Hello and welcome to Women’s Radio Station. I’m Dr Annette Greenwood, life coach and author. And on today’s show, Dr Annette talks, we are delving into the topic of the Samaritans.

The Samaritans are available 24-7, 52 weeks of the year. What do they do? And what makes someone give up their time to support this valuable work? And what does this work actually involve? Today, my guest is John Greenwood. John is a volunteer listener with the Samaritans who gives his time weekly to listen to those in despair.

He’s also part of the training team for new recruits. It’s all surrounded by a mystery for many people who know nothing about what the Samaritans do. So I’ve invited John on as my guest to tell us a little bit more about it and to share his journey and why he became a volunteer.

Welcome, John Greenwood. I have to say before we get going, I do know this person, he is my husband, so I don’t want to sit here and pretend I’ve never seen him or heard of him before. Welcome, John.

Hello, thank you very much indeed. Nice to talk to you on the radio. I’ve never done this before.

This is very unusual. I know, this is a first. So if there’s any blitz in the background or any doors banging, we are doing our best to do this as professionally as possible.

So I want to talk to you, even though I’m your wife, I want to talk to you about somebody who knows nothing about the Samaritans. Now, I know you’ve been volunteering for a number of years and you love what you do. So I’d like to take away the mystery that surrounds about the Samaritans and what they do.

So can you share with our listeners why you became a Samaritan in the first place? What was your reasoning behind it and the journey really leading up to it? Yeah, I think it’s something that I’ve thought of for many years. Many years ago, as you will remember, the first person when I was first promoted within the work I was doing at the time as a manager, the first killed himself because of his personal circumstances. And that was, I think, the start of it really.

And we’re talking probably now, I don’t know how long ago that was, it will be probably 30 years ago. At that time, I thought about it and did nothing about it. One of the things that we say at Samaritans quite often is life happens.

So life happened, our circumstances changed and it sort of was there but got very much put on a back burner. And then sort of five, six years ago, I had an episode where I was quite poorly. And that sort of was the catalyst, I think, that made me want to do something to help.

I do remember that occasion only too well when your work colleague committed suicide. And I know how it affected me personally at the time and how it affected you. It brought up so many difficult emotions that I wasn’t personally able to cope with or deal with.

And I’m sure it had that same effect on you. And I just wonder at that particular time, we’ll go back to the, like you said, the episode that you had a few years ago, at that particular time, what stopped you from taking that step forward? Did you feel that you weren’t ready to be able to handle what you might hear? Was it at the time something about, okay, this is what’s happened to my friend and work colleague. And that it kind of then just got pushed to one side? Or was it something a little bit deeper within you that didn’t allow you to be able to take that step at that time? I don’t think I was ready.

I think if I’d done it at that point, I would never have succeeded. I wasn’t in the right place. I do believe that you have to be in a certain place to be able to do the work.

You’ve got to be at peace with yourself and with your life really. Because if your life’s in turmoil, which at that time, I’m not saying my life was in turmoil, our lives are in turmoil, because there weren’t, but that particular period was very difficult. And a knee-jerk reaction would have been to say, right, well, I’m going to join the Samaritans and do the training and all the rest of it.

But it would have been a knee-jerk reaction. And there was a lot going on, apart from that, in terms of my work, your work, and our lives were evolving. And I think that really, it was the wrong time.

So I’m pleased, in a lot of respects, that I did sort of put it on the bar burner and left it there for as long as it was, because I think I eventually picked exactly the right time. And I’m not saying that your mental health wasn’t in the right place, but you as a person. And I know we both have opposing views about spirituality, but I do think there’s something bigger than us sometimes about whether it be God or the universe or whatever, where you want to describe it, about divine timing, some people call it.

And when the time’s not right, it doesn’t happen. And if you’re not in the right place, similarly to the coaching work I’ve done, as you know, I’ve done a lot of work in prisons and probation services with vulnerable women and with mental health and domestic violence. And I think as a person, you have to go through a certain amount of challenges and difficulty yourself in order for you to be able to empathise in the way that you need to with other people.

