Samaritans to axe branches

[glazbagun]

I've fortunately never needed their help and it's never occured to me before but I've met volunteers almost everywhere I've lived.

Can a volunteer workforce be centralised it the same way a normal call centre can? Does anyone want to be taking calls from the suicidal and abusive dregs in their own home for months on end?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2l23ylv46o

[119]

glazbagun said:

I've fortunately never needed their help and it's never occured to me before but I've met volunteers almost everywhere I've lived.

Can a volunteer workforce be centralised it the same way a normal call centre can? Does anyone want to be taking calls from the suicidal and abusive dregs in their own home for months on end?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2l23ylv46o

Not embarrassed to say i have used them, and they kept me from going down the wrong road a couple of times.

Would certainly like to hope that i wasn't thought of as a 'dreg' tbh.

[ScotHill]

I would hope they meant that Samaritans get a lot of purely abusive phone calls outside of their standard remit.

Also called a couple of times, and dropped into a city centre office for a drop-in session, it's not all suicide prevention.

A friend volunteered with them for a couple of years, they're ordinary people who are trained to listen, not professional counsellors/psychologists who at least would have some minimal form of screening on the people they deal with. From what they said, having the support of at least one other person in a neutral building was essential for coping with some of the calls, can't see how getting people to take calls at home could possibly be healthy, you don't want that kind of thing associated with your spare room. And reducing the number of offices will reduce the number of available volunteers.

[ScotHill]

Incidentally, another friend volunteered for them, and while they were not permitted to hang up on undesirable callers (because there may be an underlying issue that they really wanted to address) they could challenge them on their behaviour.

So to a man who was heavy breathing while he was talking to her, she said 'Excuse me are you masturbating?', and he said 'No I've got asthma'.

[Ken Sington]

I've been a Samaritans volunteer for 7 years now and am the deputy director of our branch. Safe to say that these proposals, and that's all they are at the moment, have caused a massive furore right across the organisation. The proposals are ill thought out, have been badly introduced and are going to cause massive damage to the brand.