An Invitation to Live: Rethinking Suicide Prevention | Barry Taylor

After 38 years in suicide prevention, Barry Taylor believes the work is not simply about stopping death. It is about listening to distress, restoring hope and helping people rediscover what might invite them to live.

Content note: This article discusses suicide, suicidal thoughts, depression, anxiety, trauma and mental distress.

When Barry Taylor speaks about suicide prevention, he does not begin with a checklist. He begins with a person.

He asks whether we can remain with someone in their distress without immediately trying to fix them. Can we listen closely enough to understand not only what has happened in their life, but why life feels unbearable today? Can we recognise the part of them that is overwhelmed while also hearing the quieter voice that still wants to live?

This way of thinking emerged from almost four decades of professional experience across New Zealand and Australia. It was also transformed by Barry’s own experience of chronic depression, anxiety and suicidal distress.

His story brings together two forms of knowledge: the knowledge developed through research, policy, training and community action, and the knowledge that can only come from living at the edge himself.

The early years of suicide prevention in New Zealand

Barry’s involvement in suicide prevention began in the late 1980s, when New Zealand was becoming increasingly aware of youth suicide. Through what was then the National Youth Council, he helped lead the country’s first national response.

The work included training, the publication of Under Pressure and a pioneering report on suicide among gay and lesbian young people—an issue that had rarely been publicly acknowledged at the time. The report eventually took Barry into government, where he helped implement its findings as the Office of Youth Affairs developed into the Ministry of Youth Affairs.

That early work became the beginning of a much wider journey. A Winston Churchill Fellowship took him to England and the United States to study suicide prevention. He later worked across Australia on youth suicide, workforce development, postvention, community mobilisation, mental wellbeing and suicide prevention for LGBTIQ+ communities.

Barry’s career has included national strategies and government initiatives, but he repeatedly returns to one principle: communities need the trust, resources and freedom to develop responses grounded in their own realities.

Centralised programmes can provide important structures, but communities are not interchangeable. A rural area, a culturally diverse urban neighbourhood, an older population and an LGBTIQ+ community each carry different experiences, strengths and risks. Effective suicide prevention must understand those differences rather than applying the same generic response everywhere.

When survival creates isolation

One of the projects that deeply influenced Barry involved the sons and daughters of Vietnam veterans in Australia. Many had grown up in families affected by addiction, mental illness, inconsistent parenting, violence or emotional outbursts.

They often became highly self-reliant because they had learned to survive by looking after themselves. Yet the same self-reliance could make it difficult to trust others, accept support or allow people close when life became overwhelming.

Barry describes this as a form of “double jeopardy”: the qualities that helped someone survive their early life could later leave them isolated during a crisis.

The work changed how he understood the relationship between trauma and suicide. What presents as depression may have deeper roots in trauma, disrupted attachment or experiences carried across families and generations. This does not mean that every experience is identical or predetermined. It means that the story beneath the distress matters.

For Barry, prevention cannot be separated from the conditions in which people live. Childhood experiences, loneliness, belonging, culture, sexuality, financial hardship and relationships all shape a person’s wellbeing. Suicide cannot be understood only as an individual problem removed from the person’s social world.

The expert who also lived with depression

For most of his adult life, Barry lived with depression while maintaining a successful professional life. He jokingly described himself as a “high-functioning depressive.” Every few years he would become unwell, visit his GP, take medication or attend counselling, begin to feel better and then return to the same life—until the depression returned.

Eventually, that familiar cycle changed. Barry experienced the darkest and most persistent depression of his life. For the first time, he had to stop working. He used his savings, experienced financial hardship and withdrew from people because of shame.

Even as someone with extensive knowledge of suicide prevention and mental wellbeing, he was not protected from internalised stigma. Intellectually, he could challenge the idea that mental illness made someone weak or flawed. Emotionally, he still felt incapacitated and ashamed.

After repeatedly beginning to recover and then collapsing again, Barry realised that his depression was chronic and accompanied by anxiety. He had to adjust to a different understanding of recovery.

Recovery was not a straight journey towards becoming permanently well. It meant learning to recognise when his depression was active, understanding what he needed and responding with greater compassion and kindness towards himself.

His lived experience changed his professional understanding. It showed him the limitations of approaches that reduce people to symptoms, diagnoses or levels of risk. It also revealed how frightening suicidal distress can be: when a person becomes a danger to themselves, they can feel that they can no longer rely even on their own mind.

