In early December, a 28-year-old Ghanaian artist and entrepreneur named Joseph Awuah-Darko announced on Instagram that he wanted to die. His battles with bipolar disorder had crushed his will to live, he said in a minute-long video, so he had moved to the Netherlands to pursue medically assisted death.

The post started with Mr. Awuah-Darko in tears, saying, “I’m just so tired,” then segued to a series of images of him having what looked like a pretty good time. Smiling and floating in shimmering blue water. Relaxing on a lawn in the shade of a tree. Pausing in contemplation on a wooden bridge.

Three days later, he followed up with one of the stranger dinner invitations in the history of dinner. As he navigated the obstacles of an officially sanctioned end, he wrote in a post, he would launch what he called “The Last Supper Project.” Anyone who wanted to cook an at-home meal for him could sign up on a calendar app linked to his Instagram bio. On the appointed evening, he would visit, and the assembled would converse, eat and connect.

“I want to find meaning again with people,” he said in the post, “while I have time still left on earth.”

Within a few days, thousands of people reached out. To date, Mr. Awuah-Darko has attended 152 Last Suppers. He has boarded trains to visit homes in Berlin, Paris, Antwerp and Milan. He has traveled to cities all over the Netherlands and to dozens of Amsterdam neighborhoods. Those who don’t cook have treated him to high-end bistros, where a meal costs $100 per person, and to Burger King.

Along the way, he has captured the interactions with videos and photographs on Instagram, a bespoke scrapbook with a soundtrack by Debussy, Radiohead and Roberta Flack and an artist’s eye for beauty. The meals look convivial and usually end with hugs. The hosts, and thousands of fans, appear buoyed by Mr. Awuah-Darko and his readiness to speak with candor about his innermost turmoil.

He’s essentially the charismatic star of a Gen Z home-cooking show, but he brings a rawness that is rare for social media and inspires people to root for him. When he wrote appreciatively about two sisters who served him a Persian dinner, he said he was in the throes of a depressive episode: “I cried heavily during the latter 2 hours of the dinner before they sent me home in a cab with a bouquet of flowers. All I did was show up and they held so much space for me.” The post received 10,000 likes. “If people will open their arms to a stranger to help them experience being alive more fully before choosing to exit forever,” one Instagram commenter wrote, “maybe there’s hope for all of us.”

Mental health experts, by contrast, are appalled. Mr. Awuah-Darko, they say, is implying that euthanasia is a legitimate answer for people with bipolar disorder, a treatable condition. And the parents of depressed children contend that his farewell tour romanticizes suicide.

“My daughter is in a fragile, emotional and impressionable state,” the mother of a suicidal young woman wrote, adding: “You are not helping anyone with this content. I’m begging you to shut it down. Please. Before you take my daughter with you.” Mr. Awuah-Darko presented the message on Instagram over a photograph of his face in despair, a tear rolling down his cheek.

Other detractors wonder if Mr. Awuah-Darko is running some kind of scam. They have compiled their suspicions in a Reddit forum documenting details, with links, of his very eventful life. This includes a breach-of-contract lawsuit for more than $260,000 filed in Ghana last year by an artist whom Mr. Awuah-Darko once represented as agent. Some doubt that Mr. Awuah-Darko truly intends to commit suicide.

But if this is a grift, it might be the world’s lamest. Last Supper hosts typically cover Mr. Awuah-Darko’s travel expenses, but he doesn’t earn any money from the meals. His sole means of income, he said, is a Substack newsletter that brings in about $2,000 a month.

So what exactly is Mr. Awuah-Darko up to? Is this a piece of performance art? Unconventional psychiatric treatment? A long goodbye, with catering? Whatever it is, his blend of light and dark has attracted a legion of devotees. He now has 542,000 Instagram followers and a singular place in the social media firmament as what could be called an assisted-death influencer.

As of late July, he also had something every bit as unexpected: a reason to live.

