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Put Lived Experience at the Front — Not the Footnotes
Fund Community Storytelling Spaces — Properly and Sustainably
Act 4: Tomorrow Stories
So What Happens Next? Reflections, Recomendations & What I, Myself Can Do?
Purpose Driven Stories
Stories build identity. Identity creates meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose give us new stories. This is the circle. And here is the crucial thing about it — it can turn in either direction. When the stories we absorb and tell about ourselves are stories of shame, worthlessness, and hopelessness, the circle turns inward and downward. Identity becomes fragile. Meaning evaporates. The new stories we generate confirm the old ones. This is the Werther Effect at work, not in the media but in a human life.
"Sometimes I think that the purpose of life is to leave our mark on the world, if only in the hearts of others. Sharing stories does that. It whispers that we exist, that our lives matter."
Kane Dodgson
But when we encounter stories of survival, of resilience, of someone who stood where we stand and found their way through — the circle begins to turn the other way. A new story enters. Identity shifts, even fractionally. A thread of meaning appears. And from that thread, a new story grows.
This is not wishful thinking. This is neuroscience. This is the oxytocin released when we hear a story that moves us . This is the brain synchronisation between storyteller and listener that makes us, briefly, less alone (). We can consciously turn the circle toward healing. That is the central argument of this report.
With, Through & Past
Living with... Living through... Living past...
When we discuss mental health recovery, particularly in relation to surviving suicidal thoughts, we often frame the conversation in binary terms. One is either unwell or well, in crisis or not, labelled as a patient or a survivor. However, the reality, as those who have experienced it will tell you, is much more nuanced, nonlinear, and human. I have come to view this journey not as a straightforward path from darkness to light, but as three distinct and overlapping stages. Each stage requires different approaches, offers unique insights, and deserves its own narrative. It is not complicated; its simplicity is the point.
Living With Trauma
A place where many people spend a long time, sometimes too long. It is the stage of existing alongside suicidal thoughts, depression, trauma, or profound loss without being consumed by them. Not recovered. Not in acute crisis. Just — surviving, getting through the day, finding small moments of relief or connection or beauty, and holding onto them.
This stage is underrepresented in our mental health narrative. It is the way people learn to cope— the long middle, the daily negotiation, the quiet endurance, rarely acknowledged. For many people, the tools that help most at this stage are intensely personal and self-selected.
Private. Personal. Yours alone. Until you are ready for the next stage.
Living Through Trauma
Living through is the active work of moving — not away from the pain, but through it. This is the stage of processing, of beginning to make meaning, of tentatively reaching toward other people and allowing them to reach back. It is not linear. Recovery is a series of small beginnings and minimal steps — accompanied by setbacks and the exhausting work of getting up again. What helps is the gradual, sometimes terrifying move from private story to shared story, from the journal to the conversation. From writing alone at 2 a.m. to sitting across from another human being and saying — out loud, for the first time — this is what happened to me.
Living Past Trauma
Living past is perhaps the most radical stage of all — and the most quietly miraculous. called this post-traumatic growth. You do not return to who you were before. The phoenix does not become an egg again. You become something new — with a richer sense of self, a deeper capacity for empathy, a different relationship with meaning and purpose.
found that people with lived experience of suicidal thoughts are drawn to suicide prevention work — motivated by the desire to help others find what they themselves found. The pain becomes purpose. The wound becomes wisdom. The people best placed to help those at the bottom of the great fall are the ones who have already made the great climb. That is the healing circle completing itself. The person who was once in the dark, holding up a light for someone else, is still finding their way. The Papageno Effect is not a media phenomenon but a lived human practice.
"Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response."
Viktor Frankl
Rewriting Our Stories
Stories exist on a spectrum — from the deeply private to the fully public. A journal entry written at 3 a.m. that no one else will ever read. A conversation with a friend over coffee. A support group. A community mural painted by a thousand hands. A handwritten note left anonymously in a gallery in New York City.
Each point on this spectrum serves a different need and carries a distinct healing potential. Private storytelling processes and integrates. Semi-private storytelling witnesses and validates. Public storytelling challenges stigma, creates connection, and — at its most powerful — reaches the person sitting alone at 2 a.m. who has not yet found the words for what they are feeling, and gives them those words.
