Farmer's suicide inspires Kelso family prevent further tragedies
In the last months of his life, Neil Stewart's family knew he wasn't in "great fettle" - but he always insisted he was fine. When the 60-year-old cattle farmer took his own life last summer, it was met with shock by the tight-knit agricultural community of the Scottish Borders. Now his widow, Caroline, is leading the family he left behind on a 100-mile memorial walk in a bid to prevent similar tragedies. It comes as new research is undertaken into the causes of the high rate of suicide among farmers in Scotland.
Neil's brother Alastair is among those who will be joining the walk along the Kintyre Way to raise awareness of what has been described as farming's silent killer. "We did realise that Neil wasn't in great fettle for the last year of his life, but when you spoke to him, he'd say he was fine," he said."It [his death] was a terrible shock for all of us, as Neil was such a strong guy. "There were signs looking back, but it was not something we ever thought could have happened - and we're all still feeling his loss a year on."
There are no up-to-date figures are available for the number of people working within agricultural in Scotland who have either taken, or are suspected of taking, their own lives.Previous Scottish and UK studies, dating back to as early as the 1980s, have suggested that farming had the highest proportion of suicides of all industries.Further post-pandemic research has found that 88% of young farmers rate poor mental health as the biggest problem of working in agriculture.The Stewart family hope that their walk - in an area where Neil's mother grew up and he enjoyed holidays as a child - will prevent similar deaths. Alastair said: "We're going to have sore knees and ankles at the end of this walk but that is nothing compared to what so many farmers are going through every day."If we can raise awareness of the problem and convince just one person to speak to their partner, their friend or their neighbour, and get the help they need, then it will all be worth it."
Although factors such as social isolation, volatile trade markets, turbulent weather and labour shortages are thought to be factors behind the alarming rate of suicides within farming, a comprehensive three-year study has just been commissioned to provide more definitive answers.The Royal Scottish Agricultural Benevolent Institution (RSABI) and the University of Glasgow will conduct the research across Scotland.Carol McLaren, CEO of RSABI, said: "Farmers take a huge pride in the job that they do - the way they look after their animals and the way they look after their crops."What they're not so good at doing is looking after themselves."They don't typically reach out and they don't tend to open up - and that's where we get into really challenging territory."
As well as RSABI, organisations such as Breathing Space, the Samaritans, the Scottish Association of Mental Health, and Support in Mind Scotland offer free and confidential support.And recent reports suggest there has been a gradual increase in the number of agricultural workers who are picking up the phone or going online for help.Carol added: "There is help out there and the good news is that more people are now reaching out to organisations such as RSABI."We are hearing more and more from farmers and retired farmers."
For more information and support on mental health in agriculture, visit BBC Action Line.
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Can I tame my 4am terrors? Arifa Akbar on a lifetime of insomnia – and a possible cure
I can't remember when I first stopped sleeping soundly. Maybe as a child, in the bedroom I initially shared with my brother, Tariq. I would wait for his breathing to quieten, then strain to listen beyond our room in the hope of being the last one awake, and feel myself expanding into the liberating space and solitude. By my early 20s, that childhood game of holding on to wakefulness while others slept began playing out against my will. Sound seemed to be the trigger. It was as if the silence I had tuned into as a child was now a requirement for sleep. Any sound was noise: the burr of the TV from next door, the ticking of a clock in another room. When one layer of sound reduced its volume, another rose from beneath it, each intrusive and underscored by my own unending thoughts. Noise blaring from without and within, until I felt too tired to sleep. The artist Louise Bourgeois suffered a bad bout of insomnia in the 1990s, during which she created a series of drawings. Among them is an image that features musical notes in red ink, zigzagging across a sheet of paper. They look like the jagged score of an ECG graph that has recorded an alarmingly arrhythmic heartbeat. It sums up the torment of my insomnia: there is a raised heartbeat in every sound. I have been told that to overcome an inability to sleep you must find its root cause, but this quest for an original impetus is guesswork. Was it self-inflicted in childhood, or does it track further back than that, to infancy, to the womb, to genetics? One starting point is Professor Derk-Jan Dijk's view of a 'sleep personality', and the idea that childhood sleep habits can be the same later in life. I was born in London, but my family moved to Lahore when I was three years old, before returning to the UK a couple of years later. In Pakistan, there was vigorous, carefree