Full disclosure – I am not a Blogger. For most of my life, I was not an academic, but here I am, and I’ve been asked to write a blog about our first  Discovering Liveability event. So, bear with me as I try my best to share what happened on the 1st of September, when we held a soft launch of our Lived and Living Experience Hub – and it was amazing!  

What Even Is a Soft Launch? 

To be honest, when we started planning this event, I had no idea. The “hub” doesn’t exist yet and won’t formally be a thing until 2027. So, this event was really just a launch of the idea. Although we know what its core will be, we want to co-produce everything around it. That is why this early engagement event was important; we want to build it together.  

Making it Real 

The hub is this ethereal (not real, or otherworldly), intangible thing that was difficult for me to wrap my head around when I joined the project (not so long ago), so the thought of trying to explain it to lots of other people and get them excited about it was a little scary. Not only that, but the whole point of the event was to get input and ideas from other people about what it should or could look like and doing that in a meaningful way with a group of almost 50 people who hadn’t met before.  

But thankfully, we have an amazing team, who each played their part in helping to organise and deliver the event. Firstly, a big shout out to Alice Hopkins and Asia Podgorska on drums and bass guitar – the beat of our band – working away in the background to make sure the stage was set, and we could perform. They organised everything from the Save the Dates and Bookitbee page to our IT and comms on the day!  

How it ran… 

We split the 90-minute online session into three smaller 25-minute chunks to allow short comfort breaks between our talks and discussions. No one wants to be staring at a screen for 90 minutes straight and it meant people were able to dip in out a bit more and stay engaged better. 

First UP …  

Amy Chandler our lovely leader (Principal Investigator) kicked things off by telling people about the Discovering Liveability Research project, and where it came from. Amy, and many of the others on the research team, have been working together over many years on lots of different research projects exploring how suicide is thought about, and understood, and what suicide prevention policies say about it and do (Links here to suicide cultures and suicide as/in politics). Amy explained how their previous studies had involved using qualitative research methods, getting out into communities to really find out about people’s experiences, analysing policy documents and using arts-based workshops to explore what these meant to people. All of this work highlighted how the main focus of suicide prevention was on saving lives and crisis intervention. The social and structural issues that can make life unliveable, although acknowledged, are not central to suicide prevention. So instead of asking how we can prevent people from dying, Discovering Liveability will explore what suicide prevention might look like if we focused on making environments and societies that are more Liveable. 

Amy went on to explain that Discovering Liveability is an ambitious seven-year research project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, with partners from the University of Edinburgh, University of Lincoln and Mind in Camden. The work of the project has been divided into four main work packages:   

• Work Package 1-centres lived and living experiences of suicide  

• Work Package 2 – explores the role of community-based and peer-led services in creating and sustaining liveable lives 

• Work Package 3- is about disrupting suicide and the role of activism in creating liveable lives 

• Work Package 4 - looks at how the State (government, politicians) contribute to making lives more/less liveable  

Our team will use lots of different qualitative methods to investigate alternatives to suicide prevention, including ethnography, in-depth interviewing, critical policy analysis, arts-based, and other collaborative approaches.  

At the centre of our work, is lived and living experiences and – eventually – the ‘hub’. Amy talked about how most of our team, from our PI, researchers and co-investigators to administrators and advisory group members, have their own different lived or living experience of suicide. Throughout Discovering Liveability, we will grow and build further networks with organisations and individuals who have lived and living experiences of suicide, including practitioners, artists, and activists.  

Drum Roll: Hazel introduces the hub  

After a few questions from the audience and a short break, Hazel Marzetti then had the job of introducing people to the lived and living experience hub. And although I am biased, I thought she did an excellent job of explaining how although it will be a space for networking, knowledge exchange, and collaboration. Importantly, it will house six lived experience researchers,. with each of them given the time, funds, resources, training, and support to conduct their own co-produced suicide research projects; creating new knowledge.  

