Bobby Stevenson took the difficult decision to sell his family dairy farm after facing a mental health crisis.

Bobby, from Lendalfoot in South Ayrshire, tells Sarah Stephen about his journey back from both a stroke and mental ill health - and how talking and sharing openly about his issues has helped his recovery.

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Welcome to Blether Together from Farm Strong Scotland.

I'm Sarah Stephen.

Thanks for being with us.

Our chat this time is with Bobby Stevenson.

He's from South Ayrshire, a former dairy farmer who sold the farm after years battling with mental ill health.

Passionate about rugby, he felt free and part of a team on the pitch.

However, he says off the pitch there was nobody to blow the whistle when the stress and anxiety became too much.

Nobody blew the whistle when I was farming.

I just kept going.

Bobby is keen to share his story.

He says the only way to break the stigma around mental health is to share and if he helps one person doing so, then it is worth it.

The only way we're going to reduce the stigma that's connected to mental health is talk about it.

Let's get into it now.

Introducing Bobby Stevenson.

Bobby, hello and welcome to Blether Together.

Thank you very much for joining us.

No, it's my pleasure.

Tell me where you're coming from today.

I'm in a wee village called Stonycut just south of Stanra in Bonny Galloway.

We are on the east side of the peninsula heading down towards the Mulligalaway.

I been a nurserman all my life.

Born and bred in Ballymtry, moved down here.

This will be our fifth summer.

Approaching.

Coming down here, it's a nice setting.

I mean I can see land, I can see the sea and got two or three neighbors but there are no immediate neighbors which I not really used to having lived on a farm in the middle of 600 acres for 40 odd years or 50 odd years.

So no, it's quite nice.

I like to start the podcast with a round of rapid fire questions.

Are you up for that today?

Well, we can try, yes.

Okay, well, let's just go for it.

Okay, so first answer that comes to mind out of 10, how are you feeling today?

I'm going to say nine.

A nine.

That's good.

That's up there.

Who do you text the most?

I'm not really a texty person but I would reply to some of my texts from my customers.

Not all my customers to be perfectly honest.

Okay, noted.

Do you like clothes shopping?

No, definitely not.

What object do you misplace or lose the most?

Oh, everything.

Absolutely everything.

I have no idea where anything is.

No idea where anything is.

Yeah, I'm a bit like that too.

What biscuit do you most identify with?

Club A club biscuit.

Yep.

That's definitely showing your age.

It used to annoy my father.

Used to take the chocolate biscuit out and put it back in the plate.

And he would go and pick it up, much to his annoyance, to discover that it was empty.

What are you, an orange club or a mint club?

The ones the compt.

Okay, Interesting, Interesting.

What is one missed opportunity that you wish you could have had?

A second chance at playing rugby.

Dog or cat person?

Dog.

Window or aisle seat?

Window.

What's your pet peeve?

Litter.

Oh, yeah, likewise.

What's something you notice about someone when you first meet them?

Well, I would.

I would say I was.

I was pretty much guilty of judging a book by its cover.

So appearance.

And for somebody that doesn't do a lot of clothes shopping, I would say dress sense.

They turned up in the boiler suit.

That would be a plus for a start.

Boiler suit is a great thing to have.

Listen, you said it right at the beginning.

You were feeling a 9 out of 10 today.

Can you expand on that?

Well, I got up this morning, I had cleared my diary for this morning, took the dogs down onto the beach at Sanhed and had an hour on the beach in San Head and yeah, what a morning for that.

Came back up, did a wee bit, rubbed his phone me and said, this went wrong.

That's went wrong.

Is that your routine every morning?

No, no, it's not my routine every morning.

Some hours I'd be up at the crack of dawning away, but this morning took me on.

My wife's actually, she's suffering for shingles at the moment.

So she would take the dogs down and that would two collie dogs.

So I know that that's quite 9 out of 10, I would say in the sun shining, I'm sitting here in.

A tea shop and having a blither.

Yes, well, I'm sorry that your wife's feeling poorly.

Shingles is unpleasant.

Yes.

Seriously?

Yeah, seriously unpleasant.

Well, I hope she gets better soon.

So, Bobbi, sorry to get a bit serious for, you know, this time in the morning, but I know that you've been down a long road with your mental health.

It'd be great to talk a bit about that.

Cause that's what the podcast is all about.

And people you know are very good come onto the podcast and share their stories.

Would you mind sharing your story a little bit?

Not at all.

You can go anywhere you want.

Have you always been comfortable sharing?

Not initially.

