Chad Varah, an Anglican priest and sex therapist who started the Samaritans movement, an early telephone help line credited with making significant contributions to suicide prevention, died Thursday at the Basingstoke hospital near London. He was 95.
A spokeswoman for the organization said she did not know the cause of death but that he had been ill.
Varah started the Samaritans in 1953 with a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers who would come to his historic London church and use "active listening therapy" to help hundreds of people who contemplated suicide every day.
He once said he thought of his Samaritans as "fire-spotters" who "keep watch for the conflagrations that break out in human lives."
The organization became a massive volunteer force, with 202 branches in Britain and the Republic of Ireland and including a system of drop-in centers and home visit services. It operates in more than 40 countries as Befrienders Worldwide.
Varah was widely recognized as having pioneered the phone help-line for those threatening suicide, and he received honors from the American Assn. of Suicidology as well as from Queen Elizabeth II.
But the volunteer organization was also criticized at times for being too passive with callers in the name of nonjudgment. One of the movement's founding principles was that a caller "does not lose the freedom to make his own decision, including the decision to take his own life."
Varah considered the Samaritans a "spiritual alternative" to the police emergency line, especially in its early years, when attempting suicide was criminalized.
Volunteers, armed with sympathy and the basics of psychotherapy, fielded anonymous calls from across the psychological spectrum. As Varah explained, some people phoned up after midnight to complain they were unloved. Others expressed suicidal thoughts or violent urges against their unfaithful spouses.
Like the callers, volunteer staffers -- doctors, stockbrokers and secretaries -- are also anonymous, a step meant to underscore the mission over individual personality. Diana Churchill, daughter of former prime minister Winston Churchill, was a volunteer, and Varah revealed that fact only after she took her own life in 1963.
Edward Chad Varah was born Nov. 12, 1911, in Barton-on-Humber, Lincolnshire, where his father, a Church of England minister, was vicar.
