Mental health resources often ignored in rural, ranching Montana
Montana roads. This is a portion of Montana Highway 253 between Terry and Circle, Montana (Photo by Darrell Ehrlick for the Daily Montanan).
There has been a lot of focus on mental health issues in Montana during the past few years, specifically aimed toward marginalized groups like the LGTBQ community and indigenous peoples. And for good reason. But one statistic that might surprise people is that a high percentage of the suicides in Montana occur in the farming and ranching community, among middle-aged men.
Courtney Kibblewhite grew up in Huntley, where her grandparents owned a ranch, but her father also worked at the Northern Ag Network, the radio station founded by former Sen. Conrad Burns in 1975. Courtney's father started working there just out of college, and he eventually bought the business, which is now family run. Courtney is now the vice president of the corporation. But her family was always involved in the ranch, and it is still in the family, now run by Courtney's brother, so she knows the culture well. And it is because of that connection, as well as her position at the radio station, that Courtney decided to find a way to bring more focus to the mental health issues that face the agricultural community in Montana.
Courtney's journey back to Montana and the radio station was a circuitous one that included going to college at Northwestern University in Chicago, followed by a couple of years in Uganda, and a year studying yoga in India. She met her husband Jonny, who is Welsh, in Thailand. But it was a difficult year even before these adventures that first inspired her to leave Montana, when she and her parents decided that a change of scenery might be beneficial. Some of Courtney's cousins, who lived on a ranch near Birney, had attended a boarding school in Maryland and liked it there, so Courtney packed her bags and moved to Maryland, which turned out to be a very good experience.
'It wasn't as if they provided me with any mental health resources, but I think it was just good for me to get out of my own head for a while. There were girls from all over the world at this school, so it was a great atmosphere,' she said.
It was that early awareness of mental health issues that inspired Courtney's interest in the topic, which has led to the creation of Beyond the Weather, a program designed to provide help for farmers and ranchers who are dealing with depression or anxiety, or any other number of mental health issues.
It has long been an established fact that Montana ranks in the top five in suicide, every year, and like so many families in Montana, Courtney's family has a story about that, where one of her relatives was missing for several days, and neighbors went to investigate, only to discover that he had shot his wife and two kids before taking his own life. Sadly, it's not an uncommon story in our state, and because of that, Courtney and several of her colleagues decided to record interviews with farmers and ranchers around the state who have faced mental health issues and gotten help for them.
About the same time that Courtney began to explore this idea, the Montana Department of Agriculture received some American Rescue Fund dollars, as did every state in the union, that were to be directed toward 'agriculture stress.' The Department of Agriculture utilized that money to fund three different approaches. If a rural community brought in a speaker to talk about mental health issues, the department would fund that. They also put $500,000 into a free counseling program for farmers and ranchers, through Frontier Psychiatry. And the third was Courtney's project to help promote the counseling program, but also to create these videos that would combat the stigma that is so prevalent among rural Montanans about getting help.
The department wanted Courtney and her team to come up with a different name for their program, in order to avoid scaring people away with the mental-health label, which is how they came up with 'Beyond the Weather,' which obviously refers to the fact that conversation in rural communities so often revolves around the weather.
Like most Montana families, Courtney's family struggled with having conversations about emotional topics, as evidenced by the fact that she didn't even know about this horrific family tragedy for years, nor did she know that her grandfather's second wife had once been married to one of his ranch hands.
'It gave me a whole new perspective on my grandfather when I learned the story of his brother killing his family and himself, because when you go through something like that, and you live in a place where those kinds of things are discussed, it's only natural that you would look for comfort somehow, either through drinking, or like he did, with someone else's wife. The way that this kind of trauma affects so many families in Montana just doesn't go away.'
Beyond the Weather features interviews with several ranchers and their spouses about issues of grief, stress, loss of a loved one, and depression, and as one young rancher, Travis Stuber, states so honestly, 'I'm not a touchy feely guy, so this doesn't come naturally to me, but I also know that as ranchers and farmers, the stigma around this stuff is weakness, and that's the last thing we want to show is weakness. So I had to learn that it's OK to be affected by loss. I lost my best friend and my mother in the past few years, and as my counselor pointed out when I said I was struggling with the loss of my mom, hey, that's OK. Think about your mom and don't bottle that up and throw it away.'
Not long after the COVID pandemic, a survey done by local law enforcement showed a huge spike in incidents of domestic violence in Montana, with an especially troubling rise in reports where one family member tried to strangle another. The isolation of ranching and farming, along with the stigma attached to asking for help, has long been a deterrent toward Montanas getting help for whatever mental health issues they are battling. So if you or someone you know is in that position, please visit the website for Beyond the Weather and check out the opportunity for free counseling, at https://www.northernag.net/beyondtheweather/.
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