Rural caregivers face mental health challenges too

by | May 15, 2023 | 5 Ag Stories, News

May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and Rural Minds and the National Grange Society held a webinar discussing the challenges facing caregivers in rural America. Those mental health challenges often get overlooked. Brittnee Henry is a communications and marketing professional who returned to her home in Iowa to care for her father when it became clear he couldn?t live on his own anymore.

?I chose to move home and be his advocate,? Henry said. ?Even though he’s in a care facility, people must have an advocate and someone that can be there on a day-to-day basis at the drop of a hat if need be. Because of the nature of the disease with frontal temporal dementia, there’s a lot of agitation, there’s fear, and it was necessary for me to move home. So, it’s been a lot of tipping your life upside down, but I realized it’s really important to take care of yourself first when you’re a caregiver.?

Henry said full-time caregivers need support themselves because they often forget to take care of their own health.

?When you want to care for someone, it’s sometimes hard to see how much you’re slipping in your own health and your own life,? Henry said. ?I’m very fortunate to have a best friend who is a social worker, and she works with caregivers and geriatric patients. She said, ?Brittany, it’s not uncommon for caregivers to suddenly forget to take their medication themselves, not get their prescriptions filled, to not do their preventative appointments, to not keep track of their health metrics like blood pressure and weight and things like that.? And I found myself in that boat.?

Henry said there are several challenges in caregiving in rural America.

?One of the things that I think is especially challenging – part of my graduate degree was centered around this, so it is a passion of mine – but having access to digital resources and technology played a role in how my dad could receive care,? Henry said. ?And, you know, in a rural community, there aren’t a lot of specialists. We had a specialist in frontal temporal dementia who served in a hospital in another state. It’s close to us, but it’s 70 miles away. My dad has gotten to the point where traveling that far, he gets very agitated because one, we didn’t have internet service here at the farm and two, the physician could not do telehealth across state lines. We were in a conundrum.?

Henry added that one thing lacking in rural America is an adequate number of care specialists.

?Second, I would say there’s not a whole lot of specialized care for memory and dementia in rural communities,? Henry said. ?We’re very fortunate that, in my hometown, the nursing home had just within like three weeks of my dad needing to be in a facility, opened a memory and dementia unit. But I can say that we still just aren’t there in the care and understanding of brain diseases that we are for other diseases.?

For more information, visit ruralminds.org.