The Art of Being Witnessed: Creativity, Ritual, and the Healing Power of Storytelling Through Illness
Illness has often been hidden behind closed doors. Now, with the rise of social media and online videos, viral health storytelling is not just a trend—it is reshaping how we relate to illness and medical grief by bringing the private realities of medicine into public view. These stories, grounded in fear, grief, humor, identity, and the labor of healing, fundamentally challenge medical silence and isolation.
On social feeds, people turn hospital rooms into stages and recovery beds into confessionals. Recent viral posts include a young woman filming a “hysterectomy diary,” joking about mesh underwear while naming her grief for a lost future. A middle-aged runner, recording a first walk after chemo, narrates with shaky breaths. People nickname their scars and Ostomy bags. Online, likes bring visibility, but being seen is the real reward.
Psychologically, this matters. Stigma thrives in silence.
When people experiencing medical challenges narrate their experience, by editing a clip, choosing a soundtrack, and deciding what to show and what to keep private, they reclaim authorship over medical processes that often treat them as a case. Humor becomes a pressure valve. Community replies reduce isolation. By sharing, they receive acknowledgment beyond medical care.
Rituals are the bridge that transforms personal storytelling into shared understanding and collective healing. They connect individual narratives to wider meaning.
Rituals make space for meaning. In medicine, especially with ambiguous or invisible losses—fertility changes, altered sexual identity, chronic fatigue and pain—rituals dignify thresholds often missed by hospital discharge papers. Rituals honor the gap between “surgery done” and “something in me is different,” and empower people facing what’s next and the unknown.
Creative Rituals For Medical Grief
Using creative process and “art as ritual for medical grief” helps people process what’s happened to their bodies and lives. For example, a “threshold table” in a clinic waiting room may have a cloth and stones, inviting patients or families to leave a meaningful object—a hospital bracelet, a pinecone from a first post-op walk, or an infusion center wristband. This honors things left behind and what lies ahead. The ritual is simple, conveying meaning through action.
“Scar mapping” lets people reimagine scars as landscapes. On paper, a participant traces a neutral outline of a body and begins to render their scars as landscapes. A mastectomy scar can become a coastline; a laparoscopic dot, a star map; a colostomy site, a harbor. This helps find beauty in change. Many people incorporate tattoos into healing, using vibrant images with personal meaning.
If you are unsure where to start, begin with something simple and consistent:
Close an individual session or a psychoeducational group with a brief “witnessing moment”: a breath together, one word from each person about what they are leaving with, then a phrase—We witness—to mark the closing.
Place a “Quiet Courage” shelf in your waiting area with patient-authored pieces that have been cleared to share.
Offer a one-page “ritual menu” with at-home suggestions: write a goodbye/hello note to the changing body or role; create a pocket talisman; or record a short hum to replay when stressed.
Creative options can help alleviate feelings of helplessness during medical experiences.
Navigating Your Own Care
For patients and creatives, these same principles apply. You don't have to go viral to matter; a kitchen table can be an altar, a voice memo can be a song of strength, or a story a reminder of progress. Choose privacy or sharing, and set healthy boundaries to invite helpful attention.
Why does Creativity and Madness care about this?
For nearly five decades, we have seen how art makes the unbearable bearable and how a caring community can ease isolation and shame. Viral health storytelling highlights the need for recognition. As clinicians and educators, our role is to support people in their health and healing journeys. With social media’s rise, we must stay current and aware of what helps. Healing need not be performative. Being witnessed is liberating.
Create a ritual this week to honor a personal experience. Find ways to honor and acknowledge others’ journeys.
by Dr. Amy Vail and Alli Fischenich