At 5.15 on an overcast evening, in a tiny Dadar apartment bathed in white light, a group of five — three young women, an older woman, and a man in his thirties — sit around a small, square table with four landline phones. Two phones ring; conversation stops as the two older members of the group answer the calls. “Samaritans Mumbai, how can I help you?” they both say, their voices soft, gentle.
Both callers hang up, not for the first time in the evening and not the last.
“Many people just want to make contact, to hear another voice at the end of the phone. They might call back later,” says Avantika, one of the younger volunteers. Purvi, another young woman, says, “Some callers, especially if they are male, prefer to speak to a woman, especially if the problems they want to discuss are sexual.”
And there are repeat callers, hoping to connect with a specific volunteer they are used to talking to.
Beacon in the dark
Every year, according to the World Health Organisation, more than 800,000 people die by suicide, and up to 25 times as many make a suicide attempt.
This tiny office, a place that not many have heard of — but enough have — feels like an epicentre of a tsunami of distress. Every few minutes, at least one person feels enough of a need to speak, to hear a voice, that they call a stranger on a helpline. Every volunteer here wears that awareness, but, strangely, it does not weigh heavy.
Samaritans Mumbai was started in 1968 as the first branch of Samaritans outside the UK, and the helpline, Samaritans Mumbai started in 1968, as the first branch of Samaritans outside the U.K., and the helpline, serving people feeling alone, stressed, depressed or suicidal, was launched in 1993. Their work has grown in volume and relevance, but the core rule remains: listen, do not intervene, do not offer solutions.
Avantika, who has been volunteering for over a year, working a three-hour shift once a week, says, “Whatever the problem the other person is having, we encourage them first to just speak about it. Often, the act of laying down the things bothering someone itself provides a kind of perspective or resolution.”
She says the calls are at three levels — where someone simply wants to discuss a vexing issue; where the caller has considered suicide and may have made plans to carry out the act; and where the person already has the plan in place and the call is envisioned as her/his last.
Shazia, one of the older volunteers, gestures for silence; for the last 20 minutes, she has been murmuring into the phone. Calls can often go on for hours, Avantika says, and end only when the caller decides to hang up.
Thus far...
The volunteers accept that self-determination is not something they can ultimately affect, that it is not their role to do so. The subtext may be unsettling: if a person is determined to die, they cannot stop it. Avantika recalls a Level 3 caller who was standing at the Sealink bridge contemplating jumping. “I tried getting him to talk about his problems, one by one. It seemed to help. I hope that whatever he was feeling was resolved.” She doesn’t know that, though. The hardest thing sometimes is that there may never be closure.
Samaritans has potential volunteers go through an intensive six-day training, some of it module-based, with segments like learning about factors that may block listening. Then the tough part: through questions, hypothetical situations, role play, they deal with precisely this question: can you accept that you may never know what happens to the people you speak to?
For younger volunteers, it can be hard to deal with, especially if, say, they read news about a suicide in the papers the next day. “The question that they ask, that all of us ask, is, what could we have done better?” A senior volunteer acts as a day coordinator who all volunteers can speak to about an issue; the senior leadership is also available on call.
Shazia says, “In case a call requires an intervention — if a person says he has taken pills for instance, and says that he wants us to report it to someone — then we call Manohar [Rangnekar, assistant director and senior-most volunteer] or one of the other coordinators and they decide on which authorities are to be contacted.”
Since Samaritans makes a pledge to maintain anonymity, callers’ names or addresses are only recorded if they volunteer to share them.
Samaritans also has a qualified counsellor who they refer callers to if asked. Volunteers may suggest counselling, but never as a directive.
The demographics of the volunteers are unusual: there are no men under 30. While some of the women are older, a significant number of them are college students, almost all studying psychology. The three young women present all plan to become clinical psychologists. But, Purvi says, “In our university course, the psychology we learn is aimed at intervention, at stopping a person from committing suicide, at helping a person who has depression.” At Samaritans, some unlearning is required.
No judgment
As the soft explanations flow, Manish, a man in his late 30s, walks in and begins filling out a form. He is here to be interviewed as a potential volunteer. Mr. Rangnekar takes Manish into an adjoining room.
Later, interview done, he explains that the first thing he was probing Mahesh for was his motivation. “I have found that there are three types of people who come to volunteer. Some, like in my case, simply want to get involved in some kind of social service and are looking for the opportunity that is their calling.” Others, he says, have some experience in personal life with suicide, or are interested in a larger range of mental health issues.
When he first started with Samaritans in 1993, Mr. Rangnekar says, the average age of volunteers was 40. Over the past ten years, however, the Samaritans has reached out more to colleges and recruited students. The average now is 23.
“The only thing that they lack is experience,” he says of the core of 40 or so student volunteers. “Otherwise their knowledge of the issues that people go through is far greater.” Most importantly, he says, young people are far less likely to fall into the pattern of judgment and trying to solve problems, an older person’s trait.
Over this ten-year period, the average age of callers (based on information volunteered) has been 15–29, so having younger volunteers helps.
But why is the service open only from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m.? A layperson might assume that it is during the night that a helpline would really be needed. Mr. Rangnekar concedes this, and says that in an ideal world, Samaritans would be a 24-hour service, but that would require more volunteers and more resources.
It’s 8.30 p.m. now. Then two phones ring simultaneously; again, both turn out to be callers who hang up. Then another ring. Shazia answers, and quietly listens, speaking softly into the phone now and then, in a cocoon that is just the caller and her.
Except for Mr. Rangnekar, all names have been changed to ensure confidentiality.