The Catholic University of America’s David Jobes, PhD, created an internationally adopted suicide treatment program called the Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality (CAMS). While other therapies address depression and other precursors to suicide, CAMS is one of very few therapies that solely targets suicidal ideation and attempts. Dr. Jobes points out that some 15 million people in the United States suffer from suicidal ideation. “About 1.4 million go on to make attempts. So it’s an extraordinary index of misery and despair.” He adds that suicide spares no one. “Suicide is ubiquitous. No socioeconomic group, no subculture is immune.”
No one is immune, but in the United States the distribution isn’t even. Some 70 percent of all suicides occur among white men. The largest number of them are middle-aged. In rural areas, which have a higher rate of suicide than urban areas, many of those middle-aged white men are farmers.
A county fair in America’s heartland—ten acres of tents, horse fences, and show barns on a hill overlooking Harlan, Iowa, enjoyed this sunny morning by hundreds of visitors, competitors, and volunteers. Its soundtrack—mooing, squawking, quacking, and snorting, children’s chatter, a PA system’s cheerful bleat. The smells of manure, overheated bodies, and baked goods greet you before teenage boys and girls direct you to parking. Up ahead on the right, they’re giving prizes to exemplary chickens and rabbits; straight ahead, it’s bottle calf and breeder beef. Coming up at 10:00 a.m., the Sidney Senior Center Singers. The festivities are under way.
The Shelby County Fair, the closest thing Iowa farmers have to a Hajj, doesn’t look like ground zero of an apocalypse, but it is. America’s farmers are dying by the hundreds, by their own hands. More than 450 farmers killed themselves across nine midwestern states from 2014 to 2018, according to the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. The real total would be higher because not every state provided suicide data for every year. And as we noted, farmers often disguise their suicides as farming or hunting accidents.
Farmers have been among the most-at-risk populations for years. More than 1,000 farmers died by suicide in just five midwestern states during the 1980s farm crisis. The University of Iowa found that from 1992 to 2010, farmers killed themselves at a rate higher than all other occupations. Today, the suicide rate of farmers is six times that of the general population.
Why are farmers dying by suicide?
“What do you think is the most stressful circumstance that can cause farmers the greatest amount of stress? Anybody want to take a crack at that and say what you think?” Psychologist and farmer Mike Rosmann, PhD, stands before a group of about thirty farmers seated on folding chairs and picnic tables, both men and women.
“Lack of rain,” says a farmer.
“Financial burden,” says someone else.
“Lack of rain imposes a financial burden. So at the top of the list, we have determined that any threat to our economic well-being is the most serious threat that affects farmers. Maybe you receive a letter from the bank that says ‘We’re going to have to have a forced auction of some of your property, or your equipment.’ ”
Farmers and spouses emit a collective groan.
Seventy-five-year-old Rosmann resembles the late actor and oatmeal pitchman Wilford Brimley, but he’s taller and with an even deeper and gruffer voice. Right now, there’s a heat dome over Harlan, and Dr. Rosmann and the farmers fan themselves with leaflets bearing the title of his talk, Suicide by Farmers Continues to Be a Vexing Problem. A biography inside declares Rosmann, who once taught psychology at the University of Virginia, the nation’s leading expert on farmer behavioral health and America’s farmer suicide crisis. He developed that expertise by growing up on a farm himself, and working his way up through academia, copiously publishing on the behavioral health, and particularly the suicides, of farmers. Eventually, Rosmann grew frustrated with writing and lecturing about the minds of farmers from Charlottesville’s lofty remove. Forty years ago he returned to Iowa with his wife, Marilyn, took up farming again, and established a practice dedicated to providing therapy to farmers.
There is in every case a host of additional stressors, Rosmann says. The death of a child. Divorce. Your hired help moves away. The ever-present threat of injury. Rosmann admits he walks with a cane because once he tried to kick loose oats that were clogged in a combine. This was before combines had protective cages over the auger. The machine took part of his foot and didn’t give it back. His children later found his toes, but they couldn’t be sewn back on. Rosmann sums up his point with a flourish. “The farm has become the most stressful setting of any occupation, and has had the highest rate of physical injuries and illnesses and fatalities of any occupational workplace.”
