Farmers’ Mental Health: The Mediating Role of Chronic Fatigue

ABSTRACT

The agricultural environment is known to be particularly harmful to farmers’ psychological health. To better understand how its impact is modulated, this study mainly focuses on the mediating role of chronic fatigue between A) loneliness at work, autonomy, workload, government regulations and policies and financial hardship, and B) life satisfaction, positive affect and psychological distress. The study is based on a sample of 453 Canadian dairy farmers. Structural equation modeling analyses confirmed the mediating role of chronic fatigue in the relationships between the factors studied, with the exception of financial hardship. Implications for research and the psychological burden affecting agricultural workers are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Farmers
• work
• well-being
• fatigue; psychological health

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics approvals

This research has been approved (#2019–2305/Dolbec) by the research ethics committee of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Sherbrooke.

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Additional information

Funding

This work was not supported by any funding.