Thread by @piglungs

I had a conversation a few weeks ago. Haven't been able to get it out of my head. It was with a mate who's about 10-12 years younger than me. He volunteers for the Samaritans. I did the same thing for a fair few years, a while ago.

And yes I know anecdotes aren't data, but...

...we'd both done the same thing, at different times that don't overlap. And what's so different about his experience now and mine then? He reckoned 80% of the calls he takes right now are from people in severe crisis because of their interaction with the benefit system...

...calls in which a person's interaction with that system was the trigger for the feelings they were experiencing - the cause of their thoughts about self-harm or suicide. How many calls can I remember in which the same mechanisms were cited as the cause of those feelings? None.

Don't get me wrong. I listened to people who were poor. I listened to people who were in the throes of illness, or crisis, or addiction, or simple bad luck that had landed them in desperate straits - situations that had sparked or contributed to suicidal feelings...

...I listened to people with no secure place to live. Or in danger of losing one. People who had experienced a shock, or had moved city or country, or had lost a job, or been injured, or any of the many other curveballs life can throw at any of us...

...but I cannot remember (and I have a good memory) a single instance in which one of those people told me it was their interaction with the system that was supposedly there to help them, that was the primary cause of their thoughts about killing themselves. Not one.

Of course there were people who were frustrated. Or might have had unreasonable expectations. Of course there were people whose interactions with bureaccracy were difficult, or exacerbated underlying problems.

But there weren't any people who told me their interactions with the social welfare system in this country - their actual attempts to get the state they lived in to offer help - were the primary reason they were thinking about suicide...

...my friend, though - he's being told that almost every time he picks up the phone.

Not like this is news to me. Or anyone reading this. Christ I've been playing guitar while @Llifo screams about this exact thing for years now.

But I can't get that difference out of my head. What that difference is, in a relatively small span of time, between a system that still at its heart tries help, and one that drives the people who need it to self-destruction.

And we've normalised this...

...me as much as anyone. Sat through years of austerity. Allowed the myth to take hold - that deliberately not helping people will save us. And now people aren't just dying. They're being driven to it.

Wish I had a clever sign-off. But there really isn't one. Just fury.