Amber and Chris met during high school at a barn dance near Corsica, South Dakota, just north of the Nebraska border. Chris had been the life of the party, but Amber showed “zero interest.” Then they both moved to Sioux Falls for college, where Chris persisted. Their courtship moved slow, then fast.
In the twenty-year-old photograph Amber shows me, the wedding party of a dozen are backed up against an altar with a crimson cross looming over the groom’s head. Amber glows in a white wedding gown, and Chris, sporting short brown hair and a clipped goatee, manages to look at ease in a stiff white tux. The new husband and wife beam broadly, like they just learned a big secret.
Children soon followed—Kalee, athletic and blond like her mom, then Kahne, born two years later. Red-haired, husky, and a hard worker like his dad, Kahne has a mind of his own and doesn’t warm up to strangers right away. Or even later.
“And then it took me some work to convince Chris to have our third child. And Kolbe came in November of 2013.”
Kolbe is an instantly likable sprite, always in motion, closely orbiting his mother. “Kolbe just doesn’t stop,” she said. “He’s always bouncing off the walls and into something, whether it be playing his video games, or basketball, or wanting a game of cards. He is very on the go.” Kolbe most resembles his dad.
The family lived in Platte, a place with good jobs near where Amber and Chris had grown up. A welder, Chris built box scrapers at a farm supply store. Amber worked in an insurance office and eventually became an agent.
Amber said, “I felt like when we were living in town, my dreams were reality. We had the perfect family. We both had day jobs. We had our evenings, and weekends, holidays free to spend together as a family. Life was great.”
But Chris had grown up on a farm, and in his early thirties he had an itch to return to the land. Amber, whose grandparents had suffered financial setbacks at farming, was afraid of its unstable income and days that started before dawn and ended after dark. Weekends, holidays relaxing with the family? Forget about it. Amber said, “It never ends on the farm. There’s always work to be done.”
At fifty-nine, Chris’s father was almost ready to retire. He agreed to hire Chris as an employee with the idea that his son would take over and eventually buy him out. This was basically the deal Chris’s dad had made with his own father. Chris would become the third generation of Dykshorn farming land that had become sacred to the family. Together, father and son would handle 789 acres of corn, hay, and soybeans—almost 600 football fields’ worth—along with chickens, pigs, sheep, cattle, and goats. In 2015, Chris and his dad began working together. Two years later the family moved to the farm.
Amber told me, “Chris did feel pressure of wanting to succeed, because his grandpa and his dad both had succeeded at farming. But farming was difficult from the moment we started.”
At the Shelby County Fair, psychologist Mike Rosmann gets to the heart of his talk. “Worry kills farmers. They’re worried their farm operation may become economically unable to continue. They worry they will lose the farm that’s been in their family for generations. They worry there will be no farm to leave to their children. These are painful, painful things to keep inside your heart. If the stress does not remit or decrease, then we just completely wear ourselves out to the point that depression sets in.”
Every suicide is different. But some suicides, such as those of farmers and soldiers, occur because of stressors unique to those occupations. They originate differently, develop differently, but tragically end the same. Rosmann had expressed in a nutshell why farmer suicide is different from all other kinds. Farmers are strongly motivated to work the land and grow food. Often, they are a link in a chain of land stewardship that has passed from father to son or daughter, over generations. Failing at farming, and losing the land, is a hauntingly painful prospect.
Rosmann adjusts his wire-rimmed glasses. His mostly farmer audience listens, rapt. He’s telling the story of their lives.
Farm debt has increased by about a third since 2007, to levels not seen since the farming crisis of the 1980s. Unless you farm, you may not know farmers take out loans just to plant for the next season. Their equipment and land, even their barns and homes, may be mortgaged to the hilt. Whenever you hear of a farm foreclosure, remember that the farmhouse is usually included in the mortgaged property, so the family probably lost their home as well. They may have had an auction to make the move easier. Tools, craftwork, furniture, wedding dresses. Keepsakes of generations.
