Farmers in Depression. A conversation about farmers' mental health with Tomáš Uhnák and Apolena Rychlíková

Language accessibility: Czech

Free entrance

The conversation is part of the event Uprooting Ill Health I. The event is organized by the Biennale Matter of Art in collaboration with the Institute of Anxiety.

“I'm in the worst psychological state I have ever been in.” This conversation between filmmaker and journalist Apolena Rychlíková and artist and researcher Tomáš Uhnák will focus on the mental health of farmers on the peripheries of Europe, who are exposed to great risk as they are subject to stress, economic instability, and the effects of climate change.

While the deteriorating mental health of farmers in the West is at the center of political attention, farmers in Eastern and Southern Europe are suffering on the sidelines. This is happening despite the fact that these farmers are set to lose much more due to the climate crisis. They are more exposed to extreme weather events like droughts, floods, and wildfires, while poverty and a lack of preparation in terms of mental health and climate change infrastructure puts them at even greater risk. Discouragement, anxiety, loneliness, family breakdown, insomnia, and even diagnosed depression are the results of growing uncertainty and declining production. The climate crisis, arriving in their lives in the form of heat stress, drought, floods, hurricanes, hailstorms, and unmitigated disease and pests, is also exacerbating existing economic uncertainty. However, our farmers find little support and often do not even know where to look for it.

It is little known or discussed in societal debates that farmers – especially small-scale farmers – are one of the professions exposed to great psychological stress, often having to cope with anxiety, burnout, and depression. Market pressures, speculation and low feed-in tariffs, debt, sales insecurity, loneliness, gender inequalities, and climate change – all this and much more crushes those on whose stability we depend for the survival of societies and ecosystems all around the world.

Apolena Rychlíková is a Czech documentary filmmaker and journalist. She has been working on social issues, inequality, poverty and social exclusion for a long time. She is the author of several films and cooperates with Czech Television and Czech Radio.

Her feature debut Limits of work (2017) won the Czech joy award at IDFF Jihlava 2017, the Audience Award and the Czech Film Critics Award and was screened at a number of international festivals.She is the winner of the 2017 Journalist Award for Best Commentary, the winner of the Journalist Quail Award for Young Journalists and the first Czech woman to be nominated for a prestigious European journalism award. Her second feature film, Limits of Europe (2024), had its world premiere in two competitions at the prestigious CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen.

Tomáš Uhnák received his master’s degrees from the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and from the food policy program at City, University of London. He is currently a PhD student and research fellow at the Czech University of Life Sciences, researching discursive, ideological, social, and material formations of agro-food paradigms and regimes, alternative food networks, organic agriculture, and theories of transformation of food systems. He is a member of the Association of Local Food Initiatives (AMPI), where his agenda involves community-supported agriculture, food sovereignty, and agroecology. He contributes regularly to academic journals and a number of Czech and international magazines on the topics of the social aspects of agriculture and the political economy of food systems. He is a food policy advisor, an agricultural consultant, and a fruit cultivator with a focus on agroforestry and heirloom fruit varieties. In his art practice he thematizes the theory of metabolic rift and uses food as a political and social tool.

In 2016 Uhnák participated in the art residency and research project Kassandras in Athens, Greece, where he researched the politics of food aid and worked as a volunteer implementing food self-provisioning structures in a refugee camp. While there, he also researched the positionality and resiliency of art collectives in Athens.Also in 2016, he participated in the Delfina Foundation Art Residency (in the Politics of Food program) in London. As part of the program, he organized a psychogeographical tour through London called Politics of Societal Digestion.He also completed a research residency at the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands in 2022.His latest exhibitions include Metabolic Rift (VI PER Gallery, Prague, together with Jirka Skála, 2023), the collective exhibition Thinking through Images (Prague City Gallery, 2023), and Miam! (Garage COOP, Strasbourg, 2023).