As I walked up the hill to St Josephs to look for the South African Depression and Anxiety Group, I was trying to realistically picture what it would be like. Maybe like a very busy call centre. Or Gatwick Arrivals, but without the aeroplanes. Or even what the newsroom was like on deadline. Given that I live in one of the harshest and most violent countries in the world. With one of the lowest life expectancies. Where the graph between rich and poor is the steepest and everyone has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from Apartheid and surviving HIV.
And would the people there be happy or be sad? Perhaps everyone would be just be swimming around in a literal Sea of Despond. Maybe the floor would be wet and slippery from all the crying. Or maybe hundreds of people would be gently sitting around in soft rooms listening to Bach. Feeling better. And some would be in even brighter rooms painting murals of rainbows. Maybe even there would be some behavioural psychologists left over from the seventies: agoraphobes would happily getting in and out of lifts or little dark cupboards. Or perhaps people would be there very proudly holding snakes for longer and longer each day.
But when I got there, of course it was not like that. I simply walked through a series of blank and empty rooms. One large one, many small. One table with pamphlets about Suicide and Addiction and a kettle on it. And then I found one lady. That was it. One small, friendly, cheerful lady, called Lynn.
While I waited for her, as usual I then started to wonder what exactly I thought I was doing. With only white middle class credentials and the same rank of suffering. Without even an updated cv. Of what use could I actually be? And then I thought of course: infographics. I could help Lynn to make a beautiful scatter graph of Bewildering Things that Happen on the x-axis and then Rising Up Like New Bread on the y. Or a simple two-toned bar graph of things you think are scary but actually are not. Like for instance, sharks.
When she sat down opposite me, I merely said more confessionally than anything: “Hi, I’m Jess. I am a journalist and I like to run and draw. And I have a dormant postgraduate degree in Psychology.” And then, “Is it only you, here?”
Lynn then explained that the KZN wing of SADAG had only just started, and that sometimes there were more people in the room. Some actual psychologists, but mostly trained volunteers running support groups. And we agreed and acknowledged that just helping to keep people in South Africa alive was a very big task, whether or not they were happily alive, was another whole thing.
And because there are not enough mental health professionals to go around, among many other peer support programmes, SADAG decided it might be helpful, to go back to the Friend zone, so to speak. So many people, both great and small, say they don’t know what to say when their friend tells them about something sad that happened to them. They say, I would like to help her, but I don’t know how. I am afraid I will say the wrong thing.
So this is one of my new projects. A lot of research, evaluation and a beautiful book. With drawings and plain words and instructions: what to say when someone tells you about something awful. Or that they don’t really want to live anymore. Or what to do if your best friend has disappeared or gone very quiet, or perhaps is simply just not at all hungry.
I don’t know if I can do this very well, or appropriately. But so far I’ve got Ethical Clearance. And in a year or so, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, check out what Zimbabwe has been up to https://www.friendshipbenchzimbabwe.org/ and these awesome popular culture videos produced a few years ago by illustrator Katy Davis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZWf2_2L2v8 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw. If you have ideas and what to be involved, please contact me.