An Epic Talker

I first met Mr. Awuah-Darko over lunch at a sidewalk cafe in Amsterdam in late June. An elfin man with a shaved head, warm eyes and a wide smile, he was dressed in a charcoal-black sweater that ended a few inches above his knees. The sleeves extended into thumb holes, like Artful Dodger-style gloves. Beside him was his ever-present Bottega Veneta handbag, a lattice of black leather.

He looked like a priest from “Dune,” or perhaps a guy headed to a Comme des Garçons store. He spoke rapidly, as though trying to keep pace with his ideas.

“I talk very fast,” he explained. “I think even faster.”

Born in London, Mr. Awuah-Darko was raised in Ghana in one of that country’s richest families. His grandfather founded an insurance company, now called Vanguard Assurance, the core of a conglomerate with banking and real estate interests. The family is worth $650 million, according to news reports in Ghana.

Mr. Awuah-Darko says his family has cut him off financially because he is openly gay, a criminal offense in Ghana. He says he has occasionally slept outdoors and in hotel bathroom stalls. In May, he moved in with a Dutch couple he met late last year, and sleeps on a sofa in their gorgeous, minimalist apartment beside one of Amsterdam’s canals.

“I have the nicest version of homelessness now,” he said. “I live with Illi, my best friend, and her husband and two dogs.”

A painter of vividly colored abstract art, Mr. Awuah-Darko had used Instagram for years to post uplifting messages directed at other artists. (Example: “Just make it exist first. You can make it good later.”) The “Dear Artist” series, as he called it, netted some 200,000 followers. But given his darkening mental state, he said, it started to feel inauthentic. Mr. Awuah-Darko said he felt so overwhelmed by hopelessness during his low points that it was difficult to get out of bed.

After he announced the Last Supper Project, his follower count rose quickly and steadily. As macabre as it sounded, the idea tapped into deep reservoirs of empathy. Invitations flowed in.

The day after our lunch, I accompanied Mr. Awuah-Darko to Rotterdam for a supper hosted by Sydney Gruis, a 21-year-old student, along with her boyfriend and a female friend. The venue was the roof of a 19th-century church converted into student housing. The food was Indonesian fare prepared by her mother, and served in Tupperware. It was a cloudless, breezy summer night.

Mr. Awuah-Darko soliloquized for most of the first hour, and his audience was rapt. He talked about how his grandparents had met; his affection for the artist Francis Bacon; his professional identity (“I’ve always considered myself a writer who paints, not a painter who writes”); his childhood, which he called “tragically privileged”; his somewhat impulsive approach to love, which includes four former fiancés; how he hates being called “versatile” because it really means “unfocused.”

Mr. Awuah-Darko, it turns out, is an epic talker. His past, his failures, his flaws, errors, triumphs, the handful of famous people he has met and others he admires, quotes from Anthony Bourdain, Mark Twain, his grandfather — they burble in a cascade of words. It’s not patter, exactly. It’s more like a marathon jazz performance with a limited number of notes.

“I definitely love the ability and the capacity I have to download or externally process what I’m thinking, what I’m going through,” he told me later. “I do it because I have this weird desire to make sure that I’m not misunderstood, or make sure that people understand that I’m maybe more than meets the eye.”

If this makes him sound narcissistic, he concurs. Until a few days ago, the first words atop his Instagram account were “I AM NOT A GOOD PERSON,” just one of many ways he anticipates every stone you might sling at his character. Point out apparent contradictions — a homeless guy with a luxury handbag? — and he perks up. It’s more material to mine. (He says he acquired it long before his impoverished phase.)

On the roof in Rotterdam, he was interrupted only to politely suggest that he take a moment to eat. He nibbled briefly, then continued.

“I think of myself as a kind of barefoot anthropologist,” he said, holding his fork. “I love that I can sit in discomfort with people and talk about really, really difficult things.”

One of those things was suicidal ideation. As he raised the topic, he paused after noticing that Ms. Gruis’s friend was holding back tears.

“Sorry about that,” Mr. Awuah-Darko said.

“No, no, no, it’s all good,” she said. “I’ve struggled with this in my life a little bit. That’s why I love to listen.”