Well, when Clare Taylor wrote the article in the Scottish Farmer, I thought the wound had healed over, but that picked up the scab and.

Yeah, but the only way we're going to reduce the stigma that's connected to mental health is talk about it and when I was at my worst, it was somebody that actually went through it.

A local farmer.

Well, it wasn't the local local, but it wasn't far away and he certainly helped me get through it and show you.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel.

It's interesting how people reacted when that hut finished up in hospital.

Some people never altered.

They came and they visited and other people, they.

They weren't comfortable dealing with it.

And particularly the salesman.

But there wasn't many salesmen left at that time.

But some of them were a real rock to lean on and other ones, well, that's when they show how to cope the whole thing themselves.

When do you think things first started to feel wrong for you?

I had a stroke when I was 49 and that accelerated the aging process.

We're all getting older by the time.

And when you're 49, you can do what you did when you were 19.

You maybe could do what you did when you were 29, but you certainly could do what you did when you were 39 or you thought you could.

The stroke, which I didn't see coming at all.

I was fairly fit.

Well, I thought was fairly fit.

And a Sunday afternoon finished the jobs, bang.

But I described that as somebody just had picked you up and wrung you like a towel, sucked you back down and added 10 years onto you just in the whole one go.

And that's when I felt I lost the ability, I did lose the ability to do the level of work with the business that I once was.

I struggled to deal with the bigger picture like harvest time or lamb and time or something like that.

And it all started to.

Didn't happen overnight.

Didn't happen overnight.

But I would say the stroke definitely was the catalyst for things taking a downward spiral for myself.

I mean, it sounds like there was an awful lot going on in your life at that time.

How stressed were you?

I didn't really think there was.

I mean, I didn't really enjoy school, but came into the business pretty much when I left the school.

We'd acquired small bits of ground and built the thing up and we were farming 600 acres and three 200 acre blocks, which.

That brought its own stress as well because it was so much easier if everything was all in one place.

But that's what it was.

Yeah.

We borrowed a bit of money to buy the last block of land, but milk prices were Good.

And then milk prices crashed, which created a bit of pressure, went from just over 30 pounds to 16, 17 pounds and well, to deal with that.

But I certainly didn't, I didn't see the stroke coming at all.

And they said to me the most likely cause of the stroke was high blood pressure.

I don't know what the signs of high blood pressure are.

And I would urge people, if you get the opportunity, if you're at the market or at a show or something like that and somebody's standing there, take your blood pressure.

And potentially if I'd done that, it would have been a different course.

So it would have been try to rectify that either with medication or what.

And.

But that definitely, definitely was the catalyst for things going wrong for me, I think.

I mean, your dad starting the business, building up the business and then you coming on board and obviously there's probably a bit of pressure to succeed and make it a success.

You're expanding it, you're spreading yourself quite thin.

How focused were you on success or totally?

For me, average wasn't good enough and the area where I farmed a thought average was a disrespect to the generations that went before it.

And it was by no means a perfectionist, by no means a perfectionist.

But Macaus, I would say were high input, high output some people, some days you got high input, low output.

But no, it was.

I wanted a spring crop of barley to be the best it could and yeah, I wanted my reseeds to be a success and yeah, no, I think that, I think I achieved that, yes.

What was your outlet at that time?

Who did you share your, you know, your troubles and your woes with?

I wouldn't say I share my troubles, but early in my life I played a lot of rugby.

The local rugby club, that was my go to place, rugby.

And we were fairly successful the number of years with a good young team and we progressed up through the leagues as a club.

And when I stopped playing rugby, I just flung myself into farming.

I didn't go and watch because I said if I've given up the time to watch, I would finally give up the time to play.

And my parents were getting older and my father never, not once did he see me play rugby.

Of all the years I played rugby at school and played rugby for the local club, he said he'd just stay at home and do the work.

And at that point it was my mum and dad, myself and maybe one other chap or a part time chap.

And so I decided to stay at home.

But the comparison I draw to my farming career and my rugby career, somebody blew the whistle and said, right, that's the game over.

You stop.

When you were training, suddenly came nine o' clock and you stopped.

Nobody blew the whistle when they were swarming, I just kept, I just kept going.

And in the summertime, you know, right after your tea and you wonder if I was back in at 9 o' clock or even after, if you were busy, but nobody actually told me, right, you stop.

There was always something to be done.

I mean, it sounds that you, you took on a lot of responsibility yourself.

I mean, how much responsibility did you shoulder yourself?

I mean, is it.

This is, this is all on me.

I've got to do this, I've got to.

I'm the one that's going to make that a success.

