Storytelling by people with lived experience has been found to reduce mental health-related stigma, especially when told in-person and from a first-person point of view, but this benefit depends on organisations not co-opting or controlling the narrative. Stigma reduction activity requires meaningful and ongoing lived experience input, collaboration, and leadership across all levels of an organisation. When storytelling is relied upon as a standalone activity and done in a non-collaborative way, it risks being tokenistic and disempowering rather than beneficial.
Using Storytelling Approaches to Reduce Stigma
Overview
This implementation brief from The ALIVE National Centre for Mental Health Research Translation is part of a five-part series on stigma and its impacts. It examines storytelling by people with lived experience as an approach to reducing mental health-related stigma, highlighting both the benefits speakers report — empowerment, connection, and personally meaningful reframing — and the significant risks of distress, loss of ownership, and discrimination that can arise when storytelling is not done collaboratively. The brief outlines pathways to scalability for organisations seeking to implement new storytelling initiatives or strengthen existing stigma reduction activities, covering speaker engagement, storytelling medium and approach, informed consent, and impact evaluation.
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Key insights
This implementation brief, part of a five-part series on stigma and its impacts, examines storytelling as an approach to reducing mental health-related stigma. While storytelling by people with lived experience has been shown to reduce stigma — particularly when delivered in-person and from a first-person perspective — the brief emphasises that this benefit depends on meaningful, ongoing, and collaborative lived experience involvement. Without this, storytelling risks becoming tokenistic and disempowering, and speakers may experience significant harms. The brief outlines practical pathways for organisations to implement storytelling initiatives ethically and effectively.
Lived experience speakers report both meaningful benefits and serious challenges as a result of sharing their stories, including risks of distress, discrimination, and loss of control over their own narrative. Reported benefits include a sense of empowerment and altruism, the opportunity to reframe personal experiences in meaningful ways, and feeling connected to and helping others. However, speakers also report distress from needing to edit or "sanitise" their stories to fit an organisational agenda, losing ownership of their story once public, experiencing discrimination such as loss of job or housing opportunities after sharing a story attached to their name, and organisations failing to recognise the diversity of lived experience and privileging certain stories over others.
While some representations of mental ill-health and suicide can be powerful and validating for audiences with lived experience, others can be harmful, and the research literature should be interpreted with caution. The brief notes that research on storytelling for stigma reduction is often created and interpreted without the involvement of people with lived experience, reinforcing the need for caution in how findings are applied and for lived experience leadership in both storytelling initiatives and the research that evaluates them.
Although elements of storytelling for stigma reduction have been well-researched, there are few models that have been evaluated in real-world environments, meaning organisations must rely on implementation pathways rather than ready-made, evaluated models. The brief identifies key scalability considerations including the credibility of evidence regarding storytelling's impact, its benefit and relevance to those involved, its cost-benefit ratio compared to other approaches, and its alignment with the values and norms of the implementing organisation.
Effective and ethical storytelling initiatives require careful attention to how speakers are engaged and supported, the medium and approach used, informed consent processes, and ongoing evaluation of impact. Recommendations include positioning people with lived experience centrally in storytelling projects — including in leadership roles — supporting speaker autonomy and boundary-setting, leveraging existing resources such as safe storytelling training and lived experience speaker guidelines, and offering fair payment for speakers' time and preparation. Informed consent processes should clearly communicate purpose, format, editing, audience, remuneration, privacy, and future use, with options for anonymity, rights to review and withdraw stories, and access to debriefing and ongoing support. Organisations are also encouraged to evaluate the impact of storytelling on stigmatising attitudes and behaviours, integrating lived experience researchers and evaluators into this work.
Did this resource draw on transformative evidence?
Yes — The brief includes a dedicated "Lived-Experience Perspectives on Storytelling" section, drawing directly on what lived experience speakers report about the benefits and challenges of sharing their stories. The implementation guidance throughout centres lived experience leadership and autonomy as essential to ethical storytelling practice.
Yes — The pathways to implementation table draws on accumulated organisational and sector practice knowledge, including references to existing resources such as the Mental Health Coordinating Council's safe storytelling training, Mindframe's lived experience speaker resources and language guidelines, and organisations including SANE, Beyond Blue, and Roses in the Ocean.
Yes — The brief references six sources including a meta-analytic review of narrative persuasion and stigma reduction (Zhuang & Guidry, 2022), qualitative studies on lived experience involvement in storytelling and suicide prevention activities, a systematic review on the uses and misuses of recorded lived experience narratives (Yeo et al., 2022), and a systematic review of tools for assessing scalability of health innovations (Charif et al., 2022).
How can this resource help me as a...?
Organisations and leaders implementing or considering storytelling initiatives are a primary audience, with detailed guidance on speaker engagement, organisational responsibilities, and avoiding tokenism.
Staff involved in coordinating or facilitating storytelling activities will find practical guidance on informed consent, medium selection, and supporting speakers ethically.
The brief's framing of stigma as a priority to action and its discussion of scalability considerations make it relevant to policymakers considering stigma reduction strategies.
People with lived experience who may be invited to share their stories are directly addressed by this brief, particularly regarding their rights, autonomy, and the risks involved in storytelling.
The brief's emphasis on lived experience leadership in storytelling initiatives, including in project leadership roles, makes it directly relevant to this audience.
The brief highlights gaps in real-world evaluation of storytelling models and calls for the integration of lived experience researchers and evaluators, making it relevant to those researching stigma reduction and lived experience narratives.