Rob Bidder is an artist based in south-east London and a Visitor Experience Assistant at Wellcome Collection. He also plays music in a ramshackle manner. He is a Gemini with a Libra ascendant.

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Rob Bidder

@robertbidder

Artist

Comic

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Loathing

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When self-loathing explodes like lava, leaving ashes all over your self-confidence.

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Sport

Body Squabbles

An obscure musician creates a superstar legend for himself, causing financial loss to those who believed him. A group of artist-activists promise fake compensation to victims of an appalling industrial accident. In our new online world of malign deception, has parafictional art had its day?

“What is fake news? I turned an empty room into an international headline. If you are reading this, you are part of the illusion.”  

On 9 November 2018 it was starting to become clear that the LA-based rock musician Threatin (real name Jered Eames) was perhaps not as successful as he seemed. Eames had spent most of the previous year creating a digital trail of fake evidence that ‘proved’ he had a label, a manager, an agent, a promoter, a press officer and a committed fanbase. Eames did have songs to promote, but everything else was a lie. 

It was during his UK tour that Eames was outed, much to the dismay of his fellow band members, who’d been hired on the back of his apparent popularity. As well as the gig venues and support acts who had lost money, they were his main victims – they’d been totally duped. 

In an interview with the BBC a few months later, Eames turned the tables on his critics and claimed that he was in creative control of the exposé and that he’d informed members of the press about the ruse before he started the tour – even hinting that the project was a form of ‘stage art’. He presented emails showing that he had contacted the press (under an alias) about the hoax before it had been revealed, but after further investigation it became clear that even these were doctored. 

Let’s assume for a moment that Eames was not just conveniently rationalising away the desperate affair and imagine that he’s making a sprawling work of ‘stage art’ about the nature of celebrity in a ‘post-truth’ age. Is this a legitimate creative strategy? Is it ever ethically justifiable to deceive others in order to make an artistic point?

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Jered Threatin performing on tour in 2015

Reframing Eames’s deception as ‘art’ feels dangerous, but there are many artists who use similar deceptive strategies in their work. In 2009, art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty used the term ‘parafiction’ to describe such approaches where “real and/or imaginary personages and stories intersect with the world as it is being lived”.

Her definition captured a way of working that emerged during the early 2000s and coincided with the rapid growth of the internet, a platform that gave artists the perfect context to create projects that mimicked official and unofficial sources of information. Such online activity often found its way back to a more conventional art context, allowing the critical space of the gallery or museum to partly reveal the fictions therein.

Is it ever ethically justifiable to deceive others in order to make an artistic point?

I’ve often found good fictive art to be deeply satisfying. You’re held in moments of uncertainty that can be genuinely disorientating; however, on further examination the true purpose of the work starts to unfold. You’re encouraged to play detective and rewarded by questioning the ‘truth’ in front of you. It asks you to accept that you may be fooled and that as a viewer you have a responsibility to navigate information with a sceptical eye.  

As an artist in this field, I’m admittedly biased. Since 2004 my WITH project has advertised a range of self-help ‘solutions’ that provide ‘offsetting’ services for meaningful experiences – from creating doctored evidence of a happier (or more traumatic) past for you through to exercising on your behalf. 

Other fictive artists also include Christoph Büchel, who set up a fully functioning community centre on the site of the former HSBC bank on Piccadilly, Michael Blum, who created an entire museum for a fictional activist at the Ninth Istanbul Biennial, and Aliza Shvarts, who supposedly performed a series of abortions for her final year art project at Yale – a work that the university subsequently described as a ‘creative fiction’. 

Parafictions are not just in the domain of visual art. The magician Derren Brown has created extraordinary television events where participants are immersed in horrifying fictions that they think are real, and comedian Chris Morris used fictive strategies in the TV series ‘Brass Eye’ to hoodwink minor celebrities into backing a fake anti-drugs campaign. 

This blend of fact and fiction always has an endgame: a critical point being made about the nature of participation and spectatorship. Visual artists tend to be interested in questioning dominant historical and social narratives, while entertainers like Brown and Morris use television to reveal the power of the media and the pliable nature of human psychology. 

