Stories of sickness: applying illness narratives to health advertising
October 7, 2025 | B Corp, Health and Humanity, Healthcare Advertising, Patient Voice, health and wellness, healthcare communications, patient advocacy, patient engagement, public affairs, wellness movement
By Dr Stephanie Goley
Introduction
As advertisers, we know that health and pharmaceutical campaigns hold enormous influence over how the public perceives illness, wellness, and treatment. But too often, our work reproduces reductive models of disease, positioning the ill person as a passive recipient of medical expertise. In Western contexts especially, health advertising tends to fall back on what Arthur Frank (1995) called the restitution narrative, a reassuring story where illness is framed as only a temporary detour from normal health, soon corrected by medicine.
This framework is familiar and comforting, but it is not the only story available to us. If we as an industry are willing to engage with the richness of illness narrative theory, we can design campaigns that are not only persuasive but also ethically resonant, inclusive, and more deeply connected to the realities of patients and caregivers.
Reconsidering the narrative norm: a reality beyond restitution
Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller identifies three dominant illness narratives: restitution, chaos, and quest. Advertising overwhelmingly favors restitution, casting medicine as the hero and patients as characters on a linear path to recovery. While this can be uplifting, it excludes those living with chronic, degenerative, or terminal conditions whose experiences defy the promise of cure.
Chaos narratives — disordered, raw, and unsettling — rarely make their way into our campaigns. Yet Frank reminds us they are ethically necessary because they bear witness to suffering in its most unmediated form. While we may not build entire campaigns around chaos, acknowledging the unpredictability and non-linear nature of illness allows us to tell more honest stories.
Quest narratives, by contrast, are rich with potential. They portray patients as active meaning-makers, drawing insight or transformation from their experience of illness. When we craft campaigns that centre the patient’s voice, adaptation, community, or personal growth (not just medical intervention), we align more closely with their lived realities and create space for dignity and agency.
Language, metaphor, and representation
Virginia Woolf (1926), in On Being Ill, lamented the lack of language to capture bodily suffering. We face the same challenge in advertising: how do we make illness visible and emotionally resonant without reducing it to cliché? Susan Sontag (1978) warned against metaphors that romanticise or moralise disease: warrior tropes, for example, that glorify “fighting” but leave behind those who cannot or do not “win.”
We can choose differently. By paying attention to how metaphors shape perception, we can avoid inadvertently casting judgment. A “journey” metaphor, for instance, may be more inclusive and less stigmatising than a battle. Just as importantly, drawing from the language actually used by patients, rather than institutional jargon, helps our messages feel authentic, respectful, and human.
Narrative ethics and patient voice
Rita Charon (2006) and the field of narrative medicine remind us of the ethical imperative to truly listen to patients’ stories in all their complexity. For our industry, this calls for a shift: we must move beyond the testimonial format, which too often reduces patients to polished soundbites that validate a brand promise. Instead, we can invite patients to be genuine collaborators, co-creators who help shape campaign concepts, scripts, imagery, and even the very framing of a brief. This does not dilute our creative authority; it strengthens it by grounding our work in lived reality.
Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) pushes us further still, showing how illness narratives can be activist, intersectional, and profoundly political. For advertisers, this means amplifying marginalised voices and ensuring our campaigns do not simply reproduce dominant perspectives. By making space for the stories that too often go unheard in mainstream health communication, we not only broaden representation but also contribute to equity and inclusion in the public conversation around health.
When we foreground narrative ethics and patient voices, we open the door to campaigns that are not only more authentic, but also more transformative. We position ourselves not as mere storytellers for patients, but as partners in shaping how their experiences are seen, heard, and valued.
Designing for complexity
Bringing illness narratives into our practice does not mean abandoning clarity or emotional appeal. It means widening the representational palette we draw from. As advertisers, we can:
- Use composite narratives rooted in ethnographic or qualitative research to reflect diverse experiences
- Employ multiple voices, fragmented storytelling, or unique visuals to signal complexity
- Step away from “heroic recovery” tropes when they do not match the patient journey
- Allow for ambivalence, uncertainty, and vulnerability alongside hope and strength
Conclusion
Advertising is storytelling at scale. When we treat illness narratives not as tools to manipulate but as practices to honour, we can produce campaigns that respect the lived experience of illness while still motivating action. By drawing on Frank, Woolf, Sontag, Charon, Lorde and others, we can see that it is possible for our industry to expand the ways we talk about health.
If we take up this challenge, we can create work that does more than sell treatment: we can foster empathy, dignity, and connection. And in doing so, we not only serve our clients and audiences better, but also contribute meaningfully to the culture of care that patients and caregivers deserve.
References
- Charon, R. (2006). Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford University Press.
- Frank, A. W. (1995). The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. University of Chicago Press.
- Lorde, A. (1980). The Cancer Journals. Aunt Lute Books.
- Scarry, E. (1985). The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press.
- Sontag, S. (1978). Illness as Metaphor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
- Woolf, V. (1926). On Being Ill. Hogarth Press.
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