The other end of the line
When hope is stifled by depression, some see death as the only way out. But even in the depths of despair, there’s a way through — with the help of something as simple as a compassionate voice, writes Leonie Wagner
It’s 10am on a Monday morning at the South African Depression and Anxiety Group (Sadag) call centre and Joe*, a helpline counsellor, has been on the phone for an hour, talking to a woman we’ll call Dineo. It has been a very different type of call from those he usually deals with.
Dineo has known about her husband’s extramarital affairs for some time. She spent years pleading with him to quit his philandering ways. Then, 20 minutes into her lamentation, Dineo confesses that she’s fallen in love with a colleague, had an affair, and given birth to a child who is not her husband’s.
Joe, a grey-bearded father of three who has been a volunteer counsellor at the Sadag call centre since 2015, says he hasn’t often had to take calls where the issue is infidelity, but he has never passed judgment on the caller. That, he says, is not his place.
The phones in the Sandton call centre ring incessantly. There are 22 lines and never a moment’s silence. Layered over the ringing is a constant murmur of voices saying things like “That must have been really difficult for you”, and the soft sound of empathetic sighs — the aural equivalent of an understanding nod.
Intense calls
Telephone counsellors at the Sadag call centre work in four-hour shifts. Joe works the Monday morning shift from 8am to noon.
This Monday is unusually quiet. After he has counselled Dineo, Joe takes a call from a teenager who has had his heart broken and is having suicidal thoughts.
“I think this is a little guy,” Joe says after advising the boy. “He’s probably 13 or 14 and the relationship just got away from him and he doesn’t know what to do with his feelings. The weird thing is that I don’t ever get relationship calls and today I’ve been getting them thick and fast.”
Another counsellor, Alexis, is listening to a mother at the end of her tether with her anorexic teenage daughter. An empathetic Alexis responds with emotional support for the mother, saying how hard this must be for her, before suggesting the family hold an intervention for the suffering 18-year-old.
This call is followed by one from a man whose buddy attempted to commit suicide. Alexis advises him on how to contact a mental-health facility in his province that can assist his friend.
This may have been a quiet Monday but the counsellors have dealt with some intense calls and it is still only mid-morning.
A crisis can be far more urgent. Joe says a call came in one Monday from an addiction counsellor who’d been fired from his job after relapsing. He started drinking again after walking in on his girlfriend and best friend having sex. Before calling the helpline he had taken 60 prescription painkillers in an attempt to end his life.
“When I was on the phone with him I was very anxious,” Joe says. “I was agitated and racking my brain about how I’d get help to him because he wouldn’t give me his address or his telephone number.
“I asked him to give me his girlfriend’s number and he did, so I phoned her and told her to get an ambulance to his house and do it now. And she did.”
Suicide calls usually involve more than one counsellor. One call that required a team effort was from a high-school girl who had locked herself in the school bathroom and was about to swallow rat poison.
Joe says this call was particularly stressful for him because he has a teenage daughter. His training has taught him to recognise and deal with this sort of overidentification, however. He had to tell himself that this was not his daughter but another girl who needed his help.
His anxiety under control, Joe got another counsellor to call the school while he talked calmly to the distraught teenager. Within minutes the principal had located the girl, called her father and handled the situation.
Senzekile, a 25-year-old counsellor who has been working at Sadag for four years, had similar difficulty remaining calm when she answered a suicide call from a 50-yearold man who said he had lost everything — all his possessions, friends and family — through being scammed, and just wanted to hear a friendly voice before he shot himself.
“We were on the call for an hour,” says Senzekile. “The aim is to keep the person on the phone so he doesn’t shoot himself. We started talking about his life and every now and then while we were talking he’d say,
‘I’m going to shoot myself now’. Then I’d say, ‘No, you’re still telling me about your exwife, let’s keep talking’.
“I had to keep doing this so that at least by the time we were done talking we could have made sure someone would be with him.
“You don’t always know how to keep that person on the phone, though. The worst thing that can happen is if the phone cuts off or the person hangs up and you don’t know what happens to them.
“I had to ask for help from my colleagues — we can listen in on each other’s calls when needed, so I asked a senior person to assist me. While we talk, another person tracks down and calls one of the person’s family members and another traces where the person is so that we can find help for them.”
Senzekile started as a telephone counsellor and now runs the counsellor training programme.
Training includes 12 listening shifts in which the potential counsellor listens in on a senior counsellor’s calls, as well as a twoday training course with experts in the field.
Part of the training involves learning how to deal with prank calls and frequent callers. For every crisis call there are several where the person is feeling anxious, lonely or isolated and just wants to talk to someone.
A woman calls in frequently to tell the counsellors that she plans to marry the prophet Mohammed. Another man calls every week just to say hi. In some ways these calls provide a moment of relief between calls for help from those overcome by stress, depression, panic attacks or suicidal thoughts.
Senzekile’s first call was a prank call, she said. Harder to handle were the calls she began taking from women who had been raped.
“Every time I would handle a rape call I would shiver, I’d have anxiety, I’d want to go to the bathroom and sit there for 10 minutes after that call,” says Senzekile.
“I got to a point where I didn’t want to answer any calls because it felt like every time I did it was a rape case. Those were very difficult for me and they triggered a lot of things in me.”
Feelings of helplessness
She attended therapy and says she functions better now as a counsellor, but one particular call still stands out in her mind. It was from a student who had been molested and raped by her schoolteacher when she was seven, leading to sexual promiscuity in her early teens, followed by a refusal to have any intimate relationships.
Then, in her second year at university, she was raped.
In telling Senzekile about it she relived the horror of what happened to her as a child.
The call affected Senzekile deeply. “You have this vision of a seven-year-old child being raped by an old man who’s supposed to take care of her,” she says.
“That destroyed her life forever. All I could say to her was, ‘I understand why you feel this way and you need to go for therapy.’ Did therapy help her? I don’t know.”
Every Sadag helpline counsellor is confronted with similar uncertainty and frequent feelings of helplessness. It’s part of the job, says Joe; counsellors must remain closely in touch with their own emotions and not see themselves as saviours. They have regular debriefing sessions and access to therapy for their own mental health.
“When you can’t keep track of yourself on a phone call it can become really hard to be helpful,” he says. “And it can be really difficult, that feeling of helplessness. It’s real. Dealing with it comes from doing the work and allowing yourself to exist in that space and being aware that you’re not someone’s saving grace.”
Only first names have been used to protect the privacy of callers and counsellors.