Farmers may carry several lines of credit—they visit bankers like the rest of us visit barbers. It’s common for their partners to have jobs off the farm and for farmers themselves to have part-time jobs at a feed lot, or a Home Depot, or someone else’s farm, to keep their operations afloat. Profit margins are low, and the odds of consistent success are lower. Since 2013, over half of all farmers in the United States have lost money every year.
One big reason is that since 2012, key commodity prices including corn, wheat, soybeans, and milk have fallen by about 50 percent. From 2017 to 2018, soybean exports to China dropped 75 percent amid a disastrous trade war. And in 2019, flooding prevented farmers from planting nearly 20 million acres.
These numbers add up to disaster in the heartland. Between 2011 and 2018, America lost more than 100,000 farms to bankruptcy. Banks foreclosed on 12,000 of those between 2017 and 2018 alone.
The farmers listening to Rosmann nod knowingly. These men and women, or many like them, would quit farming if they could. But even those on the brink of a psychological breakdown feel they cannot. That’s because, like Chris Dykshorn, they stand to inherit or have inherited their farms. Some are third- or even fourth-generation farmers. They cannot turn their backs on their heritage or fail to bequeath land to their children. Tragically, dying can come to seem like a better option.
Now Amber is walking around the winding dirt road between barn and chicken coop, tractor shed and hogpen. She coos at the new lambs stumbling gangly in the sunshine. She lingers at the hog’s dark sty and a picture-perfect spider’s web on which you expect to read “Some Pig.” There’s equipment everywhere, trucks, hoods open abandoned to the weather, disks, a brush hog, bales of chicken wire, a barn half-full of tractors, too many of them, dating back decades. A sheep’s carcass pushed off the path, sunken in like an empty bag, past stinking. Everything clamors for mending, cleaning, paint. Someone has all but abandoned this farm, but I hear a tractor engine not far away. Probably Chris’s father, who had to come out of retirement to run the operation full time, a workload taken on single-handedly that had been overwhelming for two. More than a year ago, Amber and the kids moved off the farm into a house nearer town and good schools, and far from bad memories. But not all bad. Back at the lambs, Amber says, “Lots of good times spent with Chris in here, lots of long days. Just the joy of seeing new life when we have the baby lambs. That’s so much joy.”
A farm kitten shyly roams from a barn into the sunlight, spots Amber, and hides again.
With the heel of her hand she pushes away a tear. “I do feel Chris’s presence when I come here. It can be overwhelming at times. But other times it brings me joy. And it reminds me of how hard he worked day in and day out. Such a hard worker.”
At the fair, Mike Rosmann has finished tallying the major stressors aligned against farmers. It made me wonder why anyone would voluntarily farm. Now he turned to countermeasures—how to spot the signs of extreme depression and possible suicide in those around you and even in yourself. He says, “So what are the key symptoms that we look for? For suicide the first is when we become so upset for at least three weeks that we have not laughed at all. We have not done anything that gives us pleasure. A second danger signal is a feeling of hopelessness. ‘I don’t know how I can keep on doing this, I can’t do it anymore. I’m just overwhelmed, there is nothing that looks favorable in the future.’ That is something to look out for, either in ourselves or in people that we care about.
“A third, major symptom is when someone starts making dramatic threats, like, ‘No they’re not taking my livestock. I’m going to shoot them all before I have to haul them up to the auction.’ The fourth signal is what I call the lump-in-the-throat phenomenon. This is an occasion when someone is so down and we say, ‘You look like you need to cry,’ and if you ask them have you cried, they say, ‘No, I haven’t, but I wish I could.’ ”
Rosmann continues. “Other signs are how well the person grooms himself or herself. Have they not shaved in two or three weeks? And profoundly depressed people tend to stay in their bedrooms or at home. They don’t go to the Shelby County Fair or to church or to the kids’ sports meet. Another thing that happens is sleep disturbance. Profoundly distressed persons either oversleep or can’t sleep adequately. And what happens when we can’t sleep adequately? We accumulate what we call sleep debt, just like financial debt. Every night you don’t sleep seven or eight hours puts you in the red. Did you know that ten hours of sleep debt has the same physiological impact as .08 blood level of alcohol? So we have to manage our sleep hygiene and we have found that nearly always sleep hygiene is poor when farm people end up taking their own lives.”