Did you feel it was all your fault when things weren't working well?

Yes.

When things started going wrong?

Yes.

And I described it to the counselors.

I was in a hole down in a deep hole and my job, there was dirt in the floor.

My job was to shovel that up and throw it out over the top of the hole and you just get it shoveled up and another bit fell in.

You were just constantly.

And my mental health breakdown didn't happen overnight.

It was a long period of time, from five years probably, that would be building up over that time.

And when I finished up being admitted in the hospital, it would be a total bombshell to my next door neighbors.

They wouldn't have had a clue.

They would go, wow, didn't see that coming.

Didn't see that coming.

And you know, just that admission, that moment, you know, what can you recall about that?

Well, I was functioning till one morning I couldn't get out of my bed, couldn't go and milk the cows.

And prior to that, it was my wife who would say, look, there's something wrong with, you need to go to the doctor.

And I was fortunate that the doctor who had his father knew me as a child was born there.

And you arrive, or can I arrive in the doctor's surgery?

Something's not right here.

And started getting a wee bit of counseling and it's pressures that was under and dealing with that.

And did I buy into that Totally.

Probably didn't buy into totally.

She would give you jobs to do, but they knew what they were doing.

They could, they, I mean, I've left that room in tears, just sitting, talking.

They know how to pull things out of you.

And whoa, you were exhausted when you committed.

Exhausted.

And that Would that went on six months that summer and then turn of the year well January time December January time it's not a great time it's dark, you're getting it in the morning the dark and the whole thing snowballed into state that the whole thing came to a head and pray that you could call it a breakdown and I just sat and cried and I grim.

You spoke earlier about how I suppose when it happened there were people you could count on but there was obviously also people that you couldn't count on.

How did you rely on the people around you?

Well there was a couple of next door neighbors that really and I mean they really stepped up to the plate we're working through a TB test at the time and they just, they just took over and through thankfully we get through the TB test time and just coincidentally when we're actually selling the farm and selling the stock that was as due another TB test so that was the period of time 4 years it's not a criticism and anybody I'm not saying they stepped away from it but there was even within my family how different generations deal with it.

I'm quite open about what went through and I've got an anti.

You're better now, you're better now and it's in my mum's side My mum said the retouche and members of her family I've got a cousin that's it's touch rate we said before it's not a broken leg where you can see that you've no idea what was going on in any of his head Tell.

Me about the decision to sell the.

Farm the advice I've been getting from the medical profession they said it's not mental, it's the wrong way, it's environmental and unless you change your environment we're only going to get you better and then you're going to tickle along and then the next thing boom.

Your coping strategies are not working and it worked.

Two boys, all mine, I've got two boys they were in their early 20s at that time not showing any interest in farming.

No, it wasn't an easy decision no it wasn't an easy decision because my parents had worked hard.

My father was a non he came from a non farming background and bit into the bug and built up the business and my mother she was very much involved in that as well but I would say to these counsellors I said look you have to farm as if you're going to live forever and she said well your grandchildren are not born yet they might never be born.

And I'm saying, well, I said, I said I might do Stevenson someday.

Running about, God, I wish I had half what my grandpa had or something like that.

And they said, well, you've got to make decisions for your life for the better.

So.

And at the end it was an easy process, just let an estate agent get on me.

But I could see really how a fourth, a thunder fourth, a fifth generation farmer that's in a farm and struggling and looking at that scenario, how that would weigh extremely heavily on them, thinking that he was the one that wasn't making this work.

And that will be great, you know,.

Handing over the keys, signing on the dotted line.

How did that feel?

No great.

When you buy land, there's a feeling that you get, you walk over the field and that is your field.

And I've had that opportunity two or three times.

But there's also the opposite feeling when you sell land that you can't walk over it and say that's yours, but your bank balance reflects the fact you can't walk over it.

So that.

Every cloud, etc, and I mean, I suppose having your parents maybe not, you know, just in spirit over you, you know.

Yeah, well, my mom's, my mom's still alive.

My dad passed away a number of years ago, but my mom still alive, she's 90 this year and she still lives above the farm.

She drives down past it every day and I don't know how she does it actually, to be perfectly honest.

But have you been back?

Can you bear to?

Yes, I've been back.

Well, I've been back and it was my home for 50 odd years and I was born there, brought up there and brought my kids up there.

Yes, it's.

But hey, life moves on.

There's nothing more constant than change.

My father always used to say.

Absolutely.

And you've spoken a bit about counselling and speaking to someone and is that something is you still attend?

I don't.

But I was determined to get myself off the medication that I was on, got myself under the doctor's guidance and I'm now back onto a minimum level of certain medication.