Research from Cornell University identified what it called an adaptive toolbox — a personalised set of coping strategies that people develop through lived experience (). These toolboxes are as individual as fingerprints. But the most common items in them are striking in their simplicity: community connections, art, journalling, animals, family, friends, and some form of existential hope — spiritual or otherwise.
I recognise every item on that list:- Writing. Walking. My dogs — Luna and Tinks, who got me off the floor when nothing else could, and Little Izzy now, who reminds me every single day that joy is not cancelled. Small rituals. Moments of beauty are noticed. Stories told and heard. None of these was prescribed. None appeared on a waiting list. They were found gradually, through trial and error, through the stubborn human instinct to keep reaching for something — anything — that helps.
Perhaps the most quietly powerful of all — writing it down. demonstrated that writing about difficult experiences privately and without agenda measurably improves psychological and physical health. It reduces rumination. It begins the process of making sense of what happened to us. Writing your story down — even badly, even at 2 a.m. when everything feels impossible — is the beginning of rewriting it.
argued that remembering and telling the truth about terrible events is a prerequisite for healing. Still, crucially, this telling requires a compassionate witness—someone who receives the story with care. Someone who does not flinch, does not fix, does not immediately reach for a solution — but simply stays present with what they have been told. This is where peer support becomes so vital as a space between spaces, between private and public storytelling.. Not a professional nodding across a desk. Another human being who looks at you and says — I know. I have been there too. You are not alone in this.
The question for the UK is not whether we believe in this. The evidence is clear. The question is whether we are willing to build the conditions — the spaces, the funding, the cultural permission — for all three points on this spectrum to flourish.
UK Recommendations
Many UK charities and NHS trusts will rightly argue that they are already person-centred. And I believe them — the intention is genuine. But I want to offer a gentle challenge.
Person-centred care that does not start with the full story is not truly person-centred. It is symptom-centred with a friendlier name. It asks, "What is wrong with you?" — rather than what happened to you?
"To be truly person-centred, one must first become story-centred."
Kane Dodgson
Lived experience: Start treating it as primary evidence. As Professor Singer told me, the research already knows the solution lies in lived experience stories. What is missing is the infrastructure and cultural willingness to generate those stories authentically and put them to work. Suicide prevention programmes co-designed and co-delivered with survivors from the beginning, in meaningful leadership roles. Those storytellers need support. The helpers need help too.
Imagine a national network of Community Story Spaces — physical and digital — modelled on the best of what I saw in America and what already exists here in Camerados' Public Living Rooms and Living Well UK's neighbourhood hubs. Places where anyone can walk in. No referral. No diagnosis. No agenda. Just stories, connection, and the radical act of being heard. These spaces should be rooted in local communities, co-designed with the people they serve, and funded through sustained multi-year grants — not competitive one-year bids.
3. UK Porch Light — Public Art as Mental Health Infrastructure
Philadelphia has demonstrated, with four years of Yale research behind it, that public art in communities reduces stigma, increases social trust, and creates the conditions for people to seek help (; ). Imagine a UK Porch Light Initiative — a funded partnership between arts organisations, NHS trusts, and local authorities to commission community-created public art in areas of highest suicide risk. This is not decoration. This is infrastructure. The evidence says so. This initiative should prioritise the North West and other high-risk areas (). Not art about people. Art with people.
4. Train Non-Clinical Storytellers & Story Collectors
I recommend adding a storytelling component to current gatekeeper training programmes. It's not enough to spot the signs. We need to create spaces where stories can be shared and heard safely. That means asking the right questions and really listening — not rushing to fix things. It means recognising the moments when sharing your own story might help someone feel less alone.
5. Storytelling on Mental Health Waiting Lists
If the act of expressive writing alone can profoundly change the direction of a person's mental health, then imagine what could happen if every individual on a waiting list were routinely offered access to structured storytelling and expressive writing resources. This should be based on Pennebaker's evidence-based expressive writing protocols () and include signposting to local community storytelling spaces. A pen and a notebook, and someone to show you how to use them for healing, costs almost nothing. The evidence that it helps is overwhelming. There is no good reason not to do this tomorrow.