slumber, on the roof of the house on the hottest nights, with the extended family in close proximity. It was sleep as communal ritual. Then the standstill after lunch when everyone lay down again in siesta. I remember my sister, Fauzia, sleeping beside me on these afternoons. There was no hint of insomnia until the move back to Britain when we found ourselves homeless, living in a disused building in north London for a while, crammed into a single room, before moving into a council flat. In light of Dijk's words, I see how my insomnia might be a reaction against this early chaos, along with my exacting need for order and silence in adulthood, but that is my own armchair analysis. There are so many gaps in sleep science that I wonder if sleep is by its nature too mysterious to systematise. If science can't explain the grey areas around sleep, maybe art can shed a light. It is surprising, given the painting's sense of joyous night-time, that Van Gogh painted his post-impressionist masterpiece The Starry Night in the midst of depression, after being admitted to an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the summer of 1889. A year before, in a letter dated 16 September 1888, Vincent tells his brother, Theo, that he is doing six to 12 hours of non-stop work, often at night, followed by 12 hours of sleep. By the following year he was in the grip of a 'FEARSOME' insomnia. On 9 January 1889, weeks after slicing part of his ear off in a high state of anxiety, he writes to Theo about his torment. He is fighting sleeplessness with a 'very, very strong dose of camphor' on his pillow and mattress, he says, and he hopes it will bring an end to the insomnia. 'I dare to believe that it won't recur.' I read Van Gogh's hope as optimistic desperation. In my case, it has always returned. Yet, even in his 'insensible' state, Vincent tells Theo that he is reflecting on the work of Degas, Gauguin and his own art practice; he continues to think, paint, write letters, with the insomnia existing alongside his productivity. The glittering night sky Van Gogh imagines beyond the confines of his asylum is an embodiment of the way we so often think of the gifted artist at night: synapses fizzing, imagination touched by divinity, a compulsively unsleeping genius channelling a heightened state of buoyant creativity. Countless artists and writers have elected to work after dark, from Toulouse-Lautrec, documenting night revelries at the Moulin Rouge, to Franz Kafka, Philip Guston and Patricia Highsmith. Musicians, too: the Rolling Stones' all-night jam in the lead-up to their appearance at Knebworth in 1976, for instance; or Prince, whose recording sessions could last across a continuous 24 hours. Certainly, if Van Gogh still suffered from insomnia when he was painting The Starry Night, it makes sleeplessness seem beatific – a curse turned gift. There is none of this buoyancy in Louise Bourgeois's night scribblings. She suffered from sleeplessness throughout her life but faced a particularly debilitating bout of night-time anxiety between 1994 and 1995, during which time she made her Insomnia Drawings series. 'It is conquerable,' she said, and for her it was conquered, by filling page after page of a drawing diary with deliriously repeated doodles and circles within circles, a mess of scribbles that look like screams on paper. They are so different from the enormous stainless steel, bronze and marble spiders and other caged sculptures for which Bourgeois is better known, but I feel a peculiar kind of excitement upon seeing these images, with their agitating boredom and alertness, side by side. The artist Lee Krasner also painted her way through chronic insomnia, around the time her mother and then her husband, the painter Jackson Pollock, died – the latter in a drink-driving car crash in 1956, with his lover Ruth Kligman, who survived, in the seat beside him. Krasner's Night Journeys series has some similarities to Bourgeois's drawings, featuring repeating, abstract patterns, but washed in an earthy sepia brown. The patterns are insect-like, as if ants are crawling across the retina. I am inspired by the images. Rather than seeking escape or avoidance of their sleepless state, Bourgeois and Krasner stare it in the face, and it stares back at them, an abyss of maddening monotony. There has only been one instance in my adult life when sleep became easy. Or rather, it became compulsive – as much as the insomnia was, and perhaps even more disturbing. It happened when Fauzia died in 2016, at the age of 45, of undiagnosed tuberculosis. She had been admitted to hospital with an unknown illness, and lay wired to a ventilator in intensive care. When the hospital called to say she had had a fatal brain haemorrhage one morning, the shock of it was too much to take in. So I began to sleep. No amount was enough and I felt increasingly worried by the long, blank nights, which did not bring relief but became as strangely burdensome as the insomnia had once felt. Haruki Murakami's novel After Dark features two sisters, the younger, Mari, mourning the older sibling, Eri, who is in a coma-like state. The book takes place over a single night in Tokyo as Mari roams through the city, meeting its nocturnal characters: a trombonist, a Chinese sex worker, the manager of a love hotel. All the while Eri lies in a trapped and mysterious kind of sleep. It might be an undiagnosed illness, a psychological condition