In justifying or performing parafictional strategies you have to accept that there are victims somewhere along the line, whether they are Eames’s bandmates, a gullible celebrity, the viewers who ‘don’t get’ the fakery or, in the case of Derren Brown, the participant who believes (even just for a short while) that a horrific event is real. Could rationalising that victimisation be an ethical slippery slope?

For 20 years, artist-activists the Yes Men have also used parafictional strategies to represent major corporations through duplicate websites and personal representatives. Their aim is to put words into the mouths of the intended targets, who say everything that the Yes Men think they should be saying. 

In 2004, they posed on the news as representatives of the company Dow Chemical. While in character they issued what seemed to be a heartfelt apology and promise of compensation to those who were affected by the 1984 Bhopal tragedy, which was initially believed by the families of the victims to be real. The lie was supposed to reveal the truth about what Dow (which now owns Union Carbide, the company that ran the pesticide plant where the gas escape occurred) should be doing. 

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The Yes Men at re:publica 2014

However well-intentioned, knowingly engineering such false hope to make a political point seems at best naive and at worst deeply unethical. The Yes Men responded to criticisms by saying that the distress they had caused the people of Bhopal was minimal compared to that for which Dow was responsible. But didn’t they pause to think at some point that the thousands affected had suffered enough? 

It’s also worth reflecting on whether parafictive strategies really do encourage critical thinking in those beyond the trained viewer. Experimental psychologists like Professor Stephan Lewandowsky have studied the effects of misinformation and identified a phenomenon known as the ‘continued influence effect’: even after misinformation is retracted or corrected, many people continue to treat it as true. How best to address this cognitive failure is currently being investigated, but adding another layer of deception in order to reveal the misinformation doesn’t appear to be helping. 

This finding has consequences for any artist, activist or entertainer who uses deception as a strategy: what if the creative deception inadvertently retains a continued influence after it has been revealed? What if parafictions are accidentally contributing to what computer scientist Aviv Ovadya – founder of the Thoughtful Technology Project – has called ‘reality apathy’, whereby constant contact with misinformation compels people to stop trusting everything that they see and hear?

My intentions for the WITH project were never for my audience to go away from the website or one of our gallery projects believing that the organisation was actually ‘real’. But it was essential that the project’s implicit absurdity was framed by a website that appeared, at least on the surface, to be ‘real’. Once you scratched the veneer of that illusion, the corporate framework would fracture to reveal that the speculative solutions were mere imaginings, that each had a point to make about the frailty and paradoxes of identity. 

And my audiences, in the main, seemed to revel in the way that they could acknowledge their own hidden anxieties through such fictional solutions and then laugh when they saw them speculatively realised in an art context. 

But I can’t track every single person who engaged with the project, so I can’t prove that no one believed that WITH was actually real, and I have always felt that that possibility was a risk I was willing to take. But the world has changed a lot since I created the project in 2004. In 2019 the politicised weaponisation of misinformation is becoming more pervasive and the effects of such deceits are being felt around the world. 

At a time when crucial research about climate change, vaccination, energy, food and public health is being obscured by lies from vested interests, pseudoscience and reactionary politics, we parafictional artists now perhaps need to approach our own use of deception with greater care. 

Perhaps the time has come for us to not just enjoy playing with the slippery categories of fact and fiction, but to interrogate whether such strategies have their assumed effects.

I think that a compelling argument can still be made that good parafictional art can be understood as a prescient warning about the nature of authenticity and the dangers of misinformation in the digital age. But I also fear that it could be interpreted in hindsight as a complacent footnote in the history of art, where pranksters like Jered Eames were given space to reframe a simple con into something more culturally meaningful. 

A R Hopwood is an artist and Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow. He has collaborated extensively with experimental psychologists to create art projects about memory, belief and misdirection including WITH and the False Memory Archive. He is co-curator of ‘Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic’.

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A R Hopwood

A R Hopwood's website

Author

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False memory archive: Crudely erased adults (lost in the mall)

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How the magician’s assistant creates the illusion

Discover how magic acts collude with audiences that want to believe.