The principal appeal of Mr. Awuah-Darko, it seems, is his willingness to discuss what few people will say out loud. It makes his supporters feel less alone, less abnormal. His narrative is a kind of talk therapy in reverse.

During a lull, Ms. Gruis explained the genesis of the meal. A few months ago, she had been served up one of Mr. Awuah-Darko’s videos by Instagram’s uncanny algorithm. Unlike other Instagram celebrities, Mr. Awuah-Darko was offering something real, something offline. She immediately felt an urge to invite him to dinner.

“He seemed so warm, so open, I just wanted to connect with him, honestly,” she said. “I just wanted to be part of his journey.”

Mr. Awuah-Darko has encountered Last Supper hosts who have tried to talk him out of dying, evenings that felt like interventions. Nothing of the sort happened on this night.

“I don’t want Joseph to die, I don’t want him to not die,” Ms. Gruis said. “I just want him to get from life what he wants.” She turned to him. “And I want you to end your suffering in the way that you envision it. Because it’s your life, right?”

The evening ended affectionately on the sidewalk, with hugs. Ms. Gruis removed a bangle from her wrist and demanded that Mr. Awuah-Darko take it. He could give it back when they saw each other again, she said. It was as though the jewelry would serve as insurance against his extinction.

It seemed like the ideal Last Supper. Good food, a thoughtful audience. But during the drive to the Rotterdam train station, Mr. Awuah-Darko sounded glum. He had been asked some well-intentioned questions, about his background, about his artistic practice, and that can be “triggering,” he said. And the celebrity treatment creates a kind of pressure to perform.

A minute later, he softened.

“It’s more about being confronted with what is lacking in my life,” he explained, quietly, “when I leave something as beautiful as that.”

Prep School and Polo

Mr. Awuah-Darko grew up in a mansion in Accra where a chef cooked the family’s meals. His father kept a stable of horses imported from Argentina and South Africa and bred for polo. Joseph and his three younger brothers were competitive players.

He says he was diagnosed as bipolar at 16 by a psychiatrist in South Africa, where his family has a home. After graduating from Ashesi University in Ghana with a degree in business administration, he cycled through a number of pursuits and personas. He was a recording artist in 2016. The first exhibition of his paintings was in 2019.

He began his most ambitious undertaking the next year, raising money from donors and investors to create the nonprofit Noldor Artist Residency. Emerging African artists spent weeks in a renovated warehouse in a seaside Accra neighborhood. They were given space, materials and access to a network of curators and buyers. Many signed three-year contracts in which Mr. Awuah-Darko agreed to represent them and take 40 percent of sales.

The program coincided with a surge in interest in African art and was highlighted in The New York Times and The Financial Times. It launched more than a few careers. The artist Ishmael Armarh, for instance, said that before Mr. Awuah-Darko discovered him on Instagram he was selling canvases on the street for $100 apiece. Two years after his Noldor residency, Christie’s auctioned off a work of his for $22,529.

But he and other resident artists say Mr. Awuah-Darko shortchanged them. Foster Sakyiamah, a figurative painter, concluded that Mr. Awuah-Darko was sending him a tiny slice of proceeds from the sale of 21 large canvases.

“In 2023, I stopped painting for him and said, ‘You need to send me my money,’” Mr. Sakyiamah said in a call from Accra. “He told me to wait, and that I’d have the money in a month. But it never came.”

Last year, Mr. Sakyiamah sued Mr. Awuah-Darko and his company, JAD Advisory, for $266,527, claiming breach of contract.

Mr. Awuah-Darko said he could not go into details of the lawsuit because the case was pending. (In a filing, Mr. Awuah-Darko’s lawyer asserts that Mr. Sakyiamah did not account for “sunken costs” to market his art and that some of the paintings were personal gifts to Mr. Awuah-Darko.) Speaking more generally of his troubles at Noldor, Mr. Awuah-Darko said that “misunderstandings happen all the time.” He added: “I’m not saying that I’m a perfect person, but I never set out to scam artists.”