I mean, I don’t know if you feel the same way about that. I do. Yes, I think I think you’ve got to, because that is the key thing.

The key thing is being able to empathise, being able to show that empathy and stand next to somebody, regardless of what they’re talking about, regardless of what they’re saying, you have to stand next to them and be able to show the empathy. And sometimes that can be quite difficult. So you do have to be in the correct place to be able to do that.

And there’s something about just that saying, isn’t there about standing behind somebody or standing with them? Sorry, you’re not you’re not distant from them. You are because you have to detach your emotional feelings from them. But it allows you, enables you to stand with that person and walk with them with whatever they’re going through at the time, whatever that might be for them, whether they are thinking of suicide, whether they’ve got mental health problems, whether they’re freezing cold because the you know, thought to put their electric or the gas on because of the the fuel crisis, it doesn’t really matter what the crisis is, you’ve got to be able to walk with them.

And it doesn’t mean that you have experienced everything yourself. But it does mean you have to be able to empathise. Am I am I writing what I’m thinking here about what you would be doing or how you would be dealing with it? Yeah, yeah, you are.

Absolutely. One of the things that and it’s actually funny because it’s disappeared out of the training that we’re doing currently. But when I was training, there was a brilliant graphic that was used to explain this.

And it was a picture of a of a big hole in the ground. And then the bottom of this hole was this caricature of a person shouting up. And the first person that came past looked down the hole and was talking to the person.

But that wasn’t showing empathy. That was showing sort of, I suppose, concern, whatever you want to say. But but it wasn’t it wasn’t empathy.

The second picture was of somebody that went and found a ladder, went down the ladder, stood next to the person in the hole and was with them. And I thought I thought that to me shows what empathy really means, actually being with somebody. Yeah.

And that just that analogy itself, you can stand outside and look in and as anybody listening and see the difference between the two, because if you are in that situation, all you want is somebody to be there with you. And it doesn’t mean that they’ve got to be hugging you or holding your hand. You just want them in that space, don’t you, to share with what’s going on for you.

And that kind of reminds me, if you like, what you were saying earlier about the episode that you had a few years ago, I don’t know how much you as my husband want to share about this. But I can certainly say from my perspective, and perhaps you then would like to sort of jump in with how you feel. But for me, I didn’t need the Samaritans at the time.

I didn’t need that kind of support that some people would do. But to actually see your own husband in a coma, in a potentially life or death situation, that is a really hard thing to deal with. It’s a very difficult thing to deal with.

And from my perspective, looking at you and looking at how you were, I could almost be saying, well, what’s going on? What’s wrong? There’s something wrong here. His life seems to have taken a downward spiral. And he’s now in a position where he could die at any moment.

It was because of the scale of the hospital and lots of other things. And as you know, I’m a big believer in collaboration and support and all the support I could muster up from friends who were saying prayers and putting all that other thing into the mix and my sitting, talking to you and you coming through the other side of that. But I don’t feel at that time, in some ways, you were still quite ready until you’d come through the other side of that and what happened to you.

Because that it did have, despite what you might say, it did have an impact on you as a person. And it was difficult for me to watch. And I had plenty of support in place.

But for some people, they might not have had that. And so the Samaritans would be the very thing that they needed. But if you’re happy to share from your perspective, because that was the catalyst, I do believe, that helped you make that change from maybe wanting to be a Samaritan to actually taking those active steps.

It was. There’s no two ways about it. Yes, I had thought about it for many years.

And the initial thought was when, when Simon took his own life, which was incredibly difficult, incredibly difficult time for me personally, and I know it was for you as well, but for me personally, it was incredibly difficult. And yes, it got put on the bat burner, and I think correctly. But then following that period in hospital, following on from that.

And it’s funny, because it was, I think it was probably the first thing I thought of when I, when I, you know, when I started to get better, as it were, was talking to Samaritans. Not because I wanted to talk to them, because as a, you know, somebody talking to them, but to talk to them about joining them. And I think it was one of the first thoughts I had, and I acted on that.

And that’s now five years ago. And I’ve been doing it ever since. And over that five year period, I can see the difference in you from when you first began.