Explore primary source material on health and wider issues in society and culture.

Smoke and Mirrors: The Psychology of Magic

Our exhibition ‘Smoke and Mirrors’ investigates what magic and conjuring can tell us about the human mind.

Parafictional artists create projects where the imaginary interacts with real life. But the growth of so-called ‘fake news’ is providing a new challenge.

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Artist A R Hopwood examines the applications of deception in visual culture, the therapy room, and the science lab and asks: are there any circumstances under which deception can be justified?

Is fake news killing fictive art?

Rose Mackenberg’s deceptive activism

Lost in the mall and other false memories

Manipulating the evidence with deepfake technology

When self deception becomes global hoax

The power of placebos

The political consequences of widespread misinformation are becoming ever more apparent, and anyone using deceptive strategies in their work should take extra care. In this series, artist A R Hopwood examines the applications of deception in visual culture, the therapy room, and the science lab and asks: are there any circumstances under which deception can be justified?

The Ethics of Deception

When Hannah Partos needed a stem cell transplant, she discovered just how lucky she was to be saved by an anonymous “chunky lad”. Data consistently shows that men sign up as organ and blood donors less than women do and the NHS Blood and Transplant service says it needs to recruit 25,000 new male donors. So why is the gender imbalance in donation a problem and how can the issue be tackled?

I wrote my first story in a pink Barbie notepad, with the painstaking handwriting and felt-tip illustrations of a six-year-old. A princess was drowning at sea. A prince tried to save her but was too scared of the rising waves; a female dragon rescued her and they lived happily ever after. 

I liked fairy tales as a child, but I was brought up to be dismissive of the classic young-male-hero-saves-damsel-in-distress narrative. I could never have imagined that, in the story of my own life, it would be a young male hero who rescued me from impending death. At 22, I was diagnosed with an aggressive form of blood cancer and told that a transplant of healthy stem cells was my only hope of survival. An anonymous “chunky lad” – as one doctor called him – just a year older than me was found through the national bone marrow register, and he went on to donate six million of his stem cells.

I was lucky: research shows that younger stem cell donors lead to better survival outcomes for patients, and I was told at the time that men make ideal donors, as they are generally larger than women and produce more cells. Unlike young women, they are more likely to be available to donate, as women cannot do so during pregnancy, or for at least six months after childbirth. 

But although young male donors are the top choice for clinicians, men aged 16–30 only make up 18 per cent of the UK’s stem cell registers. Women dominate the registers overall, accounting for 60 per cent of potential stem cell donors. 

And it’s not just stem cells that women appear to be more willing to donate. Two-thirds of all new blood donors are female, and there are over 100,000 more female blood donors than men, according to NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT). Women also make up the majority of the organ donor register, albeit by a narrower margin – 53 per cent is female (46 per cent male and less than 1 per cent unknown). In living kidney donation, women accounted for an average of 52.5 per cent of donors in the last six years. 

Men aged 16–30 only make up 18 per cent of the UK’s stem cell registers.

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Percentage split of men aged 16-30 on the stem cell registers

So what’s going on? Are women more altruistic than men? Or are men really wimps, as Professor Lorna Marson, a consultant transplant surgeon and president of the British Transplantation Society, asked in a co-authored editorial commenting on gender disparities in live kidney donation. 

There is no simple answer. Finding out why is a puzzle for experts and policymakers, nowhere more so than when it comes to blood donation. As the number of men giving blood has fallen by almost 25 percent since 2013/2014, according to the latest data from 2018/2019, NHSBT urgently needs to recruit more of them to supply the national blood stocks – especially because they tend to make ideal donors. For one thing, they can donate blood more frequently than women (every 12 weeks compared with every 16 weeks) as they generally have higher iron stores. Men also tend to have higher platelet counts and fewer antibodies – which women often produce during pregnancy – making men’s blood more suitable for platelet and plasma transfusions, which are given to patients after injury or during cancer treatment.

