Plant the seeds for a care farm to help people with mental health needs

By Rose Hoban

The drive to retreat into nature to improve and maintain mental health has a long history from the days of Hippocrates, who is often credited with nature as the physician of disease, to Henry David Thoreau, who traveled to the forest to live deeply and aspire. the whole marrow of life.

More recently, doctors in Japan have been writing prescriptions for their patients to walk in the woods.

All too often, however, people with mental health problems end up spending the day in rooms lit by artificial light, with little access to fresh air, sunlight, natural vegetation or opportunities for exercise.

That reality started happening to Nora Dennis.

Dennis, 44, spent years training to become a psychiatrist, climbing the clinical and corporate ladders. In her late 30s, she was an adjunct professor at Dukes Medical School, seeing a lot of patients. She also spent several years as the director of behavioral health for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina.

I had really been chasing achievement in a more conventional way to get more roles in bigger and bigger organizations and I felt that this was the way I was going to change people’s lives and change the world and create more opportunities for people with mental illness get the care and support they need, he said.

But he was becoming frustrated with institutional medicine and the way patients were confined to hospital psychiatric units.

People were desperate to get out, he said. Who among us would choose to spend eight days without seeing the sun in our face, except through a window and fluorescent lights?

One night in 2022, a dream pushed her in a different direction. I woke up and told my husband I know what I want to do with my life, Dennis recalled, adding that he then mulled over the idea for about six months.

Then in 2023, with the help of their parents, the two retired doctors, Dennis, bought nine acres in rural Orange County between Chapel Hill and Hillsborough and began building a place where people with health problems serious mental can spend the day outdoors, help take care of vegetables and greens. flowers in gardens and care for animals while receiving intensive psychiatric treatment.

Dennis filed paperwork with the state Department of Health and Human Services last month for a license to operate Jubilee Healing Farm. Once all paperwork is approved by the county and state, you can open. Dennis said he hopes it could be in a few months.

Think big, start small

Jubilee will become one of 15 care farms in North Carolina, facilities that use nature and agricultural practices as a key part of helping restore the mental health of patients with everything from anxiety and depression to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. People receive therapy in the property’s facilities while having the opportunity to get their hands dirty in the fields or feed the rabbits and chickens.

For now, Dennis thinks small.

She said they were thinking about six to eight clients with two health care providers, a peer support specialist and a licensed clinical social worker. I would be here to provide medication management and then obviously leadership and supervision.

In this context, we offer clinical services that are combined with the outside.

Its vision is to serve people recently discharged from a psychiatric hospital who are returning to the community, particularly those with public insurance. To serve these people, he hopes to offer partial hospitalization, a regimen designed to avoid the need for a full-fledged hospital stay by having people in treatment for several hours a day. There would be intensive outpatient programs, where patients could spend half the day in treatment. In addition to the more traditional socializing sessions, time will be devoted to activities such as growing blueberries and blackberries, hoeing a row of vegetables or caring for long-haired Angora rabbits.

“I have this whole thing about rabbits because they’re these calm, sweet creatures and they have to be brushed every day or they get messed up,” Dennis said, citing research that shows petting and petting animals can be calming for people ( and rabbits). ) and even lower blood pressure.

Most of us have had the experience of being in nature and in connection with the non-human world, and having somewhat transcendent experiences of feeling deeply at peace, feeling less anxiety, feeling a sense of connection and calm, and feel less anxiety about our purpose and our dignity, Dennis said.

More formal therapy services will take place within a newly renovated barn, an indoor facility with a kitchen, a circle of couches and overstuffed chairs for group therapy sessions, and private rooms for individual therapy. The building is bathed in natural light.

Included in the barn is an open space for exercise, yoga or dance instruction, activities that Dennis worries are too often accessible only to the well-to-do.

I want to support everyone’s right to move, everyone’s right to have fresh, healthy food, everyone’s right to sunlight, Dennis said. Trying to make sure they are available, especially when mental illness is part of the story, is really important.

Every day there is movement. It’s not just in your mind, is it? It is embodied, he added. It is embodied not only in your own body, but also in the body of the earth and plants and animals.

be patient

Right now, Jubilee Healing Farm looks like a work in progress. A deer fence surrounds nearly two acres of newly planted fields and a hoop house full of seedlings. There is a hutch with three fuzzy angora rabbits. Two large fields have young plants, blueberry and blackberry bushes and rows of small green plants. In a corner of the fields there are some scattered fruit trees.

Dennis said his grand plan could take a decade or more to come to fruition, but there will be steps along the way that will see it through. Those plants will produce blueberries in two years, he said, waving at the rows of tall plants.

Local farmer Howard Allen, a member of the Jubilee Healing Farm board, helped Dennis with a plan for the fields: fruit, an herb circle, orchards and a vegetable garden. Allen also offers some therapeutic opportunities at his facility, Faithfull Farms, where he hosts clients and staff at a counseling center in Durham.

My advice was to do the things that were going to be long-term up front, that didn’t need any maintenance or major upkeep after they were established, Allen said. Then things like the vegetable garden, those things will be for the end because they need almost daily management and require a lot more attention.

Allen, who left a job as a chef and adjunct culinary arts professor to start a farm near Carrboro about seven years ago, provided Dennis with a dose of reality: It’s best to recognize that not everything is going to happen overnight. day.

Before I started doing this, and even at the beginning of doing it, I was in a big hurry, Dennis said. If something was delayed by a month or a week, I would freak out.

Dennis says he’s getting used to having a more flexible timeline. This has been therapeutic for her as she works to develop a natural, unhurried place where people with mental health issues can be nurtured while nurturing the flora and fauna around them.

I think there’s something really relaxing about that, Dennis said.

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