Hazel explained that although it won’t launch officially until 2027 when we have our team of lived experience researchers in post, preparation is underway. To inform the development of the hub, the research team is researching how lived and living experiences have been and are being used in suicide research. We are doing a literature review, firstly considering how it has been used, defined, and experienced in academic research. We are also connecting with and visiting other research teams around the world who are also engaged in this work to learn from them and think about what works well and the challenges involved. Hazel told everyone how Sarah Huque had just returned from a site visit to Canada (WOW!), and that Hazel herself was going off to Australia on a site visit in November (Lucky duck). We have plans to visit India in 2026 to learn from community-based support and research projects there (hosted by the Mariwala Institute), and closer to home, Fiona Malpass will be visiting projects here in the UK.  

All of this learning, together with our continued conversations and collaborations with a range of activists, community organisations, and people with lived and living experiences, will help to co-create a research hub grounded in and reaching out to those with lived and living experiences of suicide.  

The best bit… 

The whole point of the event was to hear from other people about what they thought the hub should or could look like, how they might want to engage with it, and the kinds of events and activities they would want it to deliver. We broke up into five breakout rooms, and were so pleased at how generous everyone was, sharing their thoughts, experiences, and ideas for the hub. Some of the main discussion themes were around:  

• Knowledge exchange, and creating a knowledge bank – a resource to find recent reports / research evidence as well as different types of knowledge e.g., film, arts  

• Safeguarding; creating a safe, trauma informed space that honors diversity of experience 

• Space to connect, network and share experiences and learning  

• Arts based sessions & creative methods of engagement 

We used Padlets to capture the conversations and allow folks to add any thoughts they had afterwards. We have kept one open until the end of October 2025, so if you want to add your ideas or opinions, there is still time!    

Feedback and Next steps 

Overall, the feedback from the event was hugely positive. People were excited at the opportunity to be involved and connect with others involved in this work. We were really pleased to hear that the event had felt welcoming and that people felt they could share their opinions openly and were genuinely heard.  

We loved that so many different people came, and we want to build on this.  We want to create an open platform that everyone who wants to can access and engage with. We understand the importance of engaging with groups and communities whose voices are not always heard in relation to suicide prevention. If you haven’t signed up to be on our list of collaborators, please do! This link takes you to a short form so we can keep in touch about engagement opportunities, or if you want to know more, please contact us at discoveringliveability@ed.ac.uk.  

Thanks for being kind enough to make it to the end of my first-ever blog! I hope you enjoyed it.  

Watch this space:  

This is just the beginning and over the next year we hope you will join us for a variety of engaging, and creative activities which might include things like: 

• Fireside chats … an open space for lived experience suicide researchers to come together to connect, chat, and share the highs and lows of their work.  

• International Site Visits Webinar: Sarah and Hazel get the chance to share all about their travel and learnings in Canada and Australia.  

• (Maybe) A watch party – to be confirmed, but we are exploring fun, arts-based ways to keep the conversation going.  

 

• By Lynne Gilmour

Sep 25, 2025

The Discovering Liveability Project builds on work in two previous research projects (Suicide Cultures and Suicide In/As Politics). Our project is moving beyond and challenging the current dominant focus on the prevention of death at the point of crisis (Marzetti et al. 2022), towards exploring possibilities and potentialities for living. Our analysis will thus not be limited to suicide prevention policies but will also examine broader governmental policies and practices which invite uneven possibilities for living in the UK. Given high rates of suicide reported for some marginalised populations, such policies might include austerity, housing, immigration, and policing, to name a few. As part of this work, we are engaging with the burgeoning academic literature on ‘liveability’ and ‘lived experience’ and want to share some initial reflections on what we’ve learnt from two of our first reading groups. We read Banerjea and Browne’s ‘Liveable Lives’ (2023) and ‘The Politics of People with Lived Experience’ (2016) by Jijian Voronka (references below).

