ABSTRACT:
Public health increasingly uses lived experience narratives to humanise evidence, inform policy, and strengthen advocacy, particularly with adolescents and young women facing social and reproductive vulnerabilities. Storytelling can support reflection, connection, and meaning making. Yet when stories are extracted, digitised, or publicly shared without careful safeguards, they can also produce harm through retraumatisation, emotional burden, and loss of narrative control. Despite the rapid growth of digital and narrative approaches, few practitioners receive practical training on how to design storytelling processes that protect wellbeing while generating useful insight. This interactive masterclass presents applied lessons from three initiatives in the Global South: a digital adolescent health intervention (the Gilead study), StoryRx, a tool that generates guided stories and personas, and participatory work with young women navigating teen pregnancy. Together, these cases demonstrate how storytelling functions simultaneously as a method, an intervention, and an ethical responsibility. Participants will engage in facilitated exercises to create low risk narrative outputs using structured and trauma informed approaches. These include composite personas, short reflective vignettes, and service journey stories developed through prompts and digital tools rather than open disclosure. The session emphasises psychological safety, staged consent, dignity, and shared control over how experiences are represented. By the end of the masterclass, participants will be able to identify ethical and mental health risks in narrative work, recognise power dynamics in digital storytelling, design safer consent and safeguarding processes, and adapt persona and story based methods for their own research, programmes, and policy engagement. By treating stories as relational and embodied rather than simply data, this session equips public health practitioners with practical skills to use narrative approaches responsibly, strengthening both impact and care in youth focused and community-engaged work.