or even a radical protest at the world and her place in it – we are never sure. Mari refuses to see her sister as 'dead', even though there seems no prospect of Eri's waking up. She looks at her sister's face and thinks that 'consciousness just happens to be missing from it at the moment: it may have gone into hiding, but it must certainly be flowing somewhere out of sight, far below the surface, like a vein of water'. This is how I saw Fauzia as she lay in hospital, after her haemorrhage. Even though we were told she'd remain on a ventilator for 24 hours as a formality before being pronounced dead, I kept watching for her to twitch awake, sure that it would happen. It seemed as if she was in a deep sleep, albeit so submerged by it that she had become unreachable. In her lifetime, Fauzia went through long bouts of oversleeping brought on by depression. There seemed to be a rebellion in it, too. From the age of 19, when she first became seriously depressed, she began holing herself up in her room, sleeping for the night and most of the following day. In the medieval era, the act of daytime sleeping, for men and for women, was seen to harm one's reputation. Many still regard it as slovenly and it can be subversive for exactly this reason. For a woman, especially, to refuse to get up and assume her role in the world – which may be one of monotonous domesticity, of caring for others, or of participating in the tedious, lower-rung machinery of capitalist productivity – might be a defiant act of saying 'no'. What might look like inertia, or passivity, can be an active summoning of inner strength, as suggested by Bruno Bettelheim in his psychoanalytic interpretations of fairytales in The Uses of Enchantment. He speaks of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) not as an example of meek femininity but as an adolescent 'gathering strength in solitude'. Her sleep is a temporary turning inward in order to foment, mobilise and psychically prepare for the battles of adulthood to come. A glassy-eyed, self-medicating woman in Ottessa Moshfegh's novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation also 'hibernates' in her New York apartment. She is a Manhattan princess, narcissistic and hard to like, who does not want to experience any of life's sharp edges. Yet there is something I recognise in her overwhelming desire to disconnect from the terrible reality of the world. She plans to sleep for a year and wake up cured of her sadness, and she is. My sleep wasn't a cure, but the oversleeping did eventually lift and leave me feeling less numbed to my own sadness. Now I was glad to be returned to myself, and to my insomnia – an old friend, missed. There is evidence to suggest that women sleep differently from men and feel the effects of insomnia in discrete ways. Professor Dijk cites the familiar list of causes, from lifestyle to social class, wealth and genetics, but he has also found sex-based biological factors, with differences in the brainwaves of women and men when they sleep. Women intrinsically have different circadian rhythms, which are on average six minutes shorter than men's cycles; they experience more deep (or 'slow wave') sleep and may need to sleep for longer; while a mix of social factors, from breastfeeding to lower-paid shift work, means they face higher levels of insomnia. Sleep science makes a significant connection between hormones and sleep for women in the throes of menopause. About 50% of women who suffer with insomnia as they approach menopause are thought to sleep for less than six hours a night. The cumulative effects of this sleeplessness can be so intense that some have questioned whether they might be linked to UK female suicide rates, which are at their highest between the ages of 50 and 54. This brings another kind of insomnia for me, as I turn 50. It creeps duplicitously into my night, so I don't recognise it; I fall asleep quickly but am awake again at 4am with alarm-clock precision. This is not the organic and woozy 'biphasic' interruption believed by some to have been common in the centuries before electric light, in which communities were said to have a first and then a second sleep through the night, getting up to work or chat in between in a brief window referred to as 'the watch'. My brain is pin-sharp, as if the sleep before has been entirely restorative and I am ready to start the day, except there is a move towards a certain line of thought, a search for the faultlines of the previous day, the urgent address of an old argument or decision far in the future. And it is, in its scratchy insistence, so much like Bourgeois's scribbled red balls and Krasner's insects, that I wonder if they were experiencing menopausal sleep disruption while creating their works. Whereas younger insomniacs struggle to fall asleep, those in midlife might doze off quickly but wake up in the middle of the night as a result of hormonal changes, and it is in these 4am 'reckonings' that they encounter the night-time brain, says Dr Zoe Schaedel, who sits on the British Menopause Society's medical advisory council. 