Chris and his father had tied Chris’s income to corn production. Chris would plant and harvest corn, store it in their silo, and transport some by truck to the grain elevator—a storage facility in Platte—for sale. The rest would go to feeding their livestock. But the price of corn plummeted, cutting into Chris’s already meager income. Then in the spring of 2019, severe flooding made planting corn impossible. The furrows simply filled with rain, washing seeds away. Chris had to work around the clock to be ready when the rain let up. He feared pigs would drown in their pens. When he could get to bed, worry about the weather kept him awake. His sleeplessness left him struggling to make decisions. “I can’t think,” he told Amber. “I feel paralyzed.”
Chris decided to sell corn stored in the silo. But on the rutted farm roads, he snapped an axle on the grain truck and had no money to replace it. Chris’s dad arranged to have the corn picked up, for a hefty fee.
Amber said, “Chris started to become very withdrawn. He was very sad. He had stopped fishing, which he loved. His main worry was the finances, and how bills were gonna get paid. He didn’t make it apparent to me about being depressed until probably the first part of April 2017.”
Sometimes, Chris used his phone to express feelings he had trouble sharing directly. “Chris would send me text messages, Snapchats just about being sad, and how he felt worthless. And he didn’t know how things were gonna work. One of the last Snapchats that I received from Chris was a picture of him tightening his belt to the last belt loop.” Amber’s voice broke telling me this. “He had lost so much weight.”
Kahne helped out wherever he could—hooking up tractors, carrying buckets of feed, picking up around the farm. He liked to help his dad and wanted to ease his father’s load, but there’s only so much a nine-year-old can do. After dinner, Amber helped Chris until nightfall.
Amber told me, “Chris visited with his dad. And his dad actually wrote down a list of all of his assets, and just basically tried showing Chris how he could make things work. How it was gonna be okay. And we had an appointment with our banker, who was working on helping me show Chris that we could make it work. But at that point, Chris was so depressed. I don’t think he could really see the light in any situation. The kids could tell he was depressed, because when we would sit down for a meal, he would just be silent. He wouldn’t say anything. He just looked down. He was in a lot of pain.”
Amber reached out to a nurse who in turn asked the sheriff to perform a welfare check. When the sheriff came by, Chris agreed to go with him to the emergency room for an evaluation. From there Chris was referred for immediate treatment to a behavioral health center. At the live-in facility, he engaged in group therapy and learned coping skills. He discussed what in life was worth living for. When he spoke with Amber on the phone, Chris said he felt great.
Amber felt a flood of relief.
In one sense Chris was lucky. He had found mental health care. Compared to their city counterparts, rural Americans have far less access to mental health services. In rural counties in America, there are on average just 25 mental health professionals—psychiatrists, psychologists, and licensed social workers—per 10,000 people. That’s a fraction of those available in urban areas. Most mental health care visits are conducted through primary care providers, not therapists or specialists. And as Rosmann told me, without specialized training, primary care physicians do not adequately understand behavioral health.
Another factor is that rural people are less likely to be able to afford counseling because of poverty and lack of health insurance. Furthermore, for Natives and others in underserved communities, there’s a scarcity of culturally appropriate care. Medicaid and telehealth visits have made mental health care more accessible, but they don’t impact the shortage of mental health professionals.
And finally, to have an impact, rural mental health professionals need to know about farming. The last thing a farmer or agriculture worker in distress wants to do is explain the problems that are killing him to a counselor who doesn’t understand farm life. The counselor might suggest a vacation, to which the farmer would object that his milk cows don’t take vacations. Fortunately, in their psychology and social work curricula, many university programs in farm country have begun addressing fluency in agricultural work.
