Duncan Irvine believes he would not be alive today if it weren't for the Samaritans.
One night, struggling to cope with his mother’s mental illness and his own sexuality, Duncan decided to end his life.
When he'd been growing up in a small village in the Scottish borders, he felt he had no one to turn to for help. Duncan, who was in his 20s, lived with his mother and worked in Edinburgh in the civil service.
His mother's mental health was deteriorating. She would hear voices and think the TV was talking to her.
"She was generally paranoid and behaving strangely," says Duncan, who now lives in west London.
"At the time, there was a much greater stigma around mental illness. I felt incredibly ashamed."
With little understanding of mental illness, Duncan feared his mother might "be taken away" and he blamed himself for her condition. "Living at home was becoming difficult, not least because it was hard to know what to expect," he says.
"Things got worse to the point where I dreaded getting on the train to go home from work."
Sexual identity
At the same time, Duncan was coming to terms with his homosexuality and he was afraid to confide in anyone.
"Homosexuality was illegal in Scotland up until the early 1970s, so I felt guilty and ashamed about it," he says.
With no one to turn to for advice and support, Duncan felt "totally isolated, totally alone".
He says: "Everything whirled around in my head all the time and I couldn’t make any sense of any of it. I found it increasingly hard to carry on."
One day it got too much for Duncan. "I couldn’t face going home that night," he says.
He left the office, bought a knife from a high street store and tried to cut his wrists.
"Not really knowing how to do it and finding it much more painful than I’d thought, I made a bit of a hash of it," he says.
"So I thought, well I’ve got to kill myself somehow so I’ll throw myself into the sea at Leith later on."
As he wandered the streets in the dark, getting colder and more depressed, Duncan passed a phone box and noticed a Samaritans poster inside.
"I gave them a ring," he says. "I’m not sure why. The guy there talked to me for about an hour. He got me to promise to see him in the offices in Edinburgh."
The next morning, Duncan went there. "We had a long chat," he says. "It was the same guy and I spoke to them [Samaritans] a couple of times over the following two weeks.
"It’s not really as though they did anything much in the way you might normally think of helping someone. They didn’t solve anything to do with my mother or being gay.
"But they allowed me to talk about these things without feeling any guilt.
"And by talking about it, the words came tumbling out. I felt more able to see that there were a series of choices that had to be faced.
"When I was speaking to the volunteer, instead of everything whirling around in a jumble inside my head, I could see things more clearly.
Talking therapy
"Speaking my thoughts clarified them in a way that I maybe hadn’t even been aware of before. The action of getting the words out made it easier to see the choices I had.
"Being able to talk without being interrupted, just being listened to, was all it took."
After the meeting, Duncan felt able to go back to work and return home. Having talked with the Samaritans, Duncan started opening up to his friends.
"To my surprise, I found they were incredibly supportive," he says. "Life didn’t suddenly turn into a bed of roses, but I was able to make some decisions about the issues and move on."
About a year later, he moved to London and got a new job.
"I’ve always known that if things ever get bad, I can contact Samaritans at any time. But I haven’t since then, because I’ve got friends now who I’d be happy to talk to about anything."
Duncan has been a Samaritans volunteer for nearly 20 years at the Ealing and central London branches.
