Mothers, wives and sisters have overwhelmed a suicide prevention service with stories of loss and grief after it featured on ABC Landline.

Are You Bogged Mate? is targeted at rural men, a group nearly twice as likely to die by suicide as their urban counterparts.

The founder, plant scientist Mary O’Brien, said women left behind after a son, brother, or husband took their own lives, also needed support but often slipped through the cracks.

Ms O’Brien said country women had contacted her to share their stories and thank her for encouraging rural men to ask for help when they were mentally ‘bogged’.

“Many had lost sons and several had lost a father and a brother, or a brother and a husband,” Ms O’Brien said.

“It’s an epidemic out there, an epidemic.”

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Ms O’Brien said she was working on a program to help women battling the high rates of suicide and depression among rural men.

She started Are You Bogged Mate? after a spate of suicides in her home town of Dalby in Queensland.

Her appeal is that she uses ‘farm speak’.

“The ‘shit-ometer’ really struck a chord with rural blokes and I’m so glad speaking to them in their language worked,” Ms O’Brien said.

Her straight-talking approach to mental health hits home with pragmatic rural blokes.

“One said both his elderly parents cried, another said he was teary watching it with his ‘badly bogged’ son, who was now open to getting help.”

Ms O’Brien heard from outback paramedics, rural fire services, Vietnam veterans, bushfire affected communities, Indigenous leaders, and mining companies wanting her to bring what she calls her simple ‘shed talk’ to their region.

One of the services recommended by Are You Bogged Mate? is the Virtual Psychologist, which specialises in text/SMS consultations.

It had its first call five minutes after the Landline story aired, and had to bring on extra staff to deal with the influx of new clients from Australia and as far afield as the UK.

Head psychologist Dervla Loughnane said the youngest was 14, the oldest in his 80s, and more than a third were between 30 and 44 years of age.

“They had issues with stress, depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and relationship issues and 69 per cent said they would not have sought phone or face to face counselling,” she said.

“We’re now sending follow up texts to those who reached out after the program, to see how they’re travelling.”

While rates of suicide and depression are staggeringly high in the bush, there’s growing momentum for using farms to help treat mental health challenges.

Landline also featured a story on plans for a ‘care farm’ in Australia, where patients check-in to a farm instead of a medical clinic for treatment.

The model is popular abroad, with 1,100 care farms in the Netherlands, 675 in Italy and 230 in the UK.

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Mental health nurse, Liz Everard, was inundated with offers after the program aired, from those willing to volunteer to farmers wanting to establish a program on their properties.

“I knew a lot of people would resonate with this but I was surprised by the enormity of the response,” Liz Everard said, after nearly half a million people viewed the story on social media.

People shared their own stories of using farm work, animals and nature to recover.

But many lamented they wished their loved ones had had access to care farms when they were battling mental health challenges.

Liz Everard welcomes other people’s desire to start their own care farms.

Watch this story on ABC TV’s Landline at 12:30pm on Sunday, or on iview.