I feel sure, it’s the same as most of us on a different path, because we’re all on different paths that way. I have my own practices and things, but it brings up all sorts of, it stirs the mud up, as somebody said to me a few weeks ago, when you begin something like this journey, everything feels calm. And then you start to do the training.

And it’s like somebody’s taking a stick, they’ve gone into a muddy wash, and they’ve just swished it up. And it brings up so many things, it makes you question things, it makes you question your own life, it makes you question the people you’re with and what you’re doing. And in some ways, that’s a really healthy thing to do.

And it helps you to work through it. It’s kind of a process that you have to go through. And I can see over this last five years, with all the training and all the hours and hours of dedicated service, because it is a service, no matter how you look at it, it’s a service to other people, to other humans, all that work that you’ve done and put in, and I’m sure the impact it has on you as well, it’s changed you.

You’ve done a full circle really. And I think one of the things I’d like to ask, and I know you can’t share any information about the people you speak to, and that’s exactly how it should be. But again, I think people think there’s a bit of a misnomer, isn’t there, about what kind of calls you get? Because it’s not all suicide, is it? It’s not all mental health, it’s not all people wanting to be quite blunt about it, jump in front of trains.

So what kind of calls do you get? What kind of differences do you get on different nights? It’s interesting. First of all, to pick up on your point about the sharing. I am not allowed to share, even with you as you well know, anything that I hear at Samaritans.

The only people that I’m allowed to share that with are other Samaritans within the support network that there is there, which is immense. But you cannot share any details of any calls that you’ve had with anybody, including your nearest and dearest, which is hard, which is very difficult. But the sort of calls you get.

You get things like debt problems and things? You get the full range, you get the full range, you know, you name it, we get a call about it. It doesn’t matter what you want to name. You could, you know, from somebody’s telly doesn’t work to, I’m going to commit suicide tonight.

And that you can get that full range of calls in one duty. So that’s somebody saying that the telly doesn’t work. So I’m sat here and I bet there’s many other people sat thinking, what on earth would you ring the Samaritans for? Because your telly doesn’t work.

You press a button surely to goodness, you press the on off button, you’d mess about with your handset. I mean, why would somebody ring for something as trivial as that? Now I’m not saying it’s trivial, but you can see how people’s perspectives might be on that. But is it as trivial as it sounds? No, it’s not.

Definitely not. If it’s not that trivial, there are a lot of people in this world who rely on things, they rely on things such as the television or the radio as their support network, because they don’t have people, they don’t have relatives, friends, they live alone. Their support network is the television or the radio.

And if all of a sudden that doesn’t work, that support network’s gone. And that’s massive. So for somebody who might be isolated, whether it be it could be somebody younger, it could be somebody older, I mean, the age is irrelevant really, isn’t it? They’re sat there and that is their lifeline is what you’re saying.

And they’re not able to have that lifeline. And so for them, that is a massive part. It’s like taking away all our friends, all our relatives, taking all those people away.

So we’ve got nobody. It’s like doing that, essentially. So you’re left absolutely alone with nothing.

And I can sense that compassion in your voice when you’re talking about that and the emotion behind that and about how important you know it is for somebody else who is on their own who might not be able to watch Coronation Street and it might be a program you or I might absolutely hate. But for them, it’s their world. That’s it.

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why I think it’s so important to have this conversation about what kind of calls you get at the Samaritanism, what kind of people you’re getting ringing up.

So the percentage of people who ring up who are saying they are suicidal or once commit suicide or will, are you allowed to share with us what that is? Or is that just taking it past a boundary we’re not allowed to go to? In terms of percentages, I wouldn’t actually like to say, to be honest, because it’s very, very difficult to say what I can say is I can say that if we look at, say, 2020, so a couple of years or three years ago, there was nearly 4,000 people took their own lives in England and Wales in that year. The interesting thing, the thing that I find interesting, anyway, one of the things about it I find interesting, and I know it’s probably quite sad that I do, but the male suicide rate is consistently three times that of the female suicide rate. Hello, I’m still here.

Yes, sorry, it just went a little bit live radio thing, it just went a little bit funny there. So the male suicide rate is higher than female. The male suicide rate is around three times the female suicide rate.

