While men in general are more likely to die by suicide, full-time farmers also face intense financial pressure with their livelihoods affected by uncontrollable forces like livestock pandemics. Farmer's death spurs fight against depression and suicide:
LOGANVILLE, Wis. — Brenda Statz remembers the rain on the day they lost Leon, her husband of 34 years. The deluge had fallen for weeks, flooding their fields, delaying the harvest, pounding the roof of the barn where Leon Statz finished his morning chores, then ended his life.
The average farmer in America is male and around 57 years of age, as Leon Statz was, although more women and younger people have entered farming over the past decade. Men in general are more likely to die by suicide, and full-time farmers face intense financial pressure, their livelihoods affected by global forces outside their control like trade wars and livestock pandemics.
Leon Statz’s life revolved around the 200-acre farm, an operation kept small enough so that the family could work it without outside help. Leon Statz’s parents had lived and worked on the farm. The couple’s sons, Tom and Ethan, farmed with their father part-time, as did Brenda Statz, who also works in a Lands’ End distribution center in nearby Reedsburg.
“He basically told Leon to ‘chin up and face it like a man — in a year, you’ll laugh at it,’” Statz recalled. “I will never forget that. Because then Leon’s like, ‘Now it falls back on me again. It’s my fault I can’t get out of this.’” Leon Statz sought part-time work off the farm to help tide the family over before the harvest. Offered good-paying jobs at a local valve company and as a forklift operator, he instead signed on as a meat cutter in a local supermarket. It was low-paid, dangerous work. “He finally admitted why he took that job,” Statz recalled. “Because he thought he failed, and he needed to punish himself.”
He returned home still anxious, and with an extensive medication regime. Brenda Statz, deeply shaken, was uncertain about how to care for him, what to watch for or what to say. She recalled sitting with him in the car outside their church, St. Peter’s Lutheran in Loganville, on a Sunday soon after his hospitalization. Her husband was ashamed to go inside.
Leon Statz described to his wife how he felt: “Like you’re in the bottom of this hole, this pit, and you can see the top and you’re climbing, climbing, and struggling your way to the top. And just when you get to the top, it goes higher, and you keep climbing, and pretty soon you get tired and you can’t climb anymore.”
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