The AgriStress Helpline, a crisis line dedicated to serving agricultural and forestry communities, is up and running in Oregon.

The AgriStress Helpline, a crisis line dedicated to serving agricultural and forestry communities, is up and running in Oregon.

The number is 833-897-2474.

The number can be accessed via either voice or text and is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Calls to the helpline are answered within 30 second by people who understand something about the stresses that workers in natural-resource fields can face. It offers confidential and fast assistance to people who have long been in the habit of internalizing those stresses.

“Everybody knows somebody who has committed suicide,” said Rep. Bobby Levy of Echo, “a farmer or rancher (who) couldn’t talk about the stress” to anybody.

Levy was among the sponsors of Senate Bill 955, which allocated $300,000 to help establish an endowment for the Oregon State University Extension Service to operate the helpline in Oregon. The bill passed the Legislature in June and was signed by Gov. Tina Kotek in July in a ceremony in Prairie City. Levy and Wallowa County Commissioner Todd Nash were among those attending the bill-signing ceremony.

Just like Levy, Nash said the issue was personal.

“It has a profound effect on me,” said Nash, who also serves as the president of the Oregon Cattleman’s Association and who worked with Oregon State University’s Allison Myers to get the effort launched. “I’ve been asked to speak at funerals that were suicide-related.”

He called Senate Bill 955 “emotionally, the most challenging piece of legislation I’ve worked on, no doubt.”

Myers, associate dean for Extension and engagement at OSU’s College of Health, said the effort now shifts to getting the word out about the AgriStress Helpline.

“People can’t call it if they don’t know it exists,” she said. Plans call for creating a social-media kit for partners and ordering promotional materials, “making sure our Extension offices have print materials about the line, those kinds of things.”

It makes sense, she said, to take advantage of Extension’s longstanding relationships in rural Oregon counties to spread the news about the helpline.

For his part, Nash has visions of refrigerator magnets and dashboard stickers flooding rural Oregon, all prominently featuring the AgriStress Helpline number. And Levy likes the idea of billboards, all emblazoned with the phone number.

The Helpline costs about $70,000 annually to run in Oregon, and Senate Bill 955 allocated $300,000 to establish the endowment to fund it. Myers and others estimate that an endowment of about $2 million would be sufficient to operate the helpline in perpetuity. Fundraising efforts to that end have been launched, and are meeting with some early success, Nash said.

But both Nash and Levy said they wouldn’t be averse to approaching the Legislature and ask it to allocate whatever additional money is needed to hit the $2 million mark.

Right now, though, the focus is on spreading the word, Myers said.

“It is going to take the proverbial village,” she said. “So if there’s a call to action in here, it’s ‘Don’t be a stranger, please.’ We want folks to share the word about the helpline.”

The AgriStress Helpline can be accessed via voice or text at 833-897-2474.

The line is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It can be accessed in up to 160 languages with the help of interpreters; the text line services English, Spanish and Vietnamese.

Calls are answered within 30 seconds. All callers are screened for suicidality. Intervention occurs for people at imminent risk. Others are offered relevant resources, tailored to the agricultural community and by state. All callers are offered a 24-hour follow-up call.

Calls are answered by credentialed suicide/crisis specialists who receive training in agriculture mental health and factors affecting mental health.

Oregon is the seventh state to join the AgriStress Helpline.