A long time ago, in a different life, I was married to a very rich young man. His mother used to give me diamond and ruby bracelets, and dresses from Paris, which I never wore. For the three years of our marriage, guilt over his family’s millions made me limit my spending to necessities; I had stern notions of right and wrong in those days. When I left, taking neither the bracelets nor any money, I felt freed of a huge burden, as pleased with my new-found poverty as self-made millionaires are said to be with their wealth. I thought I could start living an honest life at last. I had no idea of the petty dishonesties I was about to be forced into: lies to prospective employers about my typing speed, lies to the landlord about late rent, lies to friends who wanted to meet me at restaurants I couldn’t afford. I had joined the ranks of the powerless, who are anything but free, for whom honesty is a luxury beyond their means.
Now I spend many nights talking on the phone to people who want to kill themselves, trying to come up with reasons they might consider going on living. Last week there was a drunken Scotsman who, despite his slurred speech, seemed completely rational; his arguments for wanting to end his life were so logical and coherent that it was hard to dispute them. He swore at me when I tried to dissuade him, but that too seemed reasonable. Given the bleakness of the life he described—he had no family left; his one friend died of cancer last year; he saw no one all week except a social worker; unable to afford pub prices, he bought cheap whiskey in the supermarket and drank it on his own in his dingy council flat—it was difficult to believe that a glorious future awaited him just around the corner. On the other hand, why did he dial that number if he wasn’t hoping to be talked out of it?
Because he was alone, because there was no one else who would listen. It’s why all of them phone, not just the ones eyeing the kitchen knives or counting up the pills in the medicine bottle. There’s the wheelchair-bound man whose carer has not shown up for two days, and who, when he phones social services, leaves messages on voicemail to which no one responds. The elderly woman whose drug-dealing neighbor scrawls obscenities on her door and threatens to bash her head in, for no particular reason, whenever she passes him in the hall. (Apparently that isn’t enough for the police to get involved: he has to do something violent first.) The woman who, let out of the hospital after a suicide attempt, was told it would be at least four months before she could see an NHS psychiatrist. The single mother of three children, working as a cleaner in a hotel, whose boss has been propositioning her, hinting that her continuing employment depends on keeping him happy; when she asks the HR people to intercede, they they don’t want to hear about it: he is their boss, too.
All the systems they rely on for support are failing them. Nothing in their world works as it is supposed to. The one thing they can do is phone and complain to people like me, who are equally powerless to put things right.
For many of them, money would solve the problem: the man in the wheelchair could hire a private carer; the single mother could quit her job and look around for something else; the woman persecuted by her neighbor could move. Even the suicidal callers might feel some cause for hope if they knew they could see a therapist within a week or two rather than having to wait for four, sometimes six months. On the radio, there are frequent public service announcements telling people that if they are suffering from mental health problems they should phone the NHS and get help. What the piously soothing voice in those announcements fails to mention is how long it is likely to be before any kind of help is forthcoming.
We get middle-class callers as well, but their problems are usually either romantic (he has jilted me) or purely psychological: they are feeling low these days, the things that once brought them pleasure no longer do. They too are suffering, but despite their troubles, they usually have faith that things will get better for them in the long run. You can hear it in their voices, and by the end of the call they are often making plans to change their situation. They will go online and search for other, more reliable lovers. They will make an appointment with some private shrink. (Increasingly, people with money are taking out private insurance and relying exclusively on private doctors and private clinics rather than the NHS, formerly the great equalizer, the one public service used by almost everyone, rich and poor alike.) It’s hard to believe that their capacity for hope is a function of a can-do attitude that enabled them to achieve financial security; it seems to work the other way around.
Nor does Freud’s explanation of the suicidal impulse seem terribly relevant. It was, he said, the result of “introjection,” a matter of the ego incorporating aspects of a lost love object and then acting out the inevitably destructive feelings towards that object. I wonder how many people really take such a convoluted route to despair. Certainly Freud’s theory can’t explain why suicide rates are much higher among the poor. But perhaps, given the milieu from which his patients came, he was never confronted with the kind of rage and helplessness felt by people for whom material deprivation, a lack of the most basic requirements for a tolerable life, is the primary trigger.