And that is consistent and has been consistent for many, many years. And so this is women’s radio station, but there’s also a men’s radio station as well. So for men who might be listening to this or women who’ve got partners who might be struggling with depression or feeling suicidal, it’s interesting that you say that, because I mean, I was aware of it, but I didn’t know the proportion of it, if you like.

And is there any evidence or factual information that says why the suicide rate is higher in men than it is in women? I don’t think there’s anything that’s sort of specific. I think there’s a lot of stiff upper lip type stuff around that. Yes, suicide rates are falling across the board, which is really good news.

So that’s good news, and we want it to fall further. And the Samaritans, their target, their ethos is to reduce the suicide rate across the board. But still, the male suicide rate is significantly higher.

So again, in 2020, there was 15 deaths per 100,000 males and only five per 100,000 females. And in 2020, we were talking pandemic, weren’t we at that point? Yes, yes, we were. Yes, yes.

And actually, in 2020, funnily enough, we as Samaritans expected that the rates would be increased, but the weren’t, which was quite significant. You know, overall, we expected that we would see an increase. But the weren’t simply, we thought the pandemic would increase the incidence, but it didn’t do that.

It didn’t remain that way. And as I say, they have done for many, many years. And you talk about stiff upper lip and things in men, which is what you’re talking about, isn’t it? It’s the same with young boys and things at school and adolescence.

And why do you think that there’s this stiff upper lip thing with men still, and that they are afraid to talk about mental health or how they feel? And others, they, you can go from one extreme to the other, you can go from the stiff upper lip, where you just, nothing bothers me scenario. And I’ve got broad shoulders today, where you’re weeping and wailing all the time. So there’s got to be that balance between the two, hasn’t there? So from your experience, what do you think makes men have the stiff upper lip? Is it because they feel that they would be weak? Is it because they’ve got to show that they’re all manly and male, and that they can’t show they’ve got feelings, or they’re not allowed to say, and they’ve just got to walk around with this constant burden of how they feel without being able to share it with anybody? I mean, I might be way off being here.

I only know from my own experience with mental health, but I’m interested to know from a male perspective. I think there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of feelings of responsibility. And I think it’s still, you know, where we should be is we should be in an era where we share responsibility between men and women.

You know, everybody works these days that, you know, that the women don’t say, oh, we’ll look after the kids as they did years ago, while the man went out to work and was responsible for the breadwinner, as they were called. Nowadays, everybody works and there’s an equality there, or there should be. And I know the, you know, don’t get me on the female inequality stuff because it makes me so angry.

But there is still that thing about men have that feeling they are responsible. And I get that quite a lot, that feeling of responsibility, not able to, you know, support and support the families and, you know, provide for the families. And it’s despair.

In a lot of cases, it’s despair. Do you think that is about education? Because historically, the old fashioned attitude was, as you’re saying now, I know it still happens, you know, even in this modern age, but it’s not really modern age, is it? As you just said earlier, because we’ve still got those inequalities and we won’t go on that subject tonight, John, we’ll save that one for another occasion. But is there, because we both have strong feelings about that, I know, but is there something around education where education at home, education at school, at university, that makes it okay for men to share and to be in an equal relationship? Now, you know, relationships are another thing altogether.

If I use our relationship as an example, it’s not always been equal. There’s been swings and roundabouts and pendulum swings and all that kind of thing. But I like to think now there’s much more of a balance.

And one of us does more things than others does. I’m better at maybe picking the phone up and speaking to people, you’re much more laid back about it, whereas I’m really proactive. And so you might have a strength in something else.

It doesn’t really matter what your strengths are, as long as you share them and combine them together, does it? It doesn’t know, but you know, I know who’s the boss. You heard it here on live radio. My husband admitting, who’s the boss? I’ll never live that down.

In terms of about the pandemic and everything, that’s interesting. But I do know, I do know there is misuse of service calls, a bit like 999, isn’t there? People ringing up for really silly things that they shouldn’t be ringing 999 for. Is that the same with the Samaritans? Do you have the same kind of issues? We do, we do indeed, yes.