Your mental health, you could go from being a nine like what I've said today, everything's going fine and something goes wrong and you're at a 2, just in the click of a finger, suddenly the whole world's fallen in you.

And what I'm on now is just to try and maybe not get you as far up as a nine too often, but certainly don't get you down to a two as often and it definitely helps.

And you know, thinking about your family dynamic, you said you've got two boys and your wife who's been an amazing support.

Has that changed?

No.

Well, I would say when we get married in 92 for the vows that it wasn't for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, for often in sickness and in health.

She absolutely meant that because she was a rock through the holidays and it certainly wasn't easy for her.

She was a primary school teacher.

She's retired now and when I was admitted to hospital and deemed Duncan well, I certainly would have been if I'd been a doctor or anything like that, I'd have been signed off my work a long time ago.

The education authority, which my wife got signed off from Christmas to Easter and a replacement was found.

Whereas when you're farming there's no that fallback on it.

When you're no.

Well, if you're understaffed before you're no.

Well, you're not going to alter that.

Just especially with a dairy farm.

People ask me, do I miss milking the cows?

I totally miss the first half of the morning milking when you new calf cows given a bit of milk, want to get into the parlor, didn't give you any hassle saying half.

You get all the kick of the stragglers and you're collecting them into the collecting area, into the parlor.

I thoroughly enjoyed what was doing and getting to the kind of animal that I liked.

It was one of the few things that my father and I agreed on was it was a type of cow that we wanted to work with.

But my wife, my wife's a farmer's daughter but she was never really hands on at all.

Became more hands on when once I was no well, she would encourage me to try and get and feed the calves in the morning and literally I could get halfway across the close and say look, I says no, I need you back in the house.

It was just totally overwhelming.

And she went and fed the calves and the same at night and afternoon.

I would spend two, three years that I wouldn't have been out the house.

Seriously, I wasn't out the house.

Couldn't get out of the house.

And I'm thinking about your boys as well, Bobby, just in terms of what happened to you, the impact on them and I suppose that everybody becoming more comfortable with, you know, sharing and, and being more open.

I think it's.

When the article was in the Scottish farm there was a lot of positive comments, but particularly from my boys peer their age group.

They were far more open about the whole thing than any of my age group would ever be and hopefully that's the case going across the farming sector.

And my son did.

He didn't.

None of them were in the young farmers or any of that.

They helped in the summer holidays and whatnot to get the pocket money but you could see from an early age that there were maybe no one to do.

But my view was they were better to get away and do something and come back to it.

And we had the conversation.

I can remember my wife speaking to Craig who was out in Australia at the time after he finished university and do you think you have any notion that you'll ever come back farming?

And he said he was lying in some beach in Sydney a beer in his hand and he's looking round about, I'll not be back to farm, Mum.

That was it.

I think it's a hard question, isn't it, for a 17, 18, 19 year old to answer.

I met a couple of farmers recently who had been asked the same question, actually lived in some same part of the world as you and they were 18, you know, they wanted to have fun, see the world, travel, but they regret saying no now, you know, 10, 10, 15 years later.

But you know, yeah, it's a, it's a time of life to let them go, isn't it, and have some fun and you know, they might come back to it but everything happens for a reason and it sounds like they were incredibly supportive of you.

And do you think what, what you've been through has made you more in tune with others?

I mean can you spot when you know people, other people are potentially not in a great place?

No, because I don't.

People don't show up very greatly and I would go through some of the things that I.

Well, I was asked this already for one another and what was the signs that you identified looking back wasn't right.

And I said one of the first things I did when I jumped in a tractor, somebody had left the radio on, you turned the key and the radio come on.

The first before you started the tractor, you turned the radio off and just wanted peace and quiet.

And my wife will say that even at night I'll come in and she love Alexa playing Greatest Text radio.

And I'm saying Alexa, shut that up please.

And it's quite hard to keep that how you're feeling outside without bringing that into the house.

And she said, well, what the hell have I done wrong?

The inability to make a decision.

You doubted yourself all the time when you were putting stock to grass, a lot of your stock, three different blocks.

Most of the stock was at the home farm for the winter and they were floated to various places.

Unless you wrote it down.

The minute you counted them into the trailer, you wrote that down because you would forget.

Was it 15?

No, no, I think it was 14.

And then just things like that.

Wee things like that.

I'm just wondering, what do you do every day?

What.

What do you do to have fun?

How do you chill out?

What do you do, like even physically to keep yourself, you know, healthy?

Well, I'm all.

