Victor Frankl was a renowned neurologist, psychologist, and philosopher who lived in Vienna, Austria, after the war.
One late night, he received a phone call from a woman he did not know. She was crying and spoke hysterically, “I’m in a state of despair. I’m depressed. I don’t want to live anymore. I want to take my own life.”
The good doctor spent over an hour with her on the telephone, calming her, reassuring her, and giving her every reason to believe that there was hope for the future and begging her not to take her life.
He did not know the outcome until some weeks later, when he was walking in the street and a woman came up to him and said, “Do you remember me? Do you know who I am?”
“No, I don’t know who you are.”
“I’m the woman who called you in the middle of the night, crying and so desperate that I wanted to take my own life.”
“I’m so happy to see that you’re alive, that you didn’t commit suicide, that you listened to me. Thank God.”
And then he said to her, “Tell me which argument, which reason, what did I say that was most compelling that changed your mind? I want to share it with other patients who feel as you did.”
“It was nothing you said that convinced me not to go through with it.”
The doctor was shocked. “So, why didn’t you commit suicide the night we talked?”
“When I hung up the phone, I said to myself, a world in which a stranger is willing to talk to me and give me an hour and a half of their time to try to reassure me and encourage me, is a world still worth living in.”
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