One likely explanation for the blood donor gender gap is that women blood donors report feeling greater levels of “warm glow” than men – the pleasurable, fuzzy feeling that comes with helping others. “There’s evidence in the blood donor context that warm glow is predictive of going to donate blood and coming back again,” says Professor Eamonn Ferguson, a psychologist at Nottingham University. Warm glow, he explains, is a “sort of oxytocin high” and blood donors who experience it strongly are apt to return to get their fix. 

More generally, Professor Ferguson says, there is a lot of evidence that women are more “pro-social” than men. “They tend to score higher on pro-social traits around trusting, altruism, agreeableness, compassion: general volunteer behaviour.” Women also tend to have higher levels of oxytocin than men, and the hormone is associated with increased generosity: in randomised controlled trials involving economic games, participants administered with an oxytocin nose spray were more trusting and gave more money away than participants who were given a placebo.

Two-thirds of all new blood donors are female.

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Percentage split of male to female new blood donors

How can more men be encouraged to become donors?

Figuring out what does motivate men to give blood is a key part of Nadine Eaton’s job as head of blood marketing at NHSBT. She says that while women tend to be more emotionally motivated, more driven by the desire to help others in need, men, more generally, “want to look like heroes.” The “egotistical aspect” is stronger in men’s motivations; they tend to be more curious about how giving blood will affect them, and more likely to google “health benefits of giving blood.” Many other countries see a similar gender gap in blood donors, Eaton says, citing international research that suggests men are more incentivised than women to donate by rewards, such as free coffee mugs.

As with blood donation, women respond overwhelmingly to emotional appeals to become stem cell donors, according to Rebecca Pritchard, Head of Register Development at the UK’s Anthony Nolan stem cell register. This makes recruiting men a challenge, when much of the charity’s messaging urging the public to join the register has centred on cancer patients who are in desperate need of a matching donor. But Pritchard also wonders if men may be more turned off than women by the donation process, which is usually very similar to giving blood, but in around 10 per cent of cases involves a small procedure under general anaesthetic. “At recruitment events, young men tend to be the most squeamish about needles, about procedures,” she says.

At recruitment events, young men tend to be the most squeamish about needles, about procedures.

Nowadays, would-be donors can sign up to the register with a simple cheek swab that they return in the post, but in the past, anyone wanting to join had to provide a small blood sample at a hospital or recruitment event. “It was always the men who would faint,” Pritchard recalls. “Even now, when we do school assemblies to raise awareness about donation, occasionally someone will feel unwell, and it’s generally young boys.”

The tactics being deployed to win over more male donors seem broadly similar for the blood and stem cell registers: both NHSBT and Anthony Nolan have teamed up with young male ‘influencers’ in the world of sports who are passionate about donation, and both have partnerships with predominantly male organisations – the NHS with the armed forces, and Anthony Nolan with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.

Women make up the majority of the organ donor register, albeit by a narrower margin – 53 per cent is female, 46 per cent male and less than 1 per cent unknown.

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Percentage split between male, female and unknown on the organ donor register

Organ donation is a very different story. Although slightly more women donate live kidneys than men overall, a more complicated picture emerges when you break down the figures. In what may be the most altruistic form of all donation – going through a major operation and several weeks’ recovery to give a kidney to a total stranger – the gender balance is virtually equal. The vast majority of kidney donors, however, give to a friend or family member in need, and these ‘directed’ donors are predominantly women: an average of 55 per cent over the last six years. 

The fact that women still generally earn less than men, and are more likely to be stay-at-home parents, is one possible reason for this, Professor Marson points out: “Say two parents might be eligible to donate to a child, then if the father is the breadwinner, the decision might be made that it’s easier if the mother donates, so they don’t lose money.” 

Living donation is a deeply personal choice, and the NHS’s campaigning is geared towards raising awareness of the Organ Donation Register, which anyone can sign to give consent for their organs to be used after death. Although women account for 53 per cent of the register, more deceased men than women actually go on to donate their organs because more men die of conditions such as brain haemorrhages and strokes in which their organs can be used.