I'm a bit three stone heavier than I used to.

Well, definitely three stone heavier than when I stopped farming.

So probably don't keep myself all that healthy.

But I've now taken on a separate cycling challenge in September this year and I've joined a gym.

But I've just realized joining a gym doesn't actually do anything for you.

You've got to go and attend the thing and whatnot.

I say probably if the doctor analysed my alcohol intake, would they be too happy?

And I keep saying, well, my nights are all backdated because I was milking cows for 30 years.

I'm back on the committee.

I've been away from the rugby club for 30 years.

I'm back on the committee, the local rugby club, trying to steer it hopefully and keep it going in the right direction.

That sounds like a real passion of yours.

So it sounds that that's a positive to get back in to that sport in some way.

Rugby is a great sport to get involved in.

You make for lifelong friends from rugby and you maybe do from other sports, but it's also a team game.

You've got to work together, you've got to be looking for the same goals out of the whole thing and.

And I was fortunate enough at the time when I played at that level.

That was the mindset of the people it played along those.

And if you had to have a sort of philosophy that you applied every day, is there one thing that you do every day just to check in with yourself and say, bobby, do you know what?

It's okay.

Well, I would say actually since I went back to the doctor, I mean, I've been back on medication for two years.

Once I've been back onto that, I would say no, I'm in a fairly level playing.

But the way I did when I was struggling, I would box it off into me bits.

Don't take in the bigger picture, just box it off where you get up and you do this, you put it in small bits and you do that.

Then you go into the next box, then you go into the next box and it's dinner time.

And then you get through it that way.

Sleep is very important when you're not getting enough sleep due to hours that you're working and then the stress kicks in and you would go to your bed and you would light it, just in a flash, but you'd wake up 1 o', clock, 2 o', clock, wide awake, sweating, I need to get back to sleep.

I need to get back to sleep.

Three hours and I'll be up.

And then it just seemed like you would fall asleep and then the next thing the alarm would go off and that was you back at the thing again.

No, I mean.

I mean, the life I have at the moment is totally, totally different from where I was.

Minimum decisions to make.

When you're farming, you're making decisions all the time and things go wrong.

Things didn't work out.

And that's more mud that's fallen into the hole that you're shoveling out of.

And I know Farm Strong has tried to stop people falling through the net, but once I fell through the net, I struggled in the mental health system because they didn't know how to deal with somebody that came for agriculture.

I think there has to be more support, mostly more effort put in because the model that they use doesn't fit a farmer, maybe fits a lawyer or a school teacher or something.

It doesn't fit agriculture.

And ask me, what shift do you work?

I say, I work for 5 to 9.

Well, that's okay to explain that.

It's 5am to 9pm and they go, how long have you been doing that?

I should have done that all my days.

Well, I said, as long as you're prepared to pay more for water in the supermarket than yam for milk, that is the road I'm getting pushed down.

Everybody wants more for less in the industry all the time.

More for less.

It wasn't actually till it was a farmer's daughter, a Northern Ireland farmer's daughter, when I was in hospital and she could grasp the whole picture of what was involved in a family farm and.

And it was a breath of fresh air.

It really was breath of fresh air.

It's been lovely to chat to you and I think you have been incredibly open and candid today, which I think will be a massive help to others out there.

And obviously you mentioned Farm Strong and if people do have worries about their health, mental health, and obviously they can check out Farmstrong Scotland's online how's it going tool@farmstrongscotland.org it is a brilliant easy access tool for people and you know we would encourage people to go to.

That if me speaking about it helps one person.

On you go.

As I said at the beginning, we're only going to break down the stigma of mental health and it is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be ashamed of.

And there is for some people that are going through it or somebody's wife, partner, you're ticking some of the boxes that gentleman's mentioned there and seek help, speak to people.

Bobby, thank you very much.

It's been so interesting talking to you and thank you for sharing.

I hope your day continues to be a 9 out of 10, but if it is a 4 out of 10 or a 2 out of 10, that's okay too.

Yes.

And we've got the addition of a granddaughter in the family now and that definitely six month old that lifts the spirits no end.

Oh that sounds like it'll keep you fit.

Yes, I'm sure you'll be a great grandpa.

Bobby, thank you very much for your time.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

Huge thanks to Bobby Stevenson.

Fantastic of him to be so open sharing his story to try to help others.

One thing you can do if you have any worries about your mental health is to check out Farmstrong Scotland's online how's it going tool@farmstrongscotland.org it is a brilliant easy access way to think about your mental well being and what you might be able to do to find help if you need it.

See you next time.

Sam.