Barry has described the writing he hopes to develop from this experience as The Suicidal Suicidologist: Learning from the Edge. The phrase captures the essence of his position—not an expert standing safely outside the experience, but someone whose knowledge has been reshaped from within it.

The Four Cs: being present before trying to fix

Barry now speaks about four foundations for suicide-prevention work: being comfortable, confident, competent and compassionate.

Being comfortable means being able to remain with someone in their distress without rushing to silence, correct or rescue them. It is the ability to communicate: “I see you, and I hear your pain.”

Being confident means being willing to act. It requires reaching out and beginning a conversation instead of waiting for someone in distress to find the words or courage to ask for help.

Being competent means having the knowledge and skills to respond appropriately. Compassion alone is not enough if a person does not know how to listen, inquire or recognise what is changing.

Finally, every action must be grounded in compassion. The person cannot become a problem to manage or a set of boxes to tick.

Risk-assessment tools may identify the presence of risk, but Barry questions whether they can tell us what we most need to know about the individual in front of us. A low, moderate or high rating does not explain what happened today, what the person has lost, what they still value or what might help them cope through the next few hours.

The deeper work begins with curiosity.

From preventing death to inviting life

Barry offers a simple but profound reframing:

“Suicide prevention is inviting people to live.”

He follows it with a question that sits at the heart of the conversation:

“If the universe sent you an invitation today to live, what would need to be on it for you to accept?”

The question does not minimise suicidal distress. It opens a different doorway into it.

Often, a person does not necessarily want life itself to end; they want unbearable pain, grief, shame or exhaustion to stop. The task is therefore not only to argue against suicide, but to understand what has made living feel impossible and what might make today slightly more bearable, tolerable and gentle.

Barry calls for courageous conversations about pain. People may be able to repeat the history of their illness or trauma because they have told it many times. But can they express how life feels today? What changed between yesterday and today? What has become overwhelming? What support, connection or relief would help them respond to a suicidal thought rather than be pulled further into it?

This is what Barry calls a “conversation of inquiry.” It is a two-way human conversation rather than an interrogation. It is curious about the person’s story, but it is equally attentive to their strengths, resources, relationships and remaining reasons to live.

Becoming a custodian of hope

Barry recognises that a person in despair may not be able to feel hopeful. Asking them simply to “have hope” can place another burden on someone who is already overwhelmed.

Instead, another person can become a custodian of hope—someone who holds hope on their behalf until they are able to carry it again themselves.

This involves more than optimism. It requires genuine interest in the person’s welfare and wellbeing. It means strengthening connection, coping, purpose and meaning—the protective parts of life that may have gradually diminished before a crisis became visible.

Barry prefers the active language of a coping plan. The question becomes: what do I need in order to cope, and how can I reconnect with the resources already available within me and around me?

In his own life, wellbeing is found in people, experiences and routines that remind him of the version of Barry who can be well while still living with depression. It may be cold-water swimming, gardening, going to a film, completing a gentle task or caring for the cat who expects to be fed. These actions do not pretend that depression has disappeared. They help him remain connected to life when it is active.

Barry also challenges what he calls the “cult of happiness.” A meaningful life cannot be measured by whether someone feels happy all the time. Happiness changes from moment to moment. A profoundly satisfying life can still contain sadness, struggle and depression.

What sustains life may instead be aroha, manaakitanga, purpose, reciprocity and the knowledge that other people believe in us.

The essence of Barry Taylor

The essence of Barry is not simply the length of his career or the number of programmes he has helped develop. It is his willingness to keep allowing experience to change what he thinks he knows.

He brings the strategic mind of a health sociologist, the memory of someone who helped shape early suicide-prevention responses, the humility of someone who has lived with depression and the compassion of someone who understands what it means to lose sight of hope.

He does not separate expertise from humanity. He asks systems to see the person, communities to create their own responses and practitioners to remain present when distress cannot be quickly solved.

At the end of the conversation, Barry is asked what he would say to his younger self. His answer gathers together everything that came before it:

“You are loved, you are cherished, and you don’t have to be perfect.”

He would remind that younger boy that his sexuality and faith are both part of who he is, and he would speak to him gently and softly.

Perhaps that is also the essence of Barry’s invitation to live: not a demand to become fearless, happy or fixed, but an invitation to be seen fully, treated gently and reminded that our lives still hold meaning—even when we cannot yet feel it for ourselves.

Watch the full conversation: An Invitation to Live: Rethinking Suicide Prevention | Barry Taylor