'Our frontal lobe [which regulates logical thought] doesn't activate as well overnight, and our amygdala [the brain's command centre for emotions, including fear, rage and anxiety] takes over.' So the very nature of thinking is different at 4am. In the daytime it is primarily logical, but at night we become more rash, anxious, catastrophic. That sets off its own physiological reaction in the nervous system, with a surge of adrenaline and cortisol, as well as rising heart and breathing rates. Between the waking, there is a welter of dreams, so many it seems like someone is changing between the channels on a TV set. Dr Schaedel says this apparent assault of dreams is an illusion. When oestrogen drops, women start sleeping more lightly and waking up in the latter part of the night, in the shallower REM, or dream, phase, which gives the impression of dreaming more because you are waking up more often in the midst of them. Still, I am wrongfooted by this second life in my head, this middle-aged night, as busy, as complicated and as exhausting as the day. When insomnia is at its most agitating, engaging the brain visually may be a way to lull ourselves back to sleep, says Dr Schaedel. This idea makes better sense of Bourgeois's scribbling. Maybe I would find my own recurring patterns on paper if I did the same thing, I think, and so I put a notebook beside my bed. I know I have had a maelstrom of dreams but, when I try to discover them on paper, it is like a stuck sneeze. I write a few words down, but I am left straining for more. A few snatched images come back, but far more float out of view, so much unreachable. The next night I can recall even fewer details, although I know I have dreamed heavily. So my odyssey of dreams evades any attempt at codification. They are determined to remain mysterious, on the other side of daytime. This is an edited extract from Wolf Moon: A Woman's Journey into the Night, published by Sceptre on 3 July at (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
6 hours ago
- The Guardian
Transgender campaigners call for European rights body to report on UK
A collection of groups campaigning on transgender issues have urged Europe's main human rights body to investigate the UK over the implementation of the supreme court's ruling on gender. In a joint letter to the Council of Europe, the organisations said the situation in which transgender people were likely to be barred from using toilets of their acquired sex or joining single-sex organisations placed them in an 'intermediate zone' of gender, saying this was a violation of the European convention on human rights (ECHR). The five groups, Trans+ Solidarity Alliance, TransActual, Equality Network and Scottish Trans, Trans Safety Network and Feminist Gender Equality Network, have asked the council to report on trans rights in the UK, adding: 'We note that the situation is urgent and that without intervention, it seems likely to further deteriorate.' The letter follows April's landmark supreme court ruling that 'woman' and 'sex' in the Equality Act referred only to a biological woman and to biological sex. In its 88-page judgment, the court said that while the word 'biological' did not appear in the definition of man or woman in the Equality Act, 'the ordinary meaning of those plain and unambiguous words corresponds with the biological characteristics that make an individual a man or a woman'. If 'sex' did not only mean biological sex in the 2010 legislation, providers of single-sex spaces including changing rooms, homeless hostels and medical services would face 'practical difficulties', it said. The justices added: 'Read fairly and in context, the provisions relating to single-sex services can only be interpreted by reference to biological sex.' According to the Equality and Human Rights Commission, which is consulting on the formal post-ruling guidance, due out later this summer, transgender people should not be allowed to use toilets or changing spaces of the gender they live as, and that in some cases they also cannot use toilets of their birth sex. The letter argues that this would leave transgender people reliant on gender-neutral facilities, which are often unavailable 'and mandating their usage may require trans people to out themselves'. It argues that this, plus the post-ruling interim advice that transgender people would not be allowed to join single sex associations of their acquired sex, would place them in an 'intermediate zone' on sex, a violation of their right to respect for private life under article 8 of the ECHR. The convention is interpreted by the European court of human rights, part of the Strasbourg-based Council of Europe, which is separate from the EU and to which Britain remains a member. Jess O'Thomson from Trans+ Solidarity Alliance said trans people had already experienced 'a huge rollback' of rights even before the final guidance on implementing the ruling had been published: 'We are asking for a report to be opened into the state of trans people's human rights in the UK, in the hope that this will encourage our politicians to listen and take action.' Rebecca Don Kennedy, chief executive of Equality Network, said: 'Trans people and their allies all over the UK are horrified with the recent chain of events following the supreme court ruling in April. The threat to trans people's autonomy, freedom and dignity should concern anyone who values equality and human rights. 'Trans people have a right to public life, and dignity in social interaction, they have a right to use the toilet safely, to leave their homes knowing that they can. They have a right to privacy, a right to engage with the world as themselves, to join clubs that fully celebrate and welcome them as who they are.'