In another sense Chris Dykshorn was very unlucky. Somehow after just four days he was able to convince the facility and his wife that he was well enough to go back to the farm. And since he wasn’t bound by a legal commitment, he was free to go. Amber drove to bring him home. But Chris was hiding a mountain of anxiety, and it soon came crashing down.
Amber said, “Once we got in the car, Chris’s mind started racing. And he’s like, I don’t even know where to start. I have so much I need to do. And I said, Okay, let’s figure it out. What can we do while we’re driving home? You can call your crop adjuster. You can make a list of things to do when we get home, that kind of thing. But you could already see how he was starting to get overwhelmed. And he wasn’t even home yet.”
The next two days passed in a blur. To try to bolster his spirits, Chris’s father praised him for the work the two did together. Amber suggested that he might work at a neighbor’s farm to increase their income or sell some of their sheep to lessen his workload. Chris remained remote and given to tears. He hardly slept at all. In the field he asked his father to hold his hand.
Had Chris’s treatment helped him at all? In the months following their release from a mental health facility, patients admitted for suicide attempts or ideation are at the highest risk for suicide in their lives. Experts are unsure why, but their chances of dying by suicide are 100 times the average for their race and age. This is a period when loved ones must be intensely alert.
At the fair, Mike Rosmann told his audience, “Depressed people do one of three things. One is that they flee from the circumstance by isolating and not talking, refusing to visit with the banker or others. That’s called the flight response. Two is that they may make broad threats, that’s called a fighting response.”
Chris fell into the third path. “They can’t make themselves do things. I have seen farmers so depressed that they couldn’t get out of bed to get into the combine and harvest grain in October because they were so encumbered with thoughts of blame and loss. Morbid kinds of thoughts. That is what we call emotional paralysis. Emotional paralysis is probably one of the worst things that can occur to us.”
On Thursday, June 13, 2019, Chris got up earlier than usual and was out of the house by the time Amber rose and began preparing for a meeting with their banker.
“I was still in my nightgown at the computer. And at 8:12, my cell phone was ringing beside me. It was Sam, who was our neighbor who lived with Carol in the house Chris’s grandparents used to live in. And he said to me, ‘Chris’s breathing has really slowed down, Amber, but he is still alive.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean his breathing has slowed down?’ And he said, ‘Didn’t Carol call you?’ And I said, ‘No, what’s going on?’ He said, ‘Oh, Amber, Chris shot himself.’
“I got in my car and I called our pastor. Our pastor had been meeting with Chris, and he knew that Chris wasn’t doing well. And he says, ‘I’m on my way out.’ So I got over to the farm, and I just, I still have nightmares of him laying on the ground there.
“I remember pleading with him to just hold on, that we couldn’t do life without him. And I remember crying to God, I need a miracle. I need a miracle, because I knew he wasn’t gonna make it with what he had done.”
Chris Dykshorn was strong. He lived all the way to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Later, Amber said, “And this was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life to this day, was to tell my kids that their dad was never coming home again. Chris is gonna miss out on a lot of things. Graduations, weddings, grandkids. But I know he’s keeping an eye and watching over us.”
From the time Chris began farming with his father to the day he killed himself, four years had passed. During that time he faced increasing responsibility as he leased land and took on ownership of cattle. Terrible floods in 2019 slowed all farm operations, bogged down machinery, and cast a sense of doom over everything. There would be no corn harvest that year, and none of its precious income. Though he had probably hidden his depression for a long time, it was April 2019 before Amber realized Chris was depressed. He took his life just two months later. During his troubles, I was told, he never mentioned suicide to Amber or to the mental health professionals he encountered.
Chris Dykshorn, like many farmers, wasn’t driven to suicide by one difficult year. Farmer suicides, like suicides everywhere, are complicated. They are caused in many cases by a genetic predisposition compounded by isolation, a shortage of health care, substance abuse, a surfeit of guns, financial pressure, and other factors. But Chris had no suicides in his family history that anyone knew of. He didn’t drink or take drugs. It is likely that he had simply suffered from stress and worry for too long. His depression was too severe to be treated in just four days at a mental health facility.
