Visceral Volunteer Work: The Emotional Labour of Crisis Helpline Volunteers

Crisis helplines provide frontline support in suicide prevention, yet the emotional labour of volunteers who sustain these services has received little attention. Drawing on 40 interviews with volunteers across five branches of a U.K. crisis helpline, this article introduces visceral volunteer work to conceptualise a form of volunteering characterised by the emotional demands arising from sustained exposure to others’ distress. This study identifies four interrelated emotional practices: readiness, immersion, containment and recovery. Through these practices, it shows how emotional labour extends beyond individual encounters and operates as a continuous and cyclical process. It further uses the unpaid context of volunteering to show how this labour is regulated and sustained outside conventional wage-based and managerial forms of control. Together, these contributions make visible the demanding emotional work obscured by conventional accounts of volunteering while extending theorisation of emotional labour beyond paid employment.