I use 'love' as a word a lot more. A lot of rural males do not use words like love, and it's really a shame that rural males aren't comfortable expressing their true happy feelings as well as their sad feelings. They miss the highs as well as the lows. Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2018. So, I'm general manager of Te Mara Farms. I run the show. This business, of course, three generations of my family currently ` my grandmother, my parents and me. It's kind of hard not to become a farmer when you come from a family of farmers. I was the only grandson, the only son of two very passionate farmers who just lived and breathed farming, so it was what I was absolutely just surrounded by, growing up. And I love working with animals, and I love working outside, so it's a kind of a unique opportunity to do that. Farming's not easy ` it's pretty common for rural folk to work seven days a week. Our people aren't always here, but our cattle are here 24-7. And our deer are here 24-7, so we're always on call for something going wrong. You know, if cows end up in the road in the middle of the night, we have to get up and deal with it. It's really hard to get off the farm in a lot of ways. To go to Hamilton to see a specialist, it's gonna take me two hours just to get there and back, let alone an hour wait and an hour at the specialist, so that's four hours of the day gone. It'd be great if there was more travelling support for people who are struggling in rural communities, especially on farms. That could be a travelling psychiatrist, could be a travelling counsellor It's really stressful working in the farming industry at the moment, stressful to the point that there's a lot of people in my parents' generation that are actually exiting farming now because they've had enough. Concrete pill's a common joke in country terms, which is, you know, take a concrete pill and harden up. My father and my grandfather and their friends, they all just got on with it. And they kind of forced themselves through some of the hard times. So that's kind of how they understand to cope. That's young rural males ` my friends, my colleagues, my peers ` they're actually the most at risk of suicide in New Zealand, so that scares me. I've gone into bouts of depression a few times now. It's usually stress-related for me. It's when things get too much. The best example I can give is, like, the time that it happened towards the end of my university studies. The Christchurch earthquake happened. And it all just became too much. The day I broke was the day it was a beautiful sunny day, and I was walking around Lincoln University campus, which is full of trees, and I just felt like crying. I just cried and cried and couldn't stop and,... kind of, just willed myself on and didn't really understand or accept what was going on. But eventually, it just became too much for me, and I cracked and thought about ending my life. Um, luckily, the competitive nature in me came out. I said, well, you know, basically, 'Fuck this. I'm not gonna fucking give in.' So I decided that,... as much as I hated life,... I didn't wanna give up. And I can't really explain why ` it's just me and my personality. It's really scary, cos it was on a knife edge. I felt isolated. I felt alone a lot. A hard part about it is, you know, a lot of young farmers is that they go from university or they go from an environment where they're really social, and then they move out back home to the farm or to a farm for a job, and they move away from all their friends, all their contacts, all their support networks. So it's been really hard here, because, like, I don't really... I have friends, I have good friends, but, like, none of them are within driving distance currently. And so it's not like I can pop round and see them and say, 'Hey, I'm having a bad day.' And, like, the phone's just not the same. And that's really hard for me ` when you're having a bad day and, you know, you're struggling to find people to talk to. New Zealand, we're awesome at hard skills ` farmers know heaps of stuff. But when it comes to what I call soft knowledge, which is your emotional well-being and the control of that, we're pretty bloody average, to be fair. In the middle of my farming career, we struck a drought. It lasted eight years. Just the constant mental drain and stress of that finally took me down, and yeah, I went to hell. My whole life was in the bin. That broke me. I would never have been fixed by telling me, 'Doug, farming's too hard for you'; I was fixed by creating a process where I could live my dream. One day I was asked to go to Lincoln University and do a lecture there. But when I finished, I got a lot of people came down, and all of a sudden, this guy appeared, Hamish, and he said to me, 'Doug,' he said, 'will you mentor me? I've been inspired by your address.' And I was thinking, well, you know, this is pretty awesome that a young man wants me to work with him. And we did. And on and off since then, we've had communications, and I've talked to him about the kind of processes that I put myself through to keep myself well. And it's something which, unfortunately in New Zealand, we tend to leave and just think our mental health can run on its own, and, of course, for a lot of people, that doesn't happen. For young people, the world today is far more complicated and challenging than it was when I was young. Building relationships with a key group of people to support you through your difficult times and your good times is the key. You know, I figure the best way is just for leaders to set an example and to show strength as well as an emotional side. I'll never forget a moment where Doug ` such an amazing man ` I hardly knew Doug, and yet we shared our stories and sat there crying, and that was just such a massive moment in my life of leading by example. (POIGNANT MUSIC) Quite often, people will say, 'Yes, I'm fine,' and they're really not. Sometimes you've just gotta take your time and wait for them to come talk to you. You know, I've had people where I've said, 'Oh, how are you?' 'Yeah, I'm fine.' And then you've walked outside and had them one on one, and all of a sudden, they actually tell you they're not, but they weren't willing to say it in front of the crowd. So, you know, just be aware of the privacy and stigma around it still, that people aren't willing to open up straight away often or to publically own it. It's not actually about having all the answers ` it's actually about holding that person's hand and just saying it's gonna be OK. I guess the hardest part's actually accepting it yourself, and the really hard part is actually sharing it with the world. And that's really, really important, I think, going forward for rural males, that we need to become more well rounded. We've pigeonholed ourselves. And we're actually not meeting our full potential, and that's the real shame. In the last month, I've ended up antidepressants ` don't be too put out, don't be ashamed of it. It's just a pill. It's nothing. If anything, the hardest part's remembering to take it. Um, but yeah, don't be ashamed of it. Don't ever judge anybody for it. And if anybody judges you for it, just laugh at them. Because that shit's a joke. Endurance exercise is really important for my well-being. But for me, that's cycling. For others it could be swimming, it could be running. It's just doing prolonged cardiovascular activity. And that just resets my emotional state, and I just become relaxed. My advice to people these days is get professional help. Don't try and go it alone. Continue to work on it, cos if you are someone who gets depressed, particularly more than once, you're probably someone who's quite vulnerable to mental illness, even if you do bounce back, like me. So you probably need to actually go back, work on it and continue to work on it, because you're still vulnerable, but the stronger you get, the less likely it is to happen. Most people that connect with me, they've got a bad story, they've got their current story ` 'It's not going well for me, Doug. I'm having this challenge. I don't feel well,' or what have you. And then I'll say to them, 'What's your old story? 'What story did you use to be telling people about yourself? What was your life like before this?' And then I say to them, 'What about your future story? 'What can I or somebody else do to get beside you and start creating 'the story that you'll be able to tell in a year's time?' And when you do that with people, they start to see hope in the future. And young people are no different to older people ` mental health in young people or old people is all the same; it's usually associated with a progressive destruction of their hope. And it's such a small word, hope, but if you build hope in people again, then they can reactivate all the vital ingredients to happiness, and that's what we all want. Yeah, so, the place I go in my head, it's a place I've gone to since I was a kid, and that's right up on top, and it's actually my grandfather's favourite spot as well. And it's actually where my grandfather's ashes are buried. It's right on the top of the farm, and it looks over the entire South Waikato. It's just an amazing view, and it's just a quiet place where all the people look like ants. It reminds you just the scale of things. So even though your problems may be so big, there's so much more out there. (MAJESTIC MUSIC) (MUSIC CONTINUES) Captions by Faith Hamblyn. www.able.co.nz Captions were made with the support of NZ On Air.