Emma Picton-Jones was 27 when she woke one day to find her husband missing.

She would soon find he had taken his own life, leaving his wife a long note which included the words 'You couldn’t help me, but you could help someone else'.

Now raising two children on her own and faced with all-consuming grief, Emma still understood she did have to do something, for those struggling as Dan did.

This is her story so far, as reported by Wales Online.

Emma was 22 years old when she met the man she would go on to marry.

It was at a rugby tournament, and she and Dan swapped numbers that night.

But Dan, an agricultural contractor, kept her waiting three weeks to meet up again because it was silage season, a story she now laughs about.

Their relationship grew and their first child, Mali, was born. They went on to get married and had a second child, Trystan.

But in July 2016, on what seemed to Emma to be a normal night, Dan left their home in Clarbeston Road in Pembrokeshire and went back to his childhood home.

It's where he took his own life.

As Emma woke up the next morning, she realised her husband wasn’t in bed next to her and within seconds knew that something was wrong.

Her gut told her where he’d be and she drove to the house.

Daniel Picton-Jones with daughter Mali

As she turned the corner she saw police cars outside the house and says she immediately knew what had happened.

The builder who had been working on the vacant property had found Dan’s body and called police.

Emma says in that 30 seconds her life changed completely as she went from a married mum-of-two to a widow aged just 27.

Their relationship had been full of ups and downs, like they all are, but Dan’s ups and downs were more dramatic.

He’d been struggling with his mental health, especially anxiety and depression, for a long time and had first approached a doctor for help at 21 - long before he met Emma.

“Looking back and reflecting on it all, it was always an issue," Emma says.

“When Mali was small I noticed there were issues with his mental health. Anything that was a day-to-day issue would really hit him hard.

“He would worry about everything. He’d worry about the kids, the family, about work. It wouldn’t be anything serious and he would be OK for weeks and then he would go downhill. It was always peaks and troughs.

“He wasn’t the best at socialising and would keep himself to himself. Sometimes, everything would seem really difficult to him.

Emma with children Mali and Tristan

“He couldn’t see anything positive in his life apart from Mali. Then, without having an understanding of mental health, I didn’t put a lot to it.

“I just thought he was struggling and I tried to compensate by doing everything I possibly could to make it better. I’d try not to put pressure on him and was sorting everything out.

“I was constantly overcompensating to try to avoid anything being any worse than it was - that went on for a long time."

She said their life continued with its ups and downs and "highs and lows", and that would simply be the way their relationship went.

"I didn’t think it would be any different but I never thought it would go down the path it did," she says.

“When you care about someone you want the best for them. I cared about him and that was him, I just lived with that.”

When they met, Daniel was employed as an agricultural contractor but decided to become self-employed.

He bought a digger and began finding clients, something Emma says came with its own problems.

"He would get anxious that he was charging too much money and if he was charging too much people wouldn’t want to hire him. It would start off as a worry or a thought but then spiral out of control.

“He always did a good job of hiding that initially. When he was working for someone else, he didn’t have the pressure of being self employed. When he was working for himself, the pressures were a little bit different.

Emma Picton-Jones with daughter Mali

“He had a bad back and he worried if his back was bad, he wouldn’t be able to work and we wouldn’t have any money coming in but money wasn’t any an issue for us because I’m lucky as a teacher we had an income coming in.

“But for Dan it didn’t matter if it was an issue or not because he’d worry about it anyway.

“He wasn’t sleeping, that was a big concern at one point. He would stay up until 2, 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning just sitting and watching TV and his mind would be going ten to the dozen.

“I would try kind of overcompensate and take on all the responsibility to not make anything difficult.

“Even at that point, I wasn’t really au fait with mental health issues and how to deal with them - since then I’ve educated myself quite extensively.”

The couple's second child, Trystan, was born in 2015 and then things became more noticeable for Emma.

“At that point I was probably aware that things weren’t quite normal. I just wanted to make my family work and everything to be OK with my family and I just kind of trudged on with everything.

“I think in response to the way he was I distanced myself from a lot of people. I was working full-time and trying to look after two kids but also a really unwell husband and I just distanced myself.

Emma raising awareness of the DPJ foundation

“He didn’t like socialising so we didn’t really go anywhere. He was happy at home with the kids. I would protect the family, and protect him."

Dan would be happy going for a walk but he was more comfortable at home.

“The children were still young and that’s the dad they knew. I took them to places and it was a case of 'daddy is working' or he had stuff to do at home," says Emma.

“It wasn’t strange for me. I grew up, as do many other farming sons or daughters, you do stuff with mum and grandparents because dad is working. It was never something that was odd to me.”

