Saw this on reddit. Plenty of suicides in my hometown, mostly farmers out in the hills without anyone else around to talk to.
This is where the Internet would be somewhat helpful. Is there a popular online community for farmers? I feel like that would be something I would have stumbled across by now. I understand that loneliness is caused by lack of physical human interaction, but I guess occasional interaction with humans through the Internet would be somewhat beneficial.
Obviously Short's suicide was the result of more than one reason, and as the final paragraphs indicate it would be difficult to pin-point the problem solely as loneliness. I feel that the focus of this article is a call for more comprehensive counselling and medical care. That would be more than social interaction; it'd be social interaction with a trained individual within an apposite environment. I am aware that Intel started a scheme in 2006 to provide Indian farmers in rural areas with "community PCs" and that developments were being made as lately as 2011 with the "Classmate PC". While this was aimed at supporting farmers in their agricultural endeavours (for example checking the weather or researching things), I have no doubt that it would allow rural Indians to connect with the rest of the world. Would something like this be feasible in the USA?
TIME My wife's cousin is a dairy farmer. She's 39. She's got three kids, 800 head of cattle, 150 acres and $1.5m in debt. Shit is rugged, no doubt. But "Idaho, New Mexico, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Nevada" is my turf, yo, and Fuckin' A there ain't no fuckin' farmers in Nevada... at least when you compare it to farming states like Kansas, Oklahoma, California, Wisconsin, etc. There is, however, shit tons of Meth. And before there was meth, there was heroin, or coke, or alcoholism. Big Sky Disease. Just because you don't live elbow-to-elbow with your neighbors doesn't mean you're growing things under the sun. I know several towns around my home town where the primary industry is welfare checks. So while I agree with the plight of the farmer, and I agree shit's rugged, yo, I disagree that you can say "there are farmers" and "there is suicide" and leap to "farming causes suicide." 'cuz I know lotsa mutherfuckers that committed suicide. We had our first when I was in 5th grade and peaked at 3 in my class Junior Year and when I came back a year after my 10-year I found out about nine people that had offed themselves in the decade betwixt and lemme tell ya - not a one of 'em was a farmer. My grandpa was a farmer. Lots of his friends were farmers. And if I were to play Deadpool on my grandpa and his buddies or my tweaker trenchcoat mafia overpass kids, I'm going with my tweaker trenchcoat mafia overpass friends.
I don't really know if I agree with the article on the point, that a farmer kills himself, because he is so lonely. When looking at India where approx. 20.000 farmers commit suicide each year, the reason is said to be poverty and debt, not lonelyness... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmers_suicides_in_India