6. A Stroke and Suicide Prevention Storytelling Programme
Stroke survivors face a 73% higher risk of suicide than the general population (). This elevated risk is not purely psychological — it is biological, rooted in neurological changes that stroke causes to brain chemistry and mood regulation (). Imagine a dedicated, purpose-driven Storytelling Programme at this intersection. Inegrating peer-led storytelling and narrative support into stroke rehabilitation pathways. Survivors hearing the stories of other survivors, with space to facilitate peer-to-peer learning in a human library or gallery.
7. The Strangers Project Inspired Grassroots & Artists Initiatives.
The UK needs its own version of the Strangers Project. A national invitation to write your story. Anonymously. Honestly. In your own words. Displayed in libraries, community centres, hospitals, barbershops, and on the sides of buildings — where it might find the person who needs it most. And perhaps — inspired by Gabe and his Herbie the Love Bug — a travelling version. Because this is how you reach the three-quarters. Not with a poster on a GP surgery wall. With a story on the back of a van, parked outside a chip shop in a seaside town, waiting for whoever needs to stop and talk.
The answers are already out there in the people. In the stories they are carrying and have never been asked to share. We just need to ask.
Endings & Beginnings
I want to tell you how this report ends. Not with statistics. Not with a summary of findings. Not with a list of references and a word count and a filing date. It ends where it began — with a story.
I grew up in Blackpool — beautiful and broken in equal measure, all neon and candy floss on the surface and underneath, some of the highest rates of suicide, poverty and mental ill-health in the country. I lost family & friends to suicide. For a long time, my own story felt hollow. Devoid of joy. Stripped of purpose. A ghost in the world rather than an active participant in my own story. And then a bleed on the brain. A stroke. A different kind of darkness — with its own hidden biological risk that most people, including most healthcare professionals, still don't know about.
I should not, by any reasonable measure, be here writing this.
I am because of stories. Not a waiting list. Not a referral. Not a clinical intervention — though those things matter and I do not diminish them. But stories. The right ones, at the right moments. Art, animals, and the slow, stubborn, magnificent human practice of rewriting who you think you are. And the stories — the ones I consumed, the ones I wrote in journals at 2 a.m., the ones I eventually found the courage to tell out loud.
I walked the streets of Philadelphia at midnight and saw a city that had decided to paint its story on its own walls — six storeys high, visible to anyone who passed, impossible to ignore. I rode a bus to a small town in upstate New York and sat beside a waterfall with a woman whose words rolled like smooth light on the wings of a dragonfly, and she told me that we ask people to share their stories while we keep our professional secrets. I stood on a street corner in Ithaca and met a painter whose community had just lost one of their own, and who was still there, still painting, still putting story on the wall for anyone who needed it.
I sat in cafés with extraordinary human beings — a comedian who turns tragedy into permission, a journalist who built a story house. I stood in New York City and thought about 100,000 strangers who had walked up to a table and written something true — not for followers or recognition, but because the story needed to exist somewhere outside themselves.
I turned a corner and found Victoria waiting there. I stood on the Ben Franklin Bridge and felt the weight of a thousand souls.
The answers are not locked in a research paper or a policy document. They already exist — in the lived experience of survivors, in communities that have quietly, without adequate funding, built the spaces where healing happens. The great fall has been extensively researched. The great climb — how people actually get back up — remains under-explored.
Stories build identity. Identity creates meaning and purpose. Meaning and purpose give us new stories. And those new stories — if we are intentional, if we are brave — can turn the circle toward healing.
That circle can be turned. I know because I turned it. Not alone — with help, with love, with art and animals and the stories of others who had survived what I was surviving. And if I can turn it — a working-class man from Blackpool with a stroke-affected brain and seven failed attempts at writing this report — then anyone can. The only thing required is that we, collectively and urgently, decide that survivors' stories matter. That they belong at the front of this work, not the footnotes.
The answer is not complicated. It is not expensive. It does not require a new clinical pathway, a government taskforce or a 15-year strategy. Ask the people. Listen to the stories. Build the spaces where that can happen. Stories change things. They always have. They always will. Now it is our turn to tell the right ones.
"Don't think your movie had any part of this, because it did."
Ronald Reagan
Copyright © 2026 Kane Dodgson. The moral right of the author has been asserted. The views and opinions expressed in this report are those of the author and not of the Churchill Fellowship or its partners.
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