It was one of those things that happen when two strangers discover a piece of common ground and strike up a conversation.

Dr. Jeffrey Leichner, a psychologist and a founding member of the Minnesota Consortium for Advanced Rural Psychology Training, recently attended a National Association of Rural Mental Health conference in New Mexico and by chance met a farmer from Iowa who had experienced the growing mental health gap in rural America firsthand.

“NARMH is an interesting group … they tend to attract to their annual conference an interesting continuim of providers, researchers and consumers,” Leichner said.

While sitting in a large ballroom in Albuquerque, Leichner met one such consumer — an elderly Iowa farmer — who attended the conference for very personal reasons.

“We were both from the same geographic area so we began to talk. ‘What brings you to Albuquerque?’ and other such questions,” Leichner said. “[The Iowa man] said that he had been sent to the conference by his church because he had been involved in a type of peer counseling program. … He said that he was sent because a neighboring farmer had called him one day several months ago in distress, and that he didn’t know what to do.”

The caller was dealing with some sort of financial crisis, according to Leichner, and the Iowa man, unsure of exactly what he should do to provide support, told the distraught neighbor to contact the local pastor.

“That’s a very typical rural thing — to tell those in distress to contact a local clergyman,” Leichter said. “I asked the man if his community had any psychologists or other professionals and he responded that he didn’t really know.”

A few minutes later, as those at the table ate their breakfast eggs, the Iowa man leaned over to Leichter and very quietly explained that the distraught neighbor ended up committing suicide.

“I was really struck — I mean, I know about suicides because I work in this field,” he said. “But it was very much brought home to me that this man had been affected by the suicide of a neighbor. It all just became very, very real. It was taken out of the literature and into reality.

“This man — just a regular guy and not a psychologist or a mental health professional — was touched by suicide. This whole idea of getting needed services out to people in rural areas was really driven home for me.”

Of the 3,075 counties in the U.S., 55 percent have no practicing psychologist, psychiatrist or social worker, according to the Bureau of Primary Health Care. In Minnesota, the state’s Department of Health estimates that there are 11.6 fatal suicides per 100,000 population in rural areas versus 8.1 for the same population figure in urban areas.