Situated in the contexts of Brighton in the UK, and Kolkata in India, Banerjea and Browne unsettle the ways in which the presence of progressive LGBTQ policy and legislation in the UK, creates the illusion of better lives for LGBTQ folk. As the authors highlight, the presence or absence of LGBTQ+ rights does not necessarily translate as a measure of un/liveability. Whilst we acknowledge that ‘progressive’ policies may only create an illusion of better lives, for our project, it is nevertheless important to move beyond the narrow focus on death prevention which currently dominates suicide prevention. Such a focus often fails to consider the broader policy landscape. Even though suicide prevention policies are seen as a measure of governmental interest in and commitment to addressing suicide, suicide prevention policies alone do not necessarily translate into sustaining liveability. We therefore need to consider how un/liveability is constituted at the intersections of other broader policy regimes. Such an approach highlights suicide prevention and un/liveability as an interdisciplinary and complicated endeavour.

However, following Banerjea and Browne, broadening our focus from suicide prevention policy alone, also necessitates recognising the limits of policy, the presence of which does not necessarily translate to liveability for all. Indeed, the existence of suicide prevention policy in the UK since 2002 can be read to suggest Britain’s progressiveness compared to other nations without suicide prevention policy. However, the globalising of Western mental illness and suicide knowledge has received much critique for furthering colonial control (Mills 2014) and disrupting other ways of knowing and responding to suicide/ality (Zantingh and Ansloos 2024). Indeed, the reading of Britain as developed vis-a-vis its commitment to prevent suicide, is tempered by the fact that suicide prevention prioritises a depoliticised reading of suicide (Button and Marsh 2020; Marzetti et al. 2022), and moreover that suicide prevention policies co-exist with policies (such as PREVENT and Hostile Environment) that actively invite and craft uneven living conditions for many (Mills 2018, 2020).

A key inspiration of the book is Banerjea and Browne’s articulation of how life is lived beyond (albeit always in relation to) rights and legislation, moving beyond deficit narratives of people living with the desire to die (Krebs 2023). In this vein, our project moves beyond the analysis of policy and parliamentary debates, to foreground lived experience to learn about what makes lives liveable, or not. As Banerjea and Browne highlight, resisting reproducing a homogenous and linear idea of what liveability is, restricts us from defining liveability, and Voronka’s work on the politics of lived experience research was helpful here. The inclusion of lived experience perspectives has the potential to disrupt hierarchical colonial power relations of researcher and researched. Nevertheless, “relying on ‘lived experience’ to produce research... risks further entrenching models of ‘difference as deficit’ and thus sanctioning the ongoing business of mental health systems” (Voronka 2016, 192). Given the dominant and pervasive medicalised understanding of suicide as mental illness (Marsh 2010), lived experience knowledge can be used to reproduce dominant knowledges on suicidality, rather than necessarily challenging them. With our focus not only on those who identify as having lived experience of suicidality, but also those more broadly affected by policies and politics of unliveability, we will be continuing to attend carefully to how we are conceptualising ‘lived experience’ knowledge, so that it doesn’t lose specificity and its radical potential for disruption.

• By Dr Emily Yue & Dr Alex Oaten

References

Banerjea, N., Browne, K. (2023). Liveable Lives: Living and Surviving LGBTQ Equalities in India and the UK. London,: Bloomsbury Academic. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350286818

Button, M. E., & Marsh, I. (2020). Suicide and Social Justice: New Perspectives on the Politics of Suicide and Suicide Prevention. Routledge.

Krebs, E. (2023). Queering the Desire to Die: Access Intimacy as Worldmaking for Survival. Journal of Homosexuality, 70(1), 168-191. https://doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2022.2103874

Marsh, I. (2010). Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth. Cambridge University Press.

Marzetti, H., Oaten, A., Chandler, A., & Jordan, A. (2022). Self-inflicted. Deliberate. Death-intentioned. A critical policy analysis of UK suicide prevention policies 2009-2019. Journal of Public Mental Health, 21(1), 4-14. https://doi.org/10.1108/JPMH-09-2021-0113

Mills, C. (2014). Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The psychiatrization of the majority world (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203796757

Mills, C. (2018). ‘Dead people don’t claim’: A psychopolitical autopsy of UK austerity suicides. Critical Social Policy, 38(2), 302-322. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261018317726263

Mills, C. (2020). Strengthening Borders and Toughening up on Welfare: Deaths by Suicide in the Uk’s Hostile Environment. In I. Marsh & M. Button (Eds.), Suicide and Social Justice: New Perspectives on the Politics of Suicide and Suicide Prevention (pp. 71-86). Routledge.