The Sun
8 hours ago
- The Sun
Garden pro's £3.99 fast-growing flower from Lidl blooms all summer & brings ‘romance' to your outside space
THINK of lush blooms swaying gently, winding soft stone footpaths inviting you to who knows where and the rustling sound of grasses nodding along in the breeze. Butterflies zig zag from scented clematis and roses to foxgloves and jasmine climbing round your door - as water softly gurgles from a fountain. 3 3 3 Sound good? Then you'll probably be a fan of romantic gardens. They've been around for about 300 years - initially designed as a reaction to the strict formal, geometrical designs that went before them. But what's great - and why they're emerging as a serious trend this year - is that they're easy to create in your outside space, look stunning - and promote positive mental health. Garden designer Nilufer Danis is building a romantic garden called 'The Three Graces of Galicia' at RHS Hampton flower show - which starts on Tuesday - and is a big advocate for creating beautiful, serene spaces that evoke a sense of calm and wellbeing but are also designed with the environment in mind. She told Sun Gardening how to create your own. 'Forget about the more contemporary geometric shapes - and think more organic - like winding paths, with shaded covers like a pavilion, pergola, or lots of trellis", she said. 'You're aiming for lots of climbers - like roses, star of jasmine, lavenders and perennials like salvia - and you want scented flowers rather than evergreens and green foliage plants. 'And water fountains - with their nice trickle of water - are not only lovely, but birds and insects like them. 'Pastel colours are really important - they give a dreamy feel - and it's not very clean and neat - it should be more overgrown' Alan Titchmarsh's top 7 plants that 'transform ugly fences with gorgeous flowers & fragrance' & they grow for years From Tuesday, Lidl will be selling an English Lavender collection of three pots, for £3.99. While Crocus has got pots of Salvia 'Victoria Blue' for £3.50 - reduced from £6.99. English Lavender (Lavandula angustifolia) generally blooms from mid-summer to late summer. French Lavender (Lavandula stoechas) can bloom in flushes from late spring to late summer, especially if pruned after each flush. Nilufer's Romantic Garden at Hampton celebrates the power of literature, identity, and resilience through the legacy of three iconic 19th-century Spanish women — Rosalía de Castro, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Concepción Arenal. She added ''I wanted to create a space that celebrates strength, resilience, and the transformative power of ideas. This garden is a tribute to Galicia's rich literary and natural heritage — and an invitation for reflection on identity, justice, and the role of women in shaping the world." Her plant list includes - Camellia japonica - chosen for it's glossy leaves and large colourful blooms are common in Galcian gardens - Hydrangea macrophylla 'Endless Summer' thrives in Galicia's cool, moist climate - Rosa 'The Ancient Mariner' and Rose 'Empress Josephine' - to add fragrance, timeless beauty and a touch of history - Polystichum setiferum - is low maintenance and supports biodiversity - Tall topiary trees (Carpinus betulus) Also in Veronica's column this week News, top tips and a competition to win a Blackstone Griddle outdoor oven NEWS! Families can discover a show themed around 'wonder' at RHS Hampton Court Palace Garden Festival - taking place next week. Alongside show gardens, pavilions of roses and thousands of plants there's an exciting schedule of children's activities, workshops and lively music. Visitors will be joined by legendary children's icons, the Wombles - with Womble sculptures and a Womble-themed trail around the gardens, plus costumed characters making an appearance across the Go Wild Family Area hosts an array of family activities to encourage playfulness and stimulates a curiosity for gardening. Exhibits include the Schools Bug Barrels the Skinny Jean Gardener mini festival where Lee Connelly will be hosting interactive workshops and Kingston Forest School will provide hands-on nature-based activities. Children up to the age of 16 go free, students pay a discounted rate of £10.85 and adult full day tickets are £38.85. For tickets visit NEWS! A baobab tree in the Rainforest Biome at the Eden Project, Cornwall is flowering in what is believed to be a first for the UK. The Adansonia digitata is native to Africa and is known as the 'Tree of Life' - because it can live for over 3000 years - and for its ability to support both humans and wildlife, providing everything from food and shelter to clothing and medicine. It can grow up to 25m in height and equally as wide in circumference, with spindly, root-like branches protruding from the rotund trunk, coining another nickname – the 'Upside-Down Tree'. WIN! One lucky Sun Gardening reader can win a Blackstone 36inch gas burner griddle - worth £639. To enter visit or write to Sun Griddle competition, PO Box 3190, Colchester, Essex, CO2 8GP. Include your name, age, email or phone. UK residents 18+ only. Entries close 11.59pm. July 12, 2025. T&C s apply. JOB OF THE WEEK! Pots and hanging baskets will be struggling in this heat - water them daily. Leave your lawn cuttings to mulch the grass - locking in lawn moisture - keep greenhouses ventilated. For more tips and gardening content follow me @biros_and_bloom