At one point, Dan told Emma he would like help so she called a counsellor on his behalf.

“I remember trying to persuade him to get support and he wouldn’t go to the doctor. I tried to get him to see a counsellor but he suffered with such social anxiety he wouldn’t ring or answer the phone to me so he wouldn’t ring a counsellor.

“I remember saying he needed to see someone, he was talking to me, his mum and his grandmother but he needed someone to talk to.”

With Dan’s permission she called a counsellor.

“The counsellor told me he had to call her himself. I told her I promised I’d get him to the appointment and I had the money to pay but I knew he would never make that phone call, that would have been the first step but she wouldn’t see him. That really got to me,” she says.

“That’s not uncommon in the farming community. The wives are often the ones who take control of situations like that. Quite often it’s the wife who needs to make the first step for the husband to get support.”

The DPJ Foundation has been set up to get people talking about their mental health

In the first week of July 2016 Dan took a downward spiral and what happened next happened quickly, Emma says.

“He had gone out with us on a tractor run, something he never did, and he never went out drinking but he'd stayed at the pub afterwards for a few drinks.

“I thought maybe this is good, he’s going out and socialising and doing it himself. Maybe this is the start now but it didn’t go that way at all.

“He knew that drink didn’t affect him very well anyway so there was a come down from that in the next week.

“He went into a deep trough that I’d never seen before. He got himself into a real state. He wasn’t sleeping and he was on edge all the time."

Emma went to work on Monday when Dan called her and said he couldn’t cope. When she got home the couple spoke and she thought he'd settled.

Then came the night that Dan left the house for the last time.

“I think he had already decided before he left the house because he was very calm leaving the house and he was very subdued, something he hadn’t been in the previous few days. He went to his childhood home, where he grew up, and at some point between 2.30am and 7.30am took his own life.

“I woke up that morning and he wasn’t there and I was a bit surprised. It was his day to look after the children and he would never miss that. I knew something was wrong because he wasn’t there and then I remember ringing round and trying to be really calm saying he’s not come home but inside I was really panicking.


“I thought I have to go and find him and I thought he would have gone to his childhood home because that’s the place he always felt home and the place he was most comfortable.

“I had an idea he’d be there so I drove there but as soon as I came round the corner I saw the police. I just knew. I think in my gut I had known something was wrong anyway because he wasn’t answering his phone.

“It was out of character and I kept trying to convince myself it was going to be fine.

“You work yourself up and you panic. I saw the police and it’s amazing how your life can just alter in the space of 30 seconds, suddenly, from being a married mother with two kids to being a widow at 27.

“Everything happened so quickly. The police came that afternoon and he’d left a really long note. The police brought it down and I remember sitting at the kitchen table and I remember the police woman sitting opposite me. I remember having it in front of me and just sobbing and sobbing.

“I think I’ve only read it twice since then but there was a part of it that stuck with me. He said 'You couldn’t help me, but you could help someone else'. I thought to myself then: 'I can do that'.

“I remember saying for hours ‘This isn’t right’. It wasn’t right I had to tell Mali her dad was in heaven and I had to ring people to say what had happened.”

She woke the next morning in a slight blur, but quickly remembered what had happened.

“I just screamed and screamed and screamed and remember saying I have to do something about this.


“The next morning, there were people around and I said I had to do something.

“There are so many other people who are going through what he went through. No matter how indifferent he felt, or how unique he was, he was really similar to a huge amount of people."

Mental health issues affect around one in four people, according to the mental health charity Mind.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of any other family having to have the conversation that I had with Mali about him having died. It was absolutely horrendous and it still makes me sick to my stomach thinking about this. I can’t have another mother having to tell another child that.”

Mali was then aged four.

“Nobody tells you how to describe death to your children. I just knew I had to tell her, she can’t not know about it because there were so many people around. I said that daddy wasn’t very well, he was very poorly and he’d gone to heaven and now he lives there.”

At the time, Trystan was 16 months old.

“Mali has had a conversation with him but he doesn’t really understand. He’s never had a dad - a dad for him is something that everyone else has. He doesn’t really know.

“That innocence of it all is quite nice. The last thing I want is for want them to have this ongoing effect of this for the rest of their lives but what they can have is this positive thing from it because of the foundation.


“They know we’re doing it for daddy.”

When the funeral director asked what charity the collection would be for, she couldn’t think of an appropriate mental health charity helping people in agriculture, where sparsity and rurality can affect levels of health and well-being.

“There were good mental health things happening in Wales and Pembrokeshire but none of them were specific to agriculture.