Andi Ttofa, head of organ donation marketing at NHSBT, thinks women’s slight lead on the register is partly because women tend to be more engaged with health matters generally. Women are much more likely to discuss the issue of organ donation with someone they know – 51 per cent of women versus 43 per cent of men. But this isn’t necessarily a problem, she says. Although Ttofa wants everyone to consider joining the organ register, which counts as legal consent, someone who hasn’t signed it can still go on to donate after they die if their loved ones believe it was something they would have wanted to do – which is why discussing the issue is so important, she says. “Yes, women are more likely to watch a big piece on organ donation on a TV programme like This Morning. But if that’s going to engage women to start a conversation and talk to the men in their lives, their fathers, sons, husbands, partners, whatever – then that’s a good thing.” 

That’s probably what we all need to keep doing – men, women and anyone who doesn’t fall within those categories: start the conversation. 

Hannah Partos is a writer whose work has been published in the Guardian, the Times and the Mail on Sunday, among others. She often works with Anthony Nolan, the UK’s stem cell register and blood cancer charity. In 2016, she won Anthony Nolan’s Journalist of the Year award. 

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Hannah Partos

Thomas is a London-based photographer working for Wellcome. He thrives when collaborating on projects and visual stories. He hails from Italy via the North-east of England.  

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Thomas SG Farnetti

Thomas S G Farnetti

Photographer

Essay

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Willing women donors

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The castration effect

Discover the effects of lowering testosterone on the male body, from the drastic surgery performed on eunuchs and castrati to the place of hormone reduction in modern prostate cancer treatment.

Find primary source material about the treatment of and therapeutic approaches towards certain medical conditions.

Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery

Explore the representation of chronic illness in the 'Misbehaving Bodies' exhibition featuring work by Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery.

Why is there a gender imbalance when it comes to the donation of organs, blood and tissue, and what can be done about it?

Why are women more willing donors than men?

During the bubonic plague epidemic of 1665–6, the residents of Eyam in Derbyshire quarantined themselves within the village boundaries to help prevent the disease spreading further. Simon Norfolk revisits the village to tell the story of this small community’s remarkable sacrifice and the genetic discovery that came from those who survived.

Simon Norfolk is a photographer who regularly contributes to National Geographic and has shown his work at Tate Modern. He specialises in post-conflict landscapes; in particular he has worked a great deal in Afghanistan. His most recent book was following in the steps of the 19th-century photographer of the Second Afghan War, John Burke. Simon is currently running at a pretty nifty Number 44 on ‘The 55 Best Photographers of all Time. In the History of the World. Ever. Definitely’.

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Simon Norfolk

Image gallery

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Humphrey Merrill's solitary grave in a field behind his house in the village of Eyam

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During the bubonic plague epidemic of 1665-6, the residents of Eyam in Derbyshire quarantined themselves to help prevent the disease spreading. Simon Norfolk tells the story of this small community’s sacrifice.

Wool, fleas, plague

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Happiness

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If happiness had a flavour, what would it taste like?

As a teenager about to have her scoliosis corrected, Rosalind Jana made herself a garment that highlighted the curvature she’d spent so long concealing. As she did so, she felt elation as she looked to the future.

I am 15 and it’s a perfect autumn weekend. I’m sitting on my bedroom floor tracing and snipping out a series of vertebrae-shaped pieces of raw white silk. I’m about to tack them to the back of a plain black cotton dress – stacked vertically in a lopsided, curving line that’ll look something like a squashed question mark on completion. 

When I try it on, my body will distort the shape of this sinuous stitched spine further – my ribcage humped outwards on the left, my right shoulder blade straining sharp against the fabric. The shape will almost perfectly map the backbone beneath; the one which, several days hence, will be seen up close by the surgeon tasked with breaking me apart and putting me back together again. 

This dress is being made for my fashion blog, which I’ve had for a year and a half. There I post pictures of myself in a variety of ridiculous get-ups. For the last six months, this has become increasingly fraught. Ever since my back began to properly, painfully twist – no, ever since my curvature was first noticed by my mum when a white vintage blouse wouldn’t sit smoothly over the suddenly abnormal hump of my ribcage – I’ve been trying to hide everything I’m about to so very visibly reveal. 

More: Why true wellness sometimes lies in not thinking about wellness at all.

