SAN LUIS VALLEY – The San Luis Valley is one of the prime agricultural regions in Colorado, home to industrious farmers and ranchers who toil to produce the food locals and others consume daily. A quiet reality of this labor is stress induced mental health issues.
The Coffee Break Project, a partnership between Valley-Wide Health Systems and Colorado State University Extension, is available to assist with these issues within the agricultural community.
In agriculture a strong work ethic, often instilled at a young age, is legendary. The work of a farmer or rancher entails long hours and is physically demanding. Working these hours, often in bad weather, entails all the tasks of growing, harvesting, and transporting crops and livestock, too.
Agricultural life is unpredictable; equipment breaks down, animals get sick, and there is always the weather that in a moment turns a profitable year into a loss. Commodity prices are determined thousands of miles away beyond the control of the producer in markets like the CME Group (Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group), which describes itself as a place "where risk meets opportunity."
The stress of agricultural life is enormous and accentuated by an ethos of rugged individualism, self-determination, and self-sufficiency. The connection to the land is engrained in American history. In his "Notes on the State of Virginia," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God if ever he had a chosen people…”
The extreme pressures of rural life take their toll; the suicide rate in the agricultural community is 3.5 times the rest of the population. There is help with the Coffee Break Project where people gather informally over coffee and discuss a variety of issues without pressure or judgment.
The project has the motto, "Do you look after your neighbors as close as your crop or herd?" When he heard that motto, Larry Brown with CSE Extension said he was "hooked" on becoming involved in the project.
The program utilizes a modality called COMET, or Changing Our Mental and Emotional Trajectory. This down-to-earth method teaches people how to intervene when they see someone who is in a vulnerable space and helps shift the person's mental health trajectory back to a place of wellness instead of proceeding toward a mental health crisis.
JC Carrica with Valley-Wide Health in Rocky Ford told the Valley Courier the project began when he reached out to community leaders in eastern Colorado to discuss "addressing suicides in the agricultural world and mental health within the ag community."
They all immediately said yes to assist and had a story to tell about the issue, and then they all met over coffee. The group discussed loneliness, depression, anxiety, and commodity prices. The Coffee Break Project was named, where participants gather informally for coffee and camaraderie.
A key to the project is how vulnerable populations of farmers, ranchers, and ag workers can best be reached. What training should be employed, what terminology, and what community events should be attended.
Carrica said, "Think of the Coffee Break Project as a stool with legs supporting it. The stool is the overall Coffee Break Project. When we go out into the community, we ask which legs of the stool they want to learn about. One leg is setting up community grass roots advisory groups to address significant issues.
“The second leg is the COMET, a 90-minute training on how to have gentle conversations with people who may be in distress using everyday language.
“We have trained over 300 people in COMET. The third leg of the stool is the farm workers' health screens. We go out with our mobile clinic and do health screens to help people access health care without going to town for appointments, at least initially.
“The fourth leg is gun safety. Not gun control. We talk about the myth and fact of Red Flag legislation and the gun shop project. The project works with gun shops and shooting sports organizations and work with them to identify people who may be in vulnerable states and should not be using firearms at the time or should not be purchasing them.
“We do training on when it is a good time to utilize firearms and when it is not. We also help put in safes so people can voluntarily store their firearms securely until they feel safe to be in possession of those guns again.
“The Coffee Break Project is the top of the stool, and we go around and teach whatever the communities want to know, and those are the legs of the stool."
The COMET method teaches people how to intervene when they encounter someone who is in a "vulnerable space" and helps shift the person's mental health trajectory back to a place of wellness instead of proceeding towards a mental health crisis. The program trains community members to initiate a supportive interaction for a potentially emotional conversation using a simple, conversational seven-question guide.
The seven question-statements include acknowledgment that someone "is not yourself," asking how they are, observation of behavior or other change, asking about family or social life, an invitation to engage (continue the conversation then or later), optional self-disclosure, and next steps (help a person more or exit).
COMET helps fill a gap and is a strong complement to other strategies to reduce the suffering resulting from the high levels of stress in rural, agricultural communities.
For more information on the Coffee Break Project, contact Brown with CSU Extension at l.brown@colostate.edu or Carrica with Valley-Wide Health at carricajc@valley-widehealth.org.
For an introduction to the COMET program, see the University of Colorado Department of Family Medicine website at https://medschool.cuanschutz.edu/family-medicine/research-and-innovation/pbrns/hprn/projects-and-programs/comet.
