Create for Change

Helen has been volunteering for the Samaritans for 19 years. This is an extract from an interview with her where she explains why she continues to be a part of the organisation.

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I find it very rewarding, and I also find it strangely un-stressful just to listen to people. Mostly in life, when your friends tell you things, you feel responsible for them, but this has taught me not to feel so responsible for people, because we believe that the responsibility for choices lies with the caller. So once I’d been trained to understand that it wasn’t for me to make decisions for the caller or guide them, but simply to be there for them and listen to them and allow them to feel whatever it was they were feeling, and to completely accept that, it was quite a liberating thing, and it’s very useful in other areas of life.

There’s also a great sense of bonding with people you’re doing the work with. I said that it was relaxing, but I suppose that’s not quite what I meant – it’s quite stressful sometimes, because of the things that you hear, but the level of support here is very high, and so you’re never on your own. It’s quite a bonding thing, particularly as the volunteers are of all ages, and you meet people here through volunteering that you’d never meet through any other walk of life. And I find that fun, actually, as well.

This is an extract from an interview with the writer of The Listeners, Mojisola Adebayo, discussing where the idea for the show came from, and how she approached turning ideas about listening into a performance for young people.

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So what was the starting point for the show when you joined the project?

It was quite open - the impulse was to make something around young people and mental health, and possibly talk about suicide. But obviously there were big questions about the ethics of doing that, and about how deep to go. We were quite tentative about what the piece would look like, and how to make it accessible, fun, and also sustainable over a long rehearsal period. 

The idea of focusing on listening came about through a day long conversation between Yasmin, myself and Helen from the Samaritans, where Helen really crystallised what the Samaritans do, which is listening. I’d known a little about the Samaritans, but I didn’t realise that they don’t give advice directly, or try to stop people committing suicide by saying ‘don’t do that, there’s another way’, or ‘your family will be upset’ and any of those other clichés that I had in my head about how they might counsel somebody. But really, they see their role as to just listen, and to enable people to talk about some of the most taboo subjects, like wanting to commit suicide. 

They really believe in the power of listening: they really believe that if somebody is on the brink of hurting themselves or killing themselves, that listening to them is a way of bringing that person to another place, without imposing advice or anything trite: just listening.

So I spent most of that day with the three of us listening to Helen and Yasmin, and thinking about that, and then I started thinking about – knowing this would be a cast of young people – how has listening changed? Is listening any different for young people at the moment? And how might technology have changed the ways we all listen and communicate?

And I was wary about getting on a bandwagon: you know, ‘Facebook is bad’, ‘Texting is terrible’, ‘We should all talk to each other’ – but it’s not so much that, I was just really curious about how all of this new technology might have changed how we communicate on a personal level. And how has that particularly changed for young people. What kind of listening do they do? How do they listen through text messages? How do you listen through Facebook? Through a tweet? Is it listening, and have we forfeited or lost that skill?