The dress, as I’ll note, is a homage to designer Alexander McQueen, who returns repeatedly to the spine as a motif, usually ensuring it overlays the wearer’s own. I particularly love his spring/summer 1998 collaboration with jeweller Shaun Leane on a metal corset comprised of ribcage and vertebrae, as well his spring/summer 2009 forays into kaleidoscopic prints of backbones on dresses and jackets. Now I want to do something similar. 

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Two dresses made by Rosalind Jana when she was 15yrs old

I’d been diagnosed with scoliosis earlier that same year. Scoliosis is a sideways curvature of the spine, vertebrae kinking to the right or left (or, in some cases, both) – often for no known reason. Kyphosis is a rounded, forward curvature. The kind that historically led to people being labelled hunchbacks.  

By the time my spine was operated on, my degree of curvature stood at approximately 80 degrees: my torso tightly bent, my daily discomfort levels almost unbearable. During surgery my back was opened up, a section of vertebrae manually straightened and bolted tight with metal rods before being fused solid with artificial bone grafts. 

I became a fragile, raw thing – my limbs no longer my own to move at will. I spent a night in intensive care flighted by morphine, a week in hospital breathing minute by minute through the kind of excruciating pain memory kindly mutes in retrospect, and several months shuffling slowly from complete debilitation back towards physical independence. It was terrifying and frustrating and agonising. It was miraculous. It gave me back my life. 

Since then I’ve been fascinated by how illness and visual identity interact – especially in the intricate negotiations forged between clothes and body. What we wear so often takes on particularly charged meaning when that body becomes unruly, subject to sudden, bewildering limitations or changes. Perhaps the relationship forged is newly fraught, or defiant. Perhaps it offers much-needed power. In my case, it was all the above. 

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Rosalind Jana

As my torso first twisted, I desperately wanted my clothes to disguise the worst of my back: wonky shoulders skimmed with loose layers, truncated waistline belted into a semblance of smooth. Regardless, it felt like the contents of my wardrobe were working against me, revealing what I didn’t want seen. 

In the immediate aftermath of surgery I was clad in hospital gowns that opened at the back for easy access to my wound. As Sylvia Plath writes in ‘Tulips’, “I am nobody.../ I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses/ and my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.” 

The first morning I could wear my own pyjamas I wept with relief.

For several weeks after leaving hospital, I had to be dressed by my mum, struggling to even lift my arms above my head. Things with buttons were preferable, as were wrap skirts and large cardigans. When I could finally take on this task myself, I did it with gusto: painting my lips red and revelling in items previously laid aside. Doing so was a way of reclaiming how I was seen, of redefining myself anew.  

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Throughout these shifts there were several people I couldn't stop thinking about. One was Frida Kahlo. A predictable point of identification, perhaps, given that, like me, she suffered from scoliosis – albeit for very different reasons (usually interpreted as one of many long-term consequences of the horrific traffic accident she was in aged eighteen). 

Her approach to dress was closely bound up in her myriad physical challenges: her long skirts an effective way of obscuring her right leg, which was thinner and shorter than her left after contracting polio aged six; her plaster back braces often adorned with intricate, hand-painted patterns and symbols and, in one case, a column running down the middle – a mirror to her 1944 painting ‘The Broken Column’. Her sartorial decisions were bold and canny. They became armour, embodying a complex set of messages about identity, nationality and gender, as well as disability. 

The braces particularly intrigued me. The idea is that such devices halt the progression of a spine’s curvature, but they are not commonly used in the UK, so I’d avoided experiencing those particularly rigid limitations. The poet Edith Sitwell described hers as “my Bastille” after spending her early adolescence in a fabric and steel one to try and correct her scoliosis.  

Andy Warhol, who had to wear surgical corsets to hold together his bowels after being shot by Valerie Solanas, dyed his a series of confectionery colours: berry pink, sherbet-lemon yellow, Parma Violet blue. In the case of both Warhol and Kahlo, these medical devices were individualised – necessity vividly transformed into adornment.  