Just going back to what you said there, first of all, about the pandemic, suicide rates in 2020 were 10% less than in 2019. Why is that? Overall. Well, why is that? And that’s interesting in itself because, you know, we were in the middle of the pandemic when you would have expected.

And yes, at that time, I did a lot of duties because a lot of the people that volunteer for Samaritans are retired and they were having to shield and all that stuff. So as one of the more able-bodied amongst us, I was doing, I was doing three and four duties a week one time and you will remember that. And I got pulled up by the police virtually every time I went.

I had to have a letter in the car that told them where I was going. So, you know, virtually every call you got was about COVID. So it’s interesting that the actual suicide rates were 10% less when you would have fully expected it to rise.

I do know the rates of domestic violence, they rose, they rose massively. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, certainly there was a lot, a lot, and a massive increase in calls on that particular subject, certainly.

And many organisations that I know of, because domestic violence is a close thing to my heart, were opening their doors to female and male employees, I have to say, so they could actually go into the office and make it safe for them. That’s right. I mean, yeah, certainly they were bending over backwards.

There were a lot of employers, which I thought was really good, to be fair, because they did show recognition of the need to provide that safe space for people. And I thought that was really good. So that helped a lot, I think.

But yeah, it was just interesting. And I’m sorry, I went back to something and you asked the question. I’ve forgotten what the question was now.

Was it about, it was a misuse of calls, wasn’t it? Misuse of service, yes, that was it, yes. Misuse of service is an interesting one, because Samaritans is a national organisation across the UK, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. We have 20,000-ish volunteers currently who listen.

And we operate, as you said at the beginning in your intro, we operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And we will accept calls from anybody. But we do get a lot of misuse of service.

We get approximately five between five and six million contacts a year as an organisation. That’s a massive amount of calls. It is, it is.

That’s what we receive. And around five percent of those are misuse of service in one form or another. So that’s in the hundreds of thousands then? Oh yes, yes.

I’m not Carol Vorderman, but I think I can work that one out quite quickly. That is a lot of misuse calls where somebody who really needs the service could be speaking to you or somebody else, one of your other colleagues. So when you say misuse of service, are you allowed to share what a misuse of service is? Or is that again, it’s a boundary we can’t go into? No, I mean misuse of service could be a number of things.

You get people who just want to chat, which is technically a misuse of service because we’re not there for a chat. If you want to chat, there are people you can ring to chat. We’re there for people who have got genuine reason for calling, who want to talk about something that’s going on in their lives.

It might be a relationship problem. It could be anything. They’re the ones that we’re there for, the people that really need our assistance.

So somebody who’s just rung up for a chat about the weather really isn’t what we’re there for. But then you get much less appropriate ones as well. You know, we get a number of sex calls.

Sex calls? Yes, yes. As a man, I don’t get many. I have had them.

But as a lot of our women volunteers get a significant amount of them. How are you dealing with a sex call? I mean, it’s not something you expect, is it, when you are offering a service of a helpline for people who are deeply affected by different things in their life and you’re getting people ringing up with sex calls. It’s all part of the training.

The training is intense. The training is exceptional. I mean, over the years I’ve done training, as you have, I’ve done training in many, many things over the years.

I have never experienced training as intense as the Samaritan’s training. It’s by necessity that it has to be that intense. And now that I’m on the training team, I actually assist with that training, which I thoroughly enjoy doing.

And as part of that training, we go through all that, you know, no holds barred, sort of, you know, using the language that we listen to, which obviously isn’t appropriate for the radio. But, you know, we hear all sorts. And we are trained how to deal with these situations.

There are sometimes difficult ones where you run show her. She’s, you always can be quite amusing because you run show her. And you can be caught out at times as well, which is even, well, can be quite annoying, really, because you’ve been caught out and you think, oh, dear me, I should have known, I should have known better.

But the thing I will say about that is, I personally have had inappropriate sex calls. And they just wash over me. Because it said me nothing to me, it doesn’t, you know, what, you know, to me, it’s just, you’re just wasting my time.

