I volunteer for the Samaritans (email hub rather than phones), it’s a relatively recent thing but I’m a bit surprised at how unhelpful it all seems. We can’t give advice and have a ‘listening wheel’ to follow which structures our responses.
However, I find this makes responses quite robotic. I can see previous responses from other volunteers in an email thread and there’s a shocking amount of just parroting back the callers problems to them. If it were me reaching out to the Samaritans I’d be looking for some advice, not just repeating back what I’ve said, summarising and interrogating me with questions.
They also have a self determination policy which means if a caller is suicidal we’re not to try and talk them out of it. AIBU in thinking it could be more helpful than this?