I think perhaps that’s what I wanted to do too, on that autumn day with its fierce, gleaming light. There was nothing practical about the garment itself. But making something rudimentary of my own – something strange and beautiful and shocking, something to fit over my body and fully externalise its contortions – still felt elating. Awful and elating and final. It required me to take ownership of what was happening, to step forwards, freshly armoured, into the unknown. 

Rosalind is a freelance journalist, author, poet, and speaker whose work has featured in British Vogue, Vogue International, Stylist, the Guardian, Broadly, Refinery29 and the Debrief, as well as on Radio 4 – covering areas from clothes to culture to health to travel.

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Rosalind's website

Camilla Greenwell is a photographer specialising in dance, portraiture and performance. She regularly works with Sadler’s Wells, Rambert, the Guardian, the Place, Barbican, Candoco, British Red Cross and Wellcome Collection.

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Camilla Greenwell

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Beth Hopkins on what asylum and sanctuary mean to her

Read about another artist who used her illness as inspiration, embroidering her story on a pillowcase.

Visit our exhibition featuring two artists who explore the representation of chronic illness. Until 26 January 2020.

One weekend, just before an operation to correct her scoliosis, Rosalind Jana stopped trying to hide her body. Read how those two days helped her step into the future.

Fashion for an unruly body

Sharing your most desperate thoughts and feelings could save your life. Former Samaritans helpline volunteer Katy Georgiou remembers the voices of the isolated and ‘invisible’ people who called during her night shifts.

It was the early hours of Sunday morning and I’d been on night shift for an hour when the phone rang. 

When I answered, all I could hear at the other end was the sound of a newborn baby crying. I waited. And then it came. The faint whisper of a woman, sobbing. “I just can’t do this.”

I was 27 when I trained as a Samaritan. What led me there was a transformative experience with a therapist whose manner and support helped me beyond words. My gratitude to this woman – a stranger with no real obligation to care about me – left me with a longing sense to pay my appreciation forward.

My helpline journey was peppered with powerful memories: some positive, others eye-opening, many harrowing. In my first month, I took a call from a woman mid-overdose who was falling in and out of consciousness. In between her swearing and being violently sick, I’d catch snapshots of her story: references to abuse, something about her childhood. And then silence. 

When I asked if she wanted help, she told me to fuck off. Because she wanted to die. My impulse to take action was overwhelming, but I was trained to remain calm. So I stayed with her, asking open questions. 

But no matter what you do, there’s always a risk that someone will still take their own life. “Don’t you dare feel guilty,” she kept saying before the call finally went dead. 

More: When everyday environments become anxious spaces

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Some shifts were less eventful. Hours could go by with no calls or, worse, prank calls. During night shifts I’d often struggle to keep my eyes open, taking turns with my shift partner to make cups of tea. Sometimes we’d look out of the window together onto the quiet, lit-up streets and get talking about our own lives. 

The way the narratives of our own unfolding life dramas got interwoven between calls was surreal. For six hours, we became an overarching backdrop against the flow of stories from strangers, our sentences suspended in mid-air upon a sudden call, punctuated by the jolting ring reminding us of why were actually there. 

Somehow, the difficult thoughts we can trap ourselves into aren’t so isolating when you hear who else around you shares them, if only we dare to say.

In truth, these late nights were the toughest, but also the most profound. I’d hear from prisoners who couldn't sleep, reflecting on their crimes, or the elderly who'd soiled themselves in hospital beds with no way to help themselves. The calls were long – anywhere from two to three hours. The length of the shift allowed for this, and there was always something about the peace of the sleeping world outside that made everything more intense. 

That still silence, mixed with my own exhaustion, would take me to a place of deep reflection that continued on my journey home among the morning commuters, emerging oblivious to the night’s proceedings. 

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Read personal essays and cultural analysis on the epidemic of modern loneliness from a range of perspectives.

Research primary source material relating to mental health and the sciences of the mind.

Visit our exhibition ‘Misbehaving Bodies’, exploring the representation of chronic illness.

Former Samaritans helpline volunteer Katy Georgiou recalls the desperate voices she heard during her night shifts, and those whose isolation she helped to alleviate.

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