Mental Health Stigma in Rural Communities

Dairy farmer and Rural Minds Founder and Chairman Jeff Winton will highlight the unique challenges around mental health for those living in rural America.  He will address how the stigma surrounding mental health affects rural communities and provide strategies to help address the stigma. Growing up on his family’s dairy farm, he discovered that many of the families in his small, 500-person town had a relative or friend living with some form of untreated mental illness—depression, bipolar disorder, anxiety, schizophrenia. But their struggle was met with silence. There were few or no resources in the community for treating them or conversations about helping them. The stigma attached to mental illness was palpable.  In response to the suicide of Jeff’s nephew in 2012, he founded Rural Minds, a nonprofit organization to serve as the informed voice for mental health in rural America, and to provide mental health information and resources.

Presenter: Jeff Winton