“I started thinking about Dan as a person and lots of other people in the agricultural sector and the services they could have accessed - but they couldn’t have accessed a lot of what’s going on because of their various different barriers being put up, whether it’s time or services.

“Art or creative therapy is perfect for some people but you won’t get a farmer sat painting a picture to feel better.”

She didn’t want to put money into a national charity when she could see a glaring gap and a “massive issue” in Pembrokeshire.

In the wake of Daniel’s death she found people were so unsure what to say, they avoided her.

“I had to keep life going because with two young children, life doesn’t stop. I remember going to the Pembrokeshire County Show - I’ve been every year since I was a child.

“My dad was walking a few steps behind looking at things and people would say hi to me but then stop him to ask how I was.

“It really frustrated me then because people weren’t prepared to have a conversation with me and that’s why there is a stigma around suicide and mental health.

“People are ashamed. I’m not ashamed. He was really unwell and he felt what he did was best for his family, he honestly thought that.

“It’s ridiculous to think because it wasn’t the best for us at all but he honestly thought that and there’s no shame in thinking that and in what he did.

“If I can deal with that, I want other people to have that same attitude as well.”

Emma and Dan with their children

She named the charity she came to set up the DPJ Foundation and with donations and the funeral collection, it opened its bank account with £8,000.

The charity's aims are to get people involved in agricultural talking about mental health.

Almost immediately, Emma began looking into best practice in terms of mental health care from across the world.

Support groups seemed to be the best option.

“I really liked the idea of having this open conversation around mental health but I think you’d struggle to set up a support group amongst men anyway but amongst farming men it’s 20 times harder.

“They are such private people but they work 24 hours a day, they don’t have a 9 to 5 job or someone in occupational health to say they have a few hours off to go get some help.

“It’s about accessing that support.”

Just three months after Daniel died she ran the charity’s first mental health awareness training day. Emma had driven around and approached anyone with a link to agriculture or farming. She spoke to vets, sales staff, animal feed companies and asked them to attend. At the first session, there were 38 people trained, the following year there were another 30.

She wanted people who were going to farms and seeing farmers and farm staff in a place they are comfortable with. She wanted them to have the skills to spot anything out of place and offer on-the-spot advice.

The first training has been expanded into “Mental Health First Aid” courses offering more comprehensive advice to people working in any area of the agricultural sector about things including depression, anxiety, psychosis and alcohol abuse, which Emma she says are emerging as huge issues across the agricultural sector.

“Agriculture brings huge responsibility. A lot of farmers have gun licences and that sort of thing. No-one with responsibility wants to turn around and say they are struggling and either hearing voices or seeing things.

“There is a stigma to that, especially in the agricultural sector.”

Farming has a disproportionately high suicide rate. Time to Change Wales says at least one farmer with a mental health problem commits suicide each week in the UK.

“If you’re working in an office, you'd have to work out how you would do something. Farmers have gun, rope, access to medicine.

“If you’re on a farm you have all this at your fingertips and unfortunately that’s why suicide is so high”.

She has already seen that by sharing her story, people have approached her or begun talking to her about their own experiences.

“If one person, male or female, says this sounds like my life or my partner and is able to recognise that, then it's been worth it.

“I hid it for so long and and thought that was the best thing to do.”

The charity’s logo was something Daniel had designed for his own company.

It’s an important part of Mali and Trystan seeing something of their dad. Since her husband’s suicide, Emma has had to look after her own mental health.

Doctors told her there were bereavement charities but there was a waiting list of up to nine months.

“My concern was that I was OK then but I may not be in six months and that could have been too late”.

She signed up to nine months of counselling. It has helped her in many ways, including the milestones of birthdays and anniversaries.

Her own positive experience with counselling has led to a further expansion of the charity’s work.

In January The DPJ Foundation launched “Share the Load” - a 24-hour text and phone service. It is run by Samaritans-trained volunteers who will make sure those who want help will be linked up with a counsellor within 24 hours.

Instead of it having to be office-based, something Emma knows people would be reluctant to do, especially in small towns where they would likely see people they know, the trained staff will go wherever needed - the farm, a home, online, anywhere.

Since it launched it has helped the equivalent of one client per week.

“We had no idea what the demand was going to be but there’s nothing else specifically for the agriculture sector in Wales.

“We thought we’d set it up and maybe not have any contacts for a few months, we were wrong.”

She said the contacts have been from men and women, as young as 17 and as old as 80.

The charity has had a lottery grant for Share the Load but the rest is from fundraisers and Emma is always encouraged to be the first involved - on a run, jumping from a plane.

“I have done more in the last few months than I have ever done,” she says.

“It’s just been unreal and there’s been so much support from the local community.”

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These feelings do improve and can be treated.
