It's easy for Paul Brooks to tell if the passenger jumping into the back of his taxi is up for a chat.
The veteran driver starts by offering different routes to get to the destination, which he says breaks the ice.
"That's when they tend to start getting a bit chatty," he says.
Mr Brooks has been driving in Melbourne for about 27 years, almost always on the night shift.
Often, the journeys end in a funny story. There was the time a young couple were discussing chucking a sickie and skipping work the next day, when Mr Brooks realised he knew the woman's boss and told her "you probably should go to work tomorrow".
If he had to put a figure on it, he'd say about 20 per cent of his passengers open up and share parts of their lives from the back seat.
"Sometimes when they get in, they say 'just drive, get me out of here'," he says.
"That normally leads to a longer conversation."
He jokingly dubs this part of his work "free therapy". But the 50-year-old says there's a more confronting side to the job.
He's one of the drivers registered to pick up people to remove them from domestic violence situations.
"And you'll take a single person or a mother with a couple of kids, and they'll try and get as much of their luggage and belongings in the boot, and you'll drive them from one side of town to the other, or somewhere else," he says.
As someone who witnessed domestic violence as a child, it can sometimes hit close to home.
He admits there have been times he's left a job, driven around the corner and shed a tear.
Like most drivers, Mr Brooks has no formal training in mental health first aid, or how to deal with vicarious trauma.
But he often finds himself on the frontline.
On a recent job, he picked up a woman he believed was a mother. He says they stopped at a service station for her to buy a bottle of water and it then became clear she went to the bathroom to use drugs.
"You pick up fares like that, and I tend to think about it for the rest of the night," he says.
As he talks, it's clear he often finds himself thinking about the barriers for people on the margins of society to access help.
Vicarious trauma is just part of the job for some workers
The Commonwealth's Australian Institute of Health and Welfare suggests about one in five Australian adults has experienced a mental disorder in the past 12 months.
The data indicates about half of Australians will experience a mental disorder over their lifetimes, with the institute noting "a person does not need to meet the criteria for a mental illness or mental disorder to be negatively affected by their mental health".
Psychiatry professor Andrea Phelps is the deputy director of the Phoenix Australia Centre for Posttraumatic Mental Health at the University of Melbourne.
The centre speaks to a range of people for mental health training and research. Many are involved in traditionally frontline jobs like defence or have experienced natural disasters.
Others work in industries where trauma may not be front of mind.
Professor Phelps says often, those workers have never thought about the impact interacting with distressed, traumatised or abusive people at work was having on them.
"They've just accepted that there are difficult calls that they have to take sometimes, and that kind of thing," Professor Phelps says.
But exposure to other people who are experiencing difficult situations can cause vicarious or second-hand trauma.
"We're not just talking about feeling empathy for someone, we're talking about people who actually then suffer themselves, as a result of having supported someone else," Professor Phelps says.
"And then that's obviously something that we need to try and avoid."
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Playing the role of security guard, therapist and help desk
At the front desk at a busy bulk-billing medical clinic in Melbourne's northern suburbs, Mary McCloskey's job description is to take calls, sign in patients and help with office admin.
But she says she has somehow ended up being "a magnet for the more sensitive situations", or for people seeking medical advice she is not legally allowed to give.
"And I suppose I'm a good listener, and don't like to hurry someone off the phone when all I can offer is to hear what they have to say, and just be an empathetic human being with them in the moment," she says.
Those more personal conversations became more frequent during Melbourne's extended lockdowns — something Mr Brooks notes about the taxi industry too.
The pandemic also saw an increase in abusive behaviour directed towards retail and hospitality staff, especially as mask and vaccine mandates came into effect.
Ms McCloskey strongly remembers one conversation in particular, when Victoria introduced vaccine mandates last year. A man told her over the phone he would self harm if he was unable to get an exemption from a doctor.
She kept talking to him, "essentially just trying to keep him on the phone so that he could calm down with me, and feel heard".
"By the end of the conversation he had calmed, he apologised for what he said and I told the doctor to call him as soon as he had a chance," she says.
She says she and her fellow receptionists have received customer service training and got group advice from a counsellor.
But she still summarises the impact on her mental health as "brutal" and would love to have more training.
The 'three d***head rule' and other coping strategies
Professor Phelps says there are broadly three ways vicarious trauma can present — feelings of psychological distress or helplessness, intrusive thoughts and/or physical symptoms like tension and increased heart rates.
Longer-term, people experiencing vicarious trauma can feel perpetually on edge, have disturbed sleep and begin to withdraw socially. Some people use drugs or alcohol to cope.
Ms McCloskey says she's experienced some of the physical and mental symptoms, especially during lockdowns when human contact outside of work was limited.
Professor Phelps says in training programs run by the Phoenix centre, the focus is on supervision, managing workloads and training people to be aware of the signs of trauma. Strategies to connect with loved ones or other points of joy are another focus, she says.
"In the sorts of jobs that you're talking about where it's not actually part of the job description … the onus does tend to fall back on the individual," she says.
Mr Brooks has developed his own strategies, including what he called the "three d***head rule" — if he has more than three difficult customers in a row, he will head home, even if he's only just begun his shift.
But he says formal training would be invaluable.
Good intentions are helpful, but correct skills are key
Training programs and awareness campaigns have emerged in a growing number over the past decade, including services which train hairdressers and beauty workers to spot domestic violence.
Workplaces and individuals can also access mental health first aid or psychological first aid training, which provides tools to respond to people experiencing mental ill-health. The first course was developed in Australia by Mental Health First Aid in 2000.
Ziyad Serhan is the founder and chief executive of EducAID Au.
The Sydney-based organisation works across a range of schools and workplaces but has a particular focus on culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
"Individuals might have good intentions and their hearts in the right place," he says.
"But if that's not paired with the correct skills, that can be quite detrimental when intervening to help somebody."
Mr Serhan, a former teacher, says all people should have a base-level training in mental health, and schools were a good place for that to start.
Late last year, the NSW government announced it would spend $130 million to train rural residents in mental health first aid. Other governments have funded similar, smaller programs for specific industries and demographics.
Personal trainer Iona Harmony took it upon themselves to complete a mental health first aid course, trauma-informed care training and a number of other courses which they say inform their work.
"We all have mental health and it's key that when you are dealing with clients, customers, employees, the public, that you understand what role — however big or small — you play in another person's wellbeing."
They say people often choose to share their burdens during exercise, as it's rare time they have "away from work, family and stress, where they can let go and let it out".
It's often the same in the relative anonymity of a taxi ride.
Paul Brooks has heard more about the lives of strangers than most, and thinks his colleagues could have a bigger role to play in providing help.
But for more training or even flyers for referral services, he says drivers would need to be paid more. He is pragmatic when he concedes higher pay is "a whole other can of worms" that is unlikely to happen.
"People know cab drivers are there," he says.
"If we trained our cab drivers a little better than we do, I personally believe the streets would be a hell of a lot safer."
