[user104658]

Originally Posted by Redway

Volunteers who don’t have sense of discretion do that, yeah. For others, there’s no way that they would go home and tell their spouses or boyfriends anything. That’s what the Samaritans in-house support for volunteers is there for. You seem to have a logical foundation for wanting boundaries to be subtly pushed in conversation but not everyone operates on that premise, and thank God they don’t.

The only times Samaritans breaks confidentiality when safeguarding’s concerned is when there’s a minor or an adult deemed particularly vulnerable in a certain fundamental way is involved. They have a self-determination policy over at Samaritans, which means that you can choose to subject a volunteer to your last conversation on Earth being with them and commit suicide on the other end. So long as you’re deemed as having the intellectual capacity to make that decision, they can’t stop you, and even if they think you’re vulnerable in that regard, there’s nothing they can do without you providing them identifying information because they really don’t have access to any of that information at all otherwise. They don’t know where you’re calling from in t’UK or Ireland, they don’t know your number, they don’t know anything about you whatsoever other than what you tell them. It wouldn’t work otherwise. So you get down that high horse about safeguarding right-this minute. Maybe that’s how it is at other organisations (undoubtedly) but not Samaritans.

I know strict confidentiality is something you struggle to get your head around but it does exist. You shouldn’t put people off ringing Samaritans because you expect them to all be just like you and breaking confidentiality because “there are no secrets in an ideal marriage”. You leave your Samaritans work at Samaritans. No offence but good Samaritans are not people like you. Always trying to find loopholes in confidentiality and a reason to tell your wife things that other people told you in confidence. You’re extensively trained at Samaritans not to be like that. And if that mentality can’t budge or you’re naturally the sort of person who worse-yet likes to gossip, being a Samaritan is obviously not for you.

I fully appreciate your point of view on this Redway and I think we do fundamentally disagree, my only counter is that it's unlike sharing information with just any other person, the information is as closely guarded as if it was just one and is functionally no different. I also don't think you entirely know what is or isn't shared. I'm only telling you here because it's a brutally honest and anonymous space. In the real world, no one (no one at all) has any idea what me and my wife do or don't share with each other in the most absolute of strict confidence and I imagine that's the same for most similar relationships. Just offering some insight into that.

I can also see that you have a huge amount of respect for and belief in the work that Samaritans do and I can appreciate that maybe there's some skin in the game there either personally or professionally so I'm not going to slam that too hard -- but I would caution to remember that they are people, not angels-on-earth, and not all reports on Samaritans contact are positive. Don't get me wrong they aren't as bad as the situation with some of the official MH Crisis lines, but they're not infallible in their treatment of or communication with callers, and it would be slightly remiss to suggest otherwise.