Voronka, J. (2016). The Politics of ‘people with lived experience’ Experiential Authority and the Risks of Strategic Essentialism. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 23(3), 189-201. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ppp.2016.0017.

Zantingh, D., Hey, B., Ansloos, J. (2024). Unsettling Settler-Colonial Suicidology: Indigenous Theories of Justice in Indigenous Suicide Research. In: Dueck, A., Sundararajan, L. (eds) Values and Indigenous Psychology in the Age of the Machine and Market. Palgrave Studies in Indigenous Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-53196-5_6

Apr 10, 2025

Discovering Liveability still feels like a ‘new’ research project, but it builds on several years of research that different members of the team have been involved in. One of these is the Suicide Cultures: Reimagining Suicide Research project (https://blogs.ed.ac.uk/suicide-cultures/suicide-cultures-seminars/). Since 2021, the Suicide Cultures project has hosted regular online seminars which have featured a wide range of scholars (academics, practitioners and activists) sharing their work on (or relating to) suicide. These seminars have provided a valuable space to talk, reflect and share different perspectives on suicide, informed by diverse disciplines and positions.

Between 2021 and 2024 the seminars were mainly organised by Suicide Cultures PhD student Emily Yue (who is now a postdoctoral researcher on Discovering Liveability – link). Emily worked with Asia Podgorska (admin assistant on both Suicide Cultures and Discovering Liveability) to schedule speakers, book times and dates, set up recordings and host Q&As. You can see a full list of the Suicide Cultures seminars here, including (in most cases) recordings of the seminars.

It’s hard to pick a favourite, as each seminar brings different perspectives and insights. However, some highlights for me include hearing Priti Sridhar and Saisha Manan from Mariwala Health Initiative, India, sharing about the different projects that they support, each of which challenges dominant narratives about suicide and who is ‘suicidal’. Another from 2022, was hearing Zoreh BayatRizi’s sociologically informed work on the history of knowledge about suicide.

Several of our seminars were given by colleagues who are now part of our project advisory board for Discovering Liveability, including Scott Fitzpatrick, and China Mills. One of our most popular seminars featured Jennifer White (Victoria University, and advisory group member on Discovering Liveability) and Discovering Liveability Co-Investigator Fiona Malpass in conversation, focusing on the issue of ethics in suicide research, drawing on the Critical Suicide Studies statement of ethics. This conversation was opened up to bring in other attendees, in a carefully held space. The seminar was a lovely example of what it is possible to achieve when the more usual presentation format is shifted to a more discursive and interactive one.

We are planning to launch a new seminar series that will be hosted by the Discovering Liveability project, building on some of the work we achieved through the Suicide Cultures seminars, but hosting perhaps different conversations about ‘liveability’ and ‘lived/living experiences’. In this, we will aim to experiment further with the online seminar format, and see what other kinds of conversations and engagements we might be able to make space for in the coming years.

In the meantime the Suicide Cultures seminars continue in 2025. On March 24^th we are hosting Kamesha Spates, who is pioneering sociological, qualitatively driven work with Black women on suicide – a group who continue to be neglected and overlooked in much suicide research. April 30^th will feature Lynn Tang sharing her work on protest suicides in Hong Kong – addressing important intersections between experiences of suicide and political contexts. Finally, our May seminar will be with Caroline Lenette, who is leading and nurturing a range of decolonial, creative approaches to working with and researching suicide – particularly with marginalised migrant groups and Indigenous communities in Australia (sign up for this seminar will be available soon, you can see a special issue of Social Sciences that Caroline is guest editing here).

Feb 20, 2025