<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>

<p>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.</p>