Mike Rosmann preaches a gospel of preemption. Farmers need to look at their emotional health as something to be managed with as much attention as their land. That means doing things that they enjoy—for Chris, fishing, hunting, spending relaxing time with the family. He gave all that up. The stress wore him down. And he only got help when Amber intervened.
What keeps many farmers from getting help? The very qualities that make them good farmers.
Rosmann told me, “Good farmers have the tendency to trust their own judgments, to rely on their own resources, to take risks, to work alone if necessary. They are proud and self-sufficient. Those characteristics work for farmers, but they also work against them during times of stress. Farmers do not reach out for help when they are in trouble. They don’t talk about their trouble.”
Chris Dykshorn’s strengths became his vulnerabilities. And rural, agricultural people have inherent vulnerabilities. They’re far more isolated than urbanites and don’t have easy access to peer groups with whom to discuss their challenges, if they feel so inclined. And, significantly, rural people have more guns than urban dwellers. As we’ll see ahead, guns play a devastating role in suicides in the United States. Christine Moutier of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention outlines the best steps to take with firearms. “If you are in a gun-owning home, a very important aspect of suicide prevention is to think about those firearms and make sure that they’re stored safely and securely, ammunition separately. And during periods of crisis, I would even go so far as to say, try to have firearms outside of the home environment.”
Amber Dykshorn told me that she had spoken with Chris about giving his guns to his father or a neighbor until he felt better. Chris said he would never shoot himself, and Amber took him at his word. But neither of them knew then the places his illness would take him. In hindsight, getting his guns out of reach might have made a difference. During a crisis, experts say, unload guns and take them to a trusted friend. And don’t stop there. Lock up or dispose of prescription drugs and over-the-counter medicines. Lock up or dispose of common household poisons. These are some of the main means of suicide in the United States, and they’re simple to address.
Each year, some 15 million Americans think about taking their lives. Many thousands like Chris Dykshorn do. But many thousands more are pulled back from the brink by someone who steps in to help.
“And thank you very much and enjoy the Shelby County Fair.” Mike Rosmann wraps up his talk about the mental health of farmers and says hello to friends and admirers in the audience.
After a few minutes, he splits off for a visit with David Boettger, a man he’s known for more than thirty years. They planned to have a look at stock together. Boettger, like Rosmann, is in his seventies and a retired farmer. He’s lean and big-boned, with shoulders and forearms shaped by a lifetime of lifting, pulling, and bending heavy things. From the look of him, he might once have carried a calf under each arm.
Earlier, Rosmann had said to me, “One person I know was so distressed that his wife called me, and she said, ‘Can you come right over and help me?’ ” Rosmann was backing into Boettger’s story but wanted to preserve David’s privacy. David Boettger and his wife, Nancy, a state politician, had prayed over whether he should share his story with me and the public. Their answer was yes. Later, Boettger himself took up the tale.
“That was the low point of my life. I probably didn’t sleep any of the night before. So I was exhausted physically and mentally. I couldn’t think straight.”
Boettger lives where he was born, on a four-generation farm that was founded in 1890. He doesn’t farm anymore but leases his land to a neighbor’s son. At his farm, like Rosmann’s, all the grass is mown, and the barns, silos, sheds, and fences are structurally sound and painted. It turns out there is a connection between messy farms and mental health conditions. During his talk, Rosmann had asked, “How well is the machinery kept up? Are the farm buildings painted?”
David and Nancy Boettger have four children, sixteen grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren—a blessing, David calls them. But there was a time when a contented old age was unlikely for David and for thousands of other farmers whose lives were overturned by the farm crisis of the 1980s.
For farmers it was a perfect storm, the worst economic crisis to hit farming since the Great Depression. One storm front was, ironically, high farm production, which resulted in a surplus of commodities like wheat, corn, soybeans, hogs, and beef. The surplus drove prices down. Another was the 1979 Soviet Union embargo, which forced a 20 percent decline in exports between 1981 and 1983. Then interest rates on farm loans for equipment and production went up to 21 percent, higher than credit card rates. To counter it, the Federal Reserve System lowered interest rates and, from 1981 to 1985, caused farmland value to drop up to 60 percent in parts of the Midwest. More land was needed to secure loans, which meant you stood to lose more if your farm went belly up.
