We need public health storytelling now more than ever

By William D. Lopez

Clinical Associate Professor of Health Behavior & Health Equity

December 9, 2025

Human beings have always loved stories. Since the emergence of language, humans have gathered around the fire to laugh, to cry, and to learn through the stories we share. We sit on the laps of our grandparents who tell us about our family traditions. We look across the kitchen table and slow our chewing when we hear someone share something unbelievable. And now, we put in our headphones and listen to podcast after podcast sharing the stories of narrators from all over the world.

Stories are entertaining. They are powerful. They are emotional. And, particularly relevant to the field of public health, stories are more likely to change behavior than data alone.

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated how powerful storytelling can be in shaping social behavior. In fact, storytelling was often more influential than population data gathered with scientific rigor by the most established infectious disease scientists in the world. To give just one example, it wasn’t data on hydroxychloroquine that caused an uptick in purchases of the anti-malarial drug, it was promotion of the drug as a “game changer” against COVID-19 by a trusted individual with a microphone, an individual who claimed to have taken the drug himself, an individual who happened to be the president of the United States. If the President was talking about hydroxychloroquine, it must be safe and effective, or so assumed a significant portion of the public. And no amount of data could convince them otherwise.

The public health world is in flux. A new Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, R.F.K., Jr, was instated earlier this year. CDC Director Susan Monarez was fired, with four other top CDC officials resigning in protest. And globally, cuts to USAID resulted in the shutting of about 80% of its programs. Trust in our public health institutions is at an all time low, and with public health messaging abandoning the established tenet of health inequity in favor of diet changes and vaccine skepticism, it’s unclear what a reconstructed public health system will look like anyway.

With the public losing trust in both data and institutions, it’s time for the average public health student, professor, and advocate to take up the mantle and share the messages central to our field's identity, like racial disparities, environmental justice, and health equity. This is where public health storytelling can be most valuable.

Public health storytelling — which uses techniques like character development, setting, dialogue, tension, and resolution while reflecting on larger structural issues — is, like public health itself, part art, part science. The best public health stories use the story of a single individual or community as a springboard to illustrate a larger social dynamic, with data and research scaffolding the argument in the piece. The language is vulnerable, approachable, and engaging, so much so that, when done well, the reader does not notice the data and theory they have learned along the way.

Each year, I teach a health communications class to every first-year student in the online MPH program. One session focuses on public health storytelling, and students each submit their own essay using public health storytelling techniques. Below are five of my favorite essays from the cohort in the Winter 2025 semester.

It’s time for public health folks of all stripes to bring our lessons to a skeptical public. It’s time to go out and tell more stories.

About the Author

William Lopez William D. Lopez is a clinical associate professor in the Department of Health Behavior & Health Equity at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and author of multiple books on immigration that utilize public health storytelling. His latest, Raiding the Heartland: An American Story of Deportation and Resistance, was released on September 23rd, 2025.