You’re wasting the time of my time because I could be talking to somebody who really needs to talk. But I was actually assisting with mentoring, which is all part of the training. And I had a lady volunteer.

She’s fairly recently, actually, it’s something he’s within the last 12 months anyway. And she took a sex call and I was horrified by what this person was saying to this woman. It absolutely horrified me.

Because as a man, you don’t get that. You don’t sort of, it’s different somehow. Yes, it washes over me and it doesn’t bother me.

But I really felt awful listening to this call with this lady because it was so bad, so inappropriate. And, you know, I do feel for our female volunteers, of which there are many who have to listen to that sort of thing. They don’t have to listen to it because, you know, we are told and shown how to end the conversation quickly.

And we always do it. We always do it in an appropriate manner. But we have to be very careful because sometimes it can be a front.

And you’ve just got to figure a way around it, if you know what I mean. And part of me, as a woman, wants to say what gives some bloke, some guy the right to ring up and think he can just abuse somebody who’s there to help people. Then there’s the other side of it, as you all say.

And from when I worked in prison where, you know, I’ve worked with sex offenders and there is that vulnerability there. Now that’s difficult to say, isn’t it? And it’s difficult for people to hear maybe about a sex offender having vulnerabilities, but the some that are and the some that are accused of sex offenses that really shouldn’t be classed as sex offenses. But again, that’s not something I’m going to go into, but nonetheless, it opens up this conversation about what is, you know, what is a misuse of service.

It’s not somebody ringing up to say, can you tell me how to switch my light on or, you know, I can’t undo my I can’t undo my handbag. It’s this is a misuse of service, isn’t it? A sex call, surely. Oh, that is that is without doubt.

Yeah, yeah. And you get all sorts of other ones as well. You know, can you tell me the next train to late, please? You know, you get all sorts of random, random things that are misuse of service.

Usually, usually in these these particular cases, you can end the call relatively quickly, but you just have to be so careful, because sometimes and and it often is a front that people are putting on. You get a lot of aggression. Sometimes you will get people who just phone up and just hurl abuse at you.

For nothing with not even a conversation involved. Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, they’re just just hurl abuse. Right from the minute you say, some items can help you.

It’s just abuse. And it is, you know, they call you every name that you can think of. And some things that you’ve never ever thought of.

And they call you all of those. And one of two things happens in those situations. Excuse me.

Either to carry on. And you have to end the call. Or they sort of run out of puffy, if you like, and suddenly start talking more rationally.

Do you need to take a drink? No, I’m fine. Thank you. Okay.

So, again, so that sounds like they’re trying to shock. They’re trying to get a reaction. Because if somebody runs out of puff, isn’t it, they’ve, they’ve actually gone, all right, I’m getting this is getting me nowhere at all.

So your training and support, which we’ve touched on, is enough to be able to get you through that situation. Yeah, and not not respond and reacting in the way that they would wish you to, which is really what they’re after. And the difficult thing, if you’re a woman, listening to somebody, perhaps effing and blinding that you are hurling some kind of a sexual abuse is not to want to defend yourself.

So you’ve got to learn not to not to do that, because it’s not personal, is it? At the end of the day, it’s simply, you know, these people don’t know you from Adam, you could be, you know, John Smith from Vancouver, or wherever, they’ve got no idea who you are. And but it’s just, you’re somebody they want to vent to, aren’t you? That’s right. That’s right.

And, you know, one of the key things and the key things we always say to people when the when the training is that remember that it’s not personal. Because they don’t know you, they don’t know where you are in the country, you could be anywhere. They don’t know your name.

They don’t know where you are in the country. Many people, particularly ladies, and I understand fully why don’t use their own name, use a different name when they’re on the phone. Because it helps to separate if you get a misuse of service call, it helps to separate that from being because quite often you’ll get people that will phone up and say, what’s your name? I’m quite easy.

I’d say my name is John. You know, it doesn’t bother me. Whereas a lot of my female colleagues will give a false name.

Understandable. And, you know, there was one there was one the first lady I I mentored. She was she was sort of flying on her own doing doing it doing it really well.

Because when you’re mentoring, you listen in to the calls. And you have to once you have a conversation about how the call went and that sort of thing. But so this lady was was doing really well.

