Psychological Stress and Health Hazards of Farm Women: The Social Ecology and Inflicting Functions

Abstract

Farm women are suffering from a lot of health related problems along with some socio-economic constraints where farming has been listed as one of the ten most stressful occupations in the world. In turn, they are at risk for the development of stress and other mental health difficulties such as anxiety, depression or even suicide. This is an important co-morbidity of physical problems and if left untreated they may invite other health issues. This will affect the financial aspect also. And as the farm women are home maker along with their farm work, they have to face the challenge both in home and workplace. The problem is mainly due to different issues in the working place like long working hours, financial uncertainty and family disturbances. A study on this topic, was carried out at Boinchigram village under Pandua Block in Hooghly district as they are also suffering the same, with objectives to generate classified information on occupational hazards of farm women, to estimate the level of psychological stress in terms of a score of socio-economic and ecological factors, to estimate the level of interactive relation between level of psychological stress and score of socio-economic and ecological factors and to generate micro level policy implication based on the empirical study In order to collect the reliable experimental data, the selected parameters were taken, like: Age, number of children, B.M.I., Main health problems, Psycho-social hazards, family income per annum, family expenditure per annum, working hours per day, daily calorie consumption etc. Majority of the population under study are poor, undernourished farm women. It has seen that, when the number of children in a family increased, it is difficult to their mother to attain the farm work and caring of their children at the same time because they spent maximum hour in the field. So, both the children and mother suffer from psycho-social hazards. And the calorie consumption level per day has some indirect effect because calorie is the last word to speak out. But income plays the most important role in stabilizing their mental condition. So, a better understanding of potential women-work environment interactions related to psycho-social hazards and mental health of the farm women is seriously needed to save the future workforce of agriculture.