Taihape farmer Dan Mickleson says a Facebook post he wrote about dealing with depression and encouraging others to talk about it has reached nearly half a million people.
"It's been absolutely mind-blowing. It's just taken off beyond what I could have imagined," he told the Chronicle.
This week the 35-year-old posted on the NZ Farming Facebook page about two times he'd coped with depression in recent years and about how the issue needed to be discussed openly. He had hoped it might reach a few hundred people but instead it has been shared more than 600 times and seen by nearly 500,000 people.
Mr Mickleson's friends had been encouraging him to go public for a while but it was comedian Jono Pryor talking openly about the death of his friend Tim Hutchens and encouraging Kiwis to ask for help if they were dealing with mental health struggles which gave him the confidence to finally do it.
"It just put it out in front of the public and opened up a can of worms," Mr Mickleson said.
Since the post he had been contacted by several people who said his post had helped them.