The program folded four years after it opened. Mr. Awuah-Darko blamed his own “low financial literacy” and the bursting of a “bubble” of interest in African art.

Mr. Awuah-Darko left Ghana for London in 2023, citing the perils of living as an openly gay man in the country. In May last year, he made international headlines when he posted on Instagram that Kehinde Wiley, the artist best known for painting former President Barack Obama’s official portrait, had sexually assaulted him. Mr. Awuah-Darko said that the encounter had happened during and after a 2021 dinner in Accra in Mr. Wiley’s honor, and that it had become “severe and violent” after starting off consensually.

Mr. Wiley denied the allegation. Soon after, others accused Mr. Wiley of a variety of assaults, from groping to rape. Several museums canceled or postponed his shows. (Mr. Wiley has denied all the allegations and called a sexual assault lawsuit filed in February by the artist Ogechi Chieke a “money grab.”)

After going public, Mr. Awuah-Darko posted an appeal for money on his Instagram account, seeking contributions to defend against a possible libel suit by Mr. Wiley. No suit was filed. Mr. Awuah-Darko raised $3,000, which he kept, he said, to cover “miscellaneous costs” tied to travel and relocation.

His parents are paying his legal fees in the Noldor suit, Mr. Awuah-Darko acknowledges. But a spokesman for the family, Emmanuel Amaning, suggested they were doing more than that and hadn’t completely cut him off, as their son contends.

“The family is not estranged from Joseph, and continue to support him as he addresses his personal challenges,” Mr. Amaning wrote in an email, “and request privacy to do so in a compassionate and considerate way.”

‘He’s Having Too Much Fun’

Mr. Awuah-Darko does not shy from the obvious and profoundly awkward questions raised by the Last Supper Project. Among them: If you truly want to die, why not kill yourself?

He gets that one a lot.

“I could easily decide to jump from a building,” he told me. “But I want to do this in a responsible way, in a manner that is nonviolent. And I don’t want to transfer my trauma to anyone who discovers my body.”

He decided to pursue medically assisted death somewhat impulsively, he said, while coming down from a manic episode. He was homeless and deeply depressed, and it seemed to offer a dignified exit, he said.

One problem. Academics in the field say there is little chance that a doctor in the Netherlands will help Mr. Awuah-Darko die.

“No way,” said T.A. Boer, a Dutch professor of health ethics.

By way of background, about 10,000 people were medically euthanized in the Netherlands last year. There is no formal application process, and no regulatory body that approves or denies. Thousands of physicians can perform the procedure.

But the Dutch want to prevent what Professor Boer called euthanasia tourism. Patients must have a residential address, a local doctor and Dutch health insurance. Even if Mr. Awuah-Darko were to meet those requirements, there is another hurdle. Before doctors agree to help anyone die, they must conclude that the person’s suffering is unbearable.

“And this is a guy having a grand goodbye tour, with dinners,” Professor Boer said. “Any doctor here would look online and reject his case. He’s having too much fun.”

Which gets to the glaring contradiction embedded in Mr. Awuah-Darko’s Instagram account. For months, he labeled it “a public requiem for my demise.” In reality, it’s a guarantee that no physician will help end his life.

Mr. Awuah-Darko says he has begun conferring with lawyers to apply for Dutch citizenship, though that could take years.

“I never said there was an end date,” he noted, adding that most people don’t take the name of his project literally.

In fact, many of his Instagram followers firmly believe that he’s near the end of his life. Some send reassuring notes; others beg him to reconsider. A few think that as a man confronting his mortality he has special insights about life. (“I have learned so much following you,” one commenter wrote.) Would 5,000 strangers invite a guy to dinner who was just deeply depressed?

Skeptics say Mr. Awuah-Darko is exploiting a wrenching psychiatric condition to win attention. Health care professionals contend his message is toxic. A charity in London, Bipolar UK, told reporters at De Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper, that it would not accept money from Mr. Awuah-Darko after he stated on Instagram that he would send proceeds to the organization from a Last Supper book he was writing.

