the odds improve greatly for a fa
Winter comes every year, and some years are better (milder) than others. In order to live in the Midwest, we must be blessed with short-term memory, because when spring comes, we tend to forget about why we wish we lived further south. What is it about the winter blues? Well, one month turns into th
Much has been written about the high rate of suicide among farmers . People ask me about numbers, how many, how often and by what means. Although I do work with families that go through the pain of a loved one taking their life, I would rather focus on a pro-active approach. There are ways we can lo