And she was getting towards the end of the mentoring. And she’d always use her own name when people had asked her a name. And this particular occasion, I didn’t have the headset on because she was doing so well.

I think I was going to get myself a drink or something. And I just heard her use a different name. And it was so unusual that I rushed back to the desk to put the headset on because I thought she obviously suspects something here.

And she was right. She was right. And you learn these things you do learn to sort of you recognize stuff.

Yes, you get fooled at times, but you do recognize things. But it’s a it’s a really, you know, I love doing it. And I know it’s a bit perverse to say that, but I do love doing it.

I don’t think it’s perverse. It’s if it’s a passion and something that really is close to your heart. It isn’t.

It’s the same when I was working with offending and women offenders and male offenders and people might think, gosh, why on earth do you want to do that? But you can you can see something in people. You can see something in them where there’s a light in there and it just needs bringing out. And it’s not for everybody to do this kind of work.

I know that. But I absolutely loved it. And I’m still in touch with the women’s group that are set up, as you know, I still have contact with a lot of the women there.

And they’ll still come to me for little snippets of advice and things and support. And it’s nice to know that you’ve had that impact. It’s nice to know you’ve made a difference in somebody else’s life.

There’s got so many things I wanted to cover, but I can see we’ve got 10 minutes left. Would you believe? So I wanted to ask about you’ve got all that training and support and you’ve got all these people ringing up. Some of them are suicidal.

Some will commit suicide. You’ve got the misuse of service. How do you cope? Does it affect you personally? I mean, I would say from my own experience, of course it affected me.

And I found myself feeling very emotional when women had been sat there with cuts on their arms for varying reasons because of being in domestic violence situations. And I felt that. But my training has helped me to deal with that and cope with it.

But emotionally, it’s often very challenging and difficult. So for you, how do you cope with it? And does it affect you personally? Um, there are calls you remember. But the calls I remember are, funnily enough, the positive ones.

Obviously, I can’t go into detail, but there are calls that I do remember quite vividly. Um, but one of the great things we have in Samaritans is the support network. We have the training.

The training is, as I’ve already said, is very intense. And sometimes, and we all do it, everybody that goes through the training has a blip at some point and they think I can’t do this. And I was the same.

I don’t think I can do this. But you’ve got to push through that. You get to the end of the training and you think, I have no idea what I’m going to say when I get on those phones, because I don’t know what I can say anymore.

Because what the training does is, you know, if you’re talking to somebody outside the supermarket, you bump into somebody and they say, oh, well, I’ve got this and that and the other. You’ll say, well, if I was you, I would do so and so. That’s advice.

We don’t give advice. We also don’t hide advice. So we don’t say, have you been to the doctor? Because that’s hiding advice.

So we listen, we support, we encourage people to come up with their own solutions. Which is empowering, isn’t it? It is, but it’s very difficult to start with because it’s completely alien to how you normally run your life. Because we all do it.

You know, we’ve all stood talking to somebody, well, if I was you, I would do so and so. And we’ve all done that. And it’s really difficult because that’s, you know, all the way through the training, that’s sort of stripped away from you.

But then you learn that new method of how to listen, empathize and to ask the questions that get the people thinking for themselves. It’s not always possible because people sometimes are in very desperate situations and they’re beyond that. But the majority of the time, you can get people to think and you can get them to start to look at what they can do to improve and how they can do what little baby steps they can take to actually help themselves.

Sometimes the baby steps that lead to the massive breakthroughs, but you don’t always realize it at the time. That’s right. One of the things I, and we all say the same thing, all of us, that we find difficult is that we never know the outcome.

We never ever know an outcome. I could have been on the phone for two hours to somebody, three hours to somebody, end the call. And I never know how that call, what happens after that call.

I’ll never know. And that must be really, at least I get to find out with the coaching work, I can see progression in people and change, but you haven’t got that unless somebody rings up and fades back. You don’t get that feed, but you never get that feedback because it’s all anonymous.

So you don’t get that feedback. All the calls are anonymous. You never get the feedback.