“Our values do not align with the messaging Joseph is sharing with the world,” a spokeswoman explained in an email to me, “that life with bipolar is not a life worth living.”

A Place to ‘Discuss and Exist’

Mr. Awuah-Darko’s proponents have a very different take. They find solace in the public way he grapples with anguish, and on Instagram, they regularly shower him with comments like “Your presence on this app has been so healing and educating for me” and “Having death close sometimes feels like a friend by our side, helping us live more fully and love more deeply.”

His most fervent acolytes turn up in Amsterdam for another occasional event, profanely named and described on its website as “a dinner party for the emotionally fluent and the existentially undone.” It adds, “You eat, you speak, you unravel.”

On an evening in June, five attendees had traveled from London, Romania, Florida and Spain, while one watched online at home in New Jersey, on a laptop. Every meal is served in the elegant apartment of Illi Goren, a fashion designer, and her husband, Tom, where Mr. Awuah-Darko now sleeps on a couch.

Ms. Goren cooks — the six-course dinner evokes high-end Nordic restaurants and costs about $175 per person — while Mr. Awuah-Darko serves as waiter and moderator. He prompts guests with intimate questions. During the dinner I attended, he asked, “If you could have a meal with your 8-year-old self, what food would you bring and what advice would you offer?”

“I’d bring a can of spinach,” said Alexandré Zii Miller, 29, who had flown in from Sarasota and was at the start of a European sojourn. He and the 8-year-old version of himself would eat it like Popeye.

“And I’d say: ‘Your intuition is right,’” Mr. Miller continued. “‘You’re going to have a hard life. Sorry.’”

Other questions led to descriptions of excruciating mental torments, which on this night included sexual abuse, depression, heartbreak and chronic fatigue. All said they had found Mr. Awuah-Darko on Instagram and hungered for community and conversation.

“Everyone other than Joseph is editing out the sadness of their lives on social media,” said Mr. Miller, who described himself as “neuro-spicy.” He works at home, editing computer code, in a house painted black, both inside and out, with chickens and a goat. Since childhood, life has felt pointless, he said, a problem that has gotten only more acute as he spends more time online.

“I have not made any new friends in person in years,” he said. “Everybody’s too busy, too distracted, in way over their heads with chores, family, whatever. And there’s really no third place I can go to to meet people, just to discuss and exist.”

The evening ended with photos and an exchanging of phone numbers.

Last Supper No. 145

A few weeks later, on a Friday in late July, Mr. Awuah-Darko’s life took a surprising turn when he traveled by bus to Poland.

It was not for a Last Supper, but rather to visit Mr. Miller, who was renting an Airbnb in Wroclaw. The next night, as the pair sat in a bar, Mr. Awuah-Darko proposed marriage. He had been smitten with Mr. Miller from the moment he saw him at the dinner, he later explained, and they had since been texting. Mr. Miller said yes.

“I had a hunch he might find me interesting,” Mr. Miller said on the phone from Poland. For him, this isn’t about romance so much as a chance to add excitement to a life that feels empty. “Also, I’m asexual, and I can’t really reciprocate the same type of love I think normal people expect in a relationship. So I can’t be picky.”

Mr. Awuah-Darko announced the engagement, his fifth, in a Substack posting. “I believe with him I finally have something I did not have for a long time — hope,” he wrote. “And the promise of someone who can finally match my freak.”

To hear him explain it, love has cured Mr. Awuah-Darko of all interest in medical euthanasia. “I met a guy who made the idea of sticking around more bearable than the idea of leaving,” he said on the phone from Poland. On Instagram this whole plot twist was greeted with both delight (“My heart is happy when your heart is happy”) and skepticism (“Well that was a bit hasty”).

His zeal for Last Suppers is undimmed. In late July, he held No. 145 at a restaurant in Poland. As he told followers, any meal could be his last. Who knows? And anyway, his primary purpose has never changed. Ultimately, he wants what his followers want, what millions of people want — someone to look into his eyes and listen.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

Aimee Ortiz contributed reporting. Audio produced by Adrienne Hurst.