Low crop prices, a smaller market caused by the trade embargo, crippling interest rates, and low land value put many farms in crisis. Farmers couldn’t win for losing. By 1984, farm debt hit $215 billion, almost twice the debt of the early 1970s. Farm foreclosures soared, threatening more than a third of all farmers. In five midwestern states, more than 900 farmers took their lives. Some farmers shot bankers.
It was the interest rates that ate at David Boettger most. “The big kicker was eighteen and twenty percent interest. That’s one dollar out of five that goes to pay for interest and that was just devastating because the corn prices were low. The yields weren’t anything like they are today. So many people went bankrupt and lost their farms. And farming at least for my generation was a lifestyle, meaning you had failed if you lost the farm.”
The Boettgers had two kids in college at the time and were paying 18 percent on equipment and production loans. “We were going backwards every day,” said David.
Depression wasn’t new to him. Years before, he had been in college for just three weeks when his father died. There were still a lot of gaps in his knowledge of farming, but he left school, took over the farm, and made mistakes. That depressed him. He always felt he was doing something wrong. His depression worsened in the disastrous ’80s. Then one of his sons was hospitalized for depression. Boettger lost forty pounds in six months. He couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus, couldn’t finish a job. He didn’t want to be around people. He preferred to stay home.
“My attitude was terrible. I wasn’t being a good husband, a good father, or anything else. I just thought, ‘I don’t know what to do but I got to do something different. I cannot go on this way.’ ”
Labor Day weekend that year, he was feeding sows in the farrowing house when he had a mental health crisis. “I just remember yelling to myself, ‘Lord, I’ve got to have some help. I’ve just got to have some help.’
“I would say it was a 10, my mental pain.”
Nancy called Mike Rosmann and he came right over. “I think he asked me point-blank, ‘Have you ever thought about committing suicide and do you have a plan?’ I told him yes, and I told him my plan. And he decided I needed to go to the hospital. Nancy took me down.”
David stayed for nineteen days. He engaged in talk therapy with a nurse and a doctor. A social worker conducted group therapy sessions. He did artwork he didn’t understand.
“I really had a hard time getting into that. You know I’m making this little painting. And yeah, gimme a break. But I continued to do it. And every part of their plan had some reason and some goal behind it. And I’m happy they insisted. They were the right things for me to do.”
David went home for visits, but he would not return for good before he was ready. He called the hospital his safe place. “They told me what to do, when to do it. I was just free to live and not function in the normal way. And that felt safe to me. I had never asked people for help. It’s something I just didn’t do. So when I had to have it, I got it. And it was freeing. When I think about what would’ve happened if I had not gotten help, no way would I be alive today. Because I couldn’t live with that pain.”
David returned to the farm and took it easy for the first few weeks. He began a course of medication he’s stuck with for forty years. He still deals with depression, which gets worse in the fall and again in the spring. Nancy keeps an eye on it and he gets his medication adjusted when necessary.
David and Nancy have since read a lot about the neuroscience behind mental health disorders and how they affected famous people, like Abraham Lincoln, who suffered from depression. It helps David to know the condition that once threatened his life has impacted so many and for so long. He keeps an eye out for people he can help.
About his old friend, Mike Rosmann said, “David has learned how to turn his turmoil into an act of benefit to others. He wants as his life’s work, partly, to keep other people from becoming so depressed that they contemplate ending their lives.”
“If I run into somebody and I’m seeing they have some signs of depression, or any mental health issue,” said David, “I try to get them in a personal conversation. And I’ve led people to that same hospital to do the same things. I don’t know how many have done it. But I know a few that had real good success.”
If you are thinking about suicide or if you or someone you know is in emotional crisis, please call or text 988 at any time to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline for confidential, free crisis support.