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Rural depression and suicides are little different than urban cases. In urban life, it is more sort of mind-induced depression due to mindless race for fame, money and luxury or acute life management stress.
In rural India, despite being in the laps of mother nature, farmers suicide. Why?
Modern chemical agriculture and ruthless chemical marketing (By govt and MNC companies). Innocent farmers (and their several generations since Green revolution) and Greedy farmers, both, are succumbed to chemical warfare.
Weedkillers tied to depression in farmers. Pseudo-scientific activists, right? When I share this with my so called intellectual friends, they give this reply – all this is propaganda by Pseudo-scientific activists. Yes, American Journal of Epidemiology is one such journal promoting pseudo-science.
Your food plate carry depression triggers. Your mental state surrenders easily when not trained by real science of life. Go read it. Find farmer friend in near by village. Inspire them and support them for spiritually inclined farming and live beautiful life.
My personal experience meeting farmer families is depressing. Especially, farmers storing pesticides in home – None of them fall in happy family definition, despite being wealthy.
Solution is very simple and possible for all farmers. We as a society, lack the will to implement it. Solution is : Cow based Agriculture. Local food cycles. Urban-Rural connect for food. Human pockets with common goal = food.
Pesticide Exposure and Depression Among Agricultural Workers in France
- ↵*Correspondence to Dr. Marc G. Weisskopf, Department of Environmental Health, Harvard School of Public Health, Landmark Center, 401 Park Drive, P.O. Box 15697, Boston, MA 02215 (e-mail: mweissko@hsph.harvard.edu).
Pesticides are ubiquitous neurotoxicants, and several lines of evidence suggest that exposure may be associated with depression. Epidemiologic evidence has focused largely on organophosphate exposures, while research on other pesticides is limited. We collected detailed pesticide use history from farmers recruited in 1998–2000 in France. Among 567 farmers aged 37–78 years, 83 (14.6%) self-reported treatment or hospitalization for depression. On the basis of the reported age at the first such instance, we used adjusted Cox proportional hazards models to estimate hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals for depression (first treatment or hospitalization) by exposure to different pesticides. The hazard ratio for depression among those who used herbicides was 1.93 (95% confidence interval (CI): 0.95, 3.91); there was no association with insecticides or fungicides. Compared with nonusers, those who used herbicides for <19 years and ≥19 years (median for all herbicide users, 19 years) had hazard ratios of 1.51 (95% CI: 0.62, 3.67) and 2.31 (95% CI: 1.05, 5.10), respectively. Similar results were found for total hours of use. Results were stronger when adjusted for insecticides and fungicides. There is widespread use of herbicides by the general public, although likely at lower levels than in agriculture. Thus, determining whether similar associations are seen at lower levels of exposure should be explored.
http://aje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/07/11/aje.kwt089
http://agrariancrisis.in/2013/07/27/weedkillers-tied-to-depression-in-farmers/?fb_source=pubv1
