What’s the growing season going to be like? Will there be enough rain? These kinds of questions can keep us up at night, and sometimes, we need an outside party to help us think through them.
But it’s not always easy to drive somewhere for a conversation.
Enter teletherapy.
“You can be sitting in your own home, you could be sitting in your car over your lunch break, you could be sitting in your tractor on the end of a corn row, as long as you have good cell phone reception, and you just meet with your therapist over that platform just like you would if you were sitting in their office.”
Jean Holthaus is with Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services, a partner of Michigan State Extension. She says that a teletherapy session using a computer or smart phone is similar to going to the doctor’s office for a physical check-up.
“It’s always a collaborative effort. It’s never the therapist telling you what to do, and it’s always a place where you get to decide.”
Holthaus encourages everyone to have these conversations with a therapist, no matter what others may think.
“We would know that definitely you need to go if in some way it is impairing your capacity to function in healthy ways. If it’s untreated, it can result in the loss of life or the loss of the ability to function and produce an income for your family. So, yeah, it might be one of those things where you can’t control what other people are going to think, but you have to recognize, okay, but what is the risk to me if I don’t take that step?”
She adds that one way to think about preventive health care is that it’s less costly than being treated for serious illnesses.
“You can either do preventative maintenance on your car or you can wait until it’s dead beside the road. Either way, it’s going to cost you something, but preventative maintenance is a whole lot less inconvenient, and it’s usually less costly than if you wait until the car dies beside the side of the road because then you’ve got to stop your life in order to take care of it.”
For more information, visit the Michigan State Farm Stress page or the Pine Rest website for more information on the services offered. You can also read previous Michigan Ag Today stories about mental health resources, including the story of one Michigan family who experienced tuberculosis in their cattle herd:
“Make This Better”: How One Family’s Experience with Tuberculosis Helps Other Michigan Farmers
Mental Health Resources from Land Grants Can Save Lives