Of course, as heart-warming tales of obstacles overcome remind us, there are certain indomitable souls with the grit and energy to battle their way through no matter what. But since I’m not at all sure I’m one of those souls, I can’t blame the people who, faced with what feels like an unclimbable brick wall, give up in defeat.
Even for the callers with the most harrowing stories—the young girls (less often boys) being molested by a father, a stepfather, a brother, their mother’s boyfriend—money can be a factor. A fourteen-year-old girl phones from a hospital in the Midlands, where they brought her after she’d been found unconscious in a public park. She refused to tell the hospital psychiatrist why she’d swallowed a hundred aspirin, washed down with rotgut wine, because she knew that then they’d arrest her father. She still loves him, she says. He buys her presents sometimes, he’s not a mean man, except when he’s drinking.
He’s been raping her since she was eight, the year her mother disappeared out of their lives. She knows she’d have to tell her story to the police, over and over, and testify against her father in court, describe all the shameful details, while his lawyer, cross-examining, does his best to discredit her, asks if she was fantasizing, asks if she took a lot of drugs. She’s seen it all on television dramas. And then, if they put her father in jail, she’ll have no one. She’ll be put in foster care, or a children’s home, and she’s heard what can happen to young girls in such places; every few years a new scandal breaks in the newspapers, about fourteen-year-olds being beaten, drugged, locked in a room, and “visited” by one man after another, or several at a time, for days on end.
When she’s discharged, she tells me, she’s going to try again, and this time she means to do it right.
“Please,” I say. “You have to tell someone. He’s got to be stopped.”
“If I’m dead it will stop,” she says.
She wants to know how old I am.
“You’re nice,” she says. “I hope you live to be a hundred.”
Sexual abuse goes on in affluent homes too, leaving horrific psychic scars: it’s estimated that eighty percent of women in psychiatric hospitals have been sexually abused. I would never claim that victims from such backgrounds are less traumatized than the fourteen-year-old I spoke to on the phone. But there is still a difference between their situation and hers. When they come forward, the immediate aftermath is almost always less grim. Even the police are apparently gentler, less skeptical, when interviewing them. They are sent to private clinics and seen by therapists, usually women, specially trained to deal with sexual abuse victims, rather than waiting for months to be seen by an overworked general-purpose psychiatrist who is directed not to spend more than twenty minutes with any one patient. Perhaps most important, it is unheard of for them to be placed in foster care or sent to children’s homes.
When I was young and rich I had no sense of money’s relation to anything but things: people with money had nicer houses, nicer clothes, nicer food, nicer cars; they went on nicer vacations. I never thought of money as a prerequisite for more urgent things—the ability to get help when you need it, the freedom to arrange your life as you want. Not having to be afraid all the time, not feeling eternally humiliated. It’s a commonplace that money buys power, but power isn’t all of the public kind.
Rich young women nowadays seem more knowing, more savvy, much less innocent, than gently reared females in the old days. But it seems to be innocence, above all, that money continues to buy, even if of a different kind than my own all those years ago. It is the faith, conscious or no, that nothing seriously awful can ever happen to you, that someone or something will always be there to protect and provide, to shelter and soothe. It can manifest itself as arrogance—a spoilt, entitled attitude found among certain offspring of the rich—but whatever form it takes, it’s a confidence that the poor, the callers who phone the suicide line in the middle of the night, cannot afford. Their only innocence, if you can call it that, lies in their trust in a stranger at the other end of the phone, their faith that she will listen to them as though their sufferings still matter: the belief that the world is not a hundred percent indifferent to whether or not they live till the next morning.
Evelyn Toynton is an American writer living in England. Her most recent book is the novel Inheritance, which came out in 2019. She is currently working on a memoir about her family, to be published in 2024.
