Kintsugi Heroes
Rethinking Suicide Prevention with Hayley Purdon
Hayley Purdon · 62 min
A PhD researcher who once hid a suicide attempt as a headache is now dismantling the systems that made her too afraid to tell the truth.
Kintsugi Studio
Kintsugi Heroes
Hayley Purdon · 62 min
A PhD researcher who once hid a suicide attempt as a headache is now dismantling the systems that made her too afraid to tell the truth.
You don't have to be in crisis to call.
Hayley Purdon spent years telling people her suicide attempt was an accident, a bad headache, anything but the truth. It took joining a lived experience committee in 2012 before she found language to describe what she'd been through, and years more before she could say it out loud to the people around her. By then, she was already deep into work that would reshape how she understood her own survival.
Before the fracture, Hayley's life looked ordered from the outside. Her parents gave her everything. But that protection left her unprepared when big emotions arrived in her teenage years. An eating disorder became the only way she knew to cope with anxiety so intense it made living feel unbearable. When she tried to reach out, the responses she got made her hide deeper. A doctor listing medical consequences instead of asking what was underneath. A boyfriend too young to know what to do with her pain. A therapist who wasn't the right fit. It took finding a clinical psychologist trained in mindfulness-based work to finally name the anxiety driving everything, and peer support networks where people understood without flinching to make survival feel possible.
Now Hayley holds a PhD examining what it's like to work in suicide prevention while carrying your own lived experience of it. She's spent nearly two decades in the sector and has become increasingly critical of how it operates. She's tired of the hero narrative, the language of saving fragile people, the assumption that someone who has been suicidal is too broken to contribute their knowledge. What people need, she argues, is not rescue. They need someone willing to sit with them in the dark and ask questions that honor what they're feeling. She likes who she has become. The experiences that nearly broke her built the person she is now.
⚠️ Content advisory: this episode discusses suicide & self-harm prevention, which some listeners may find distressing.
If you need support, you're not alone. Help is available: • Lifeline (24/7 crisis support): 13 11 14 · lifeline.org.au
Every story here belongs to the person who lived it. They said yes to sharing it, and we sat with it carefully before it went up. Nothing here is exaggerated and nothing is used without permission. Read how we handle these stories ↗
Kintsugi Heroes · Registered Australian not-for-profit · kintsugiheroes.com.au ↗