Grant Fieldsend
A Barnsley science company supervisor is marking World Mental Health Day today (October 10) by opening up on why he has volunteered with the Samaritans for the past eight years.
Grant Fieldsend, a logistics and site services supervisor at science company Lubrizol in Barnsley, is a volunteer at the town’s branch of the Samaritans, answering calls often in the early hours of the morning to people who need emotional support.
He decided to start volunteering with the charity as a “listening volunteer” to help people who – unlike him – have not got a large family support network.
He said: “I’ve always been lucky that I’ve got a good family and a good support network and I just felt for people who have got nobody to talk to. Talking does help. It makes you feel a lot better afterwards. Some people haven’t even got that basic thing, that they can talk to somebody. They keep it inside.”
Over the eight years he has volunteered with the Samaritans, Grant has gone from taking phone calls to conducting outreach work in the community about the charity’s great work. Every time he put a Samaritans sticker on a park bench or on a railway platform, he has wondered who might have seen it, and the impact it might have had.
Now he’s back manning the phones again and said he could not be prouder of the charity and its work, and the part he is able to play in helping shine a light in someone’s life at a time when they are at their loneliest and most vulnerable. It was a particularly proud moment when the town’s Samaritans were finalists in the 2021 Pride of Barnsley awards.
Themes of calls have remained the same over the years. People will call up over money worries, emotional distress at a relationship breakdown, the loss of a job or just a very bad day at work. Often, it will be a little thing that tips somebody into extreme stress: the culmination of many worries coming one on top of one another.
As for people who help at the Samaritans, Grant is keen to stress volunteers are as many and varied in background as those who call up the service.
He said: “I want to get the message out there that Samaritans are just normal people and you can just call up. Some people think the Samaritans is just about suicide, but it’s so much more than that.
“People can phone up on a bus. They might just ring up and talk about how down they are, they’ve split up with their boyfriend or girlfriend, lost their job, can’t pay their bills, struggling with debt, or in extreme cases they feel they can’t go on and there’s no hope for them. It’s just about letting them talk, and understand it’s alright not to be alright.
“It does put into perspective what actually is important. If you have one of those very serious calls, you’ll debrief on what’s happened in your shift and go through it with a supervisor.
“The work is rewarding because it makes you appreciate what you have got and the family network you have got. It’s rewarding for me that I’m there for somebody who’s got nobody.”
The most important thing to say, for Grant, is that nobody needs be on their own. The Samaritans are always there to listen.
He said: “I want the calls we get to be someone’s first call when they are starting to struggle and not the last one where they think there’s no hope.
“When somebody calls and says: ‘Thank you. I feel a lot better’, that makes it all worth it.”
Lubrizol’s Barnsley site manager Paul Mellor said: “We are so proud of Grant and his amazing years of volunteering with the Samaritans. Volunteering and giving back to the community is very important to us as a company. All over the world, people working at Lubrizol do fantastic voluntary work. The Samaritans is a very powerful organisation offering a listening ear to those in need and we feel honoured that one of our employees has given it so much time.”
For anyone who is struggling, Samaritans offers that safe space to talk in a confidential, non-judgmental environment. You can call them on 116 123 at any time, night and day.