One of my colleagues has a thing where she says, how would you want that to have ended? What would you want to happen after that call? And you’ll say, well, I would like this, this, this to have happened. And she says, well, there you go. That’s what happened.

And that it sort of, it’s, you know, it sort of satisfies yourself. But what you can do, because we do have this massive support network, each time we’re on duty, we have a duty leader who is at home and we can call them any time at all. And we always call at the end of the duty to feed back and go through all the calls we’ve had, talk through them, make sure we’re all right with them.

We have volunteer support network where we’ve got people who will, I could phone them, I could pick the phone up now and speak to somebody about a call I’ve had three weeks ago, if I wanted to, if it was bothering me, and they would sit and listen to me and talk to me and talk it through it. We have that support network. But the other thing that we have is a shredder.

The support network sounds interesting. So does the shredder. So what does the shredder do? Well, you take notes when you’re, when you’re, when you’re on a call, because you need to know, you know, somebody rings up and they’ve got eight kids and they give you eight kids names.

So you jot them all down. Because at some point through that conversation, they will test you that you’ve listened and you will have to know the names of all those eight kids. So you jot these things down because you, you, you know, you’re going to be, you know, you’re going to need it.

And that’s why you make the notes. I make the notes for that reason. And also because by the time I get to the end of the duty, I’ll have forgotten what the first call was about, because I’m like that.

But also just by the door, as you’re walking out, there is a shredder. And we shred all our notes in there every time we finish a duty. There’s no notes left anywhere.

Everything is shredded. And that’s a great release. It’s funny.

That is the, that is, it’s like saying, there you go. That’s finished. Letting go.

Yes. And that shredder is a wonderful machine. And it broke a while ago.

And it was horrible because I had to bring them home and put them on the fire. But I had to have them with me to bring home. And it really wasn’t good.

That’s the bonus about having a, having a cold fire. I’m just, we’re just about, got about four minutes left. And in that time, I wonder if you can tell me briefly where people would need to go if they’re interested in first becoming a volunteer and if they wanted to contact the service.

If you can do it quite briefly, I’d be really grateful. I can. Yes, indeed.

So to contact Samaritans, it’s a free phone number. It’s 116123. That’s 116123.

As I said, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Samaritans.org is the website. If you are interested in volunteering, there’s links on there that will take you to the relevant pages for volunteering.

There are branches across the country. Who would welcome you with open arms and lots of biscuits, which incidentally I don’t eat. But there’s lots of biscuits and lots of tea and lots of support.

So that’s, that’s the contacts. I think the biscuit side of it is very naughty, but we won’t go there either. I don’t eat them, love.

One tries to live a healthy lifestyle, but however, however, the, so I wanted to get that information in first before I, before I shared the details of the women’s radio station again. But I think anybody who wants to be a volunteer, anybody who’s interested in contacting the service and might be afraid to use the service should just take that step, pick up the phone and, you know, make that move and not be afraid to do it because you just don’t know where it might lead. It’s changed your life immeasurably and it can’t help but have an impact on the people you live with.

And it brings, I think, more, doesn’t it, than just, you’re just somebody on the end of the phone taking a phone call. It brings great rewards that probably far supersede anything that you would have expected from my perspective in saying and yours as well. And I think all that remains for me to say is my huge thank you to you.

It’s difficult because you’re my husband. You’ve come on and you’d share this quite openly with about your life as a Samaritan and what you do. And I’m forever grateful and people listening to this who haven’t heard about what the Samaritans do or what they do, I think it’ll be so, so useful.

I would like anybody who feels that they want to reach out, to reach out to the Samaritans. So also please check us out at womensradiostation.com and men’s radio station as well. You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, all the usual social media channels.

I would like to say again, thank you so much to John. You can now pop the kettle on and make me a cup of tea. I think that would be a good ending to this.

And I’ve no doubt you’ll be coming back on because there’s so much that we can share about the Samaritans and other things that we both do between us to give insight to other people. So thank you again so much John. I think I will sleep easy tonight knowing that there is what, the fifth emergency service and I’m eternally grateful for the Samaritans.

Thank you so much and I’m sending all my love to you and all your colleagues.