Promoting Personal Recovery Narratives for Engagement on YouTube: Mapping a Genre and the Signals it Sends

Health organizations often use personal narratives as promotional tools. Similarly, individual patients frequently post their own narratives in increasingly monetized platforms such as YouTube. This study compares themes and stated motives that appear in institutionally-sponsored and independently-posted personal narratives of substance-use disorder and eating disorder recovery on You Tube, finding that these videos tend to spend more time on what life was like in the disorder than on treatment or recovery, even though their stated motive is to help others. The complex motives influencing the signals these videos send as well as the pressures and conventions for posting on YouTube platform are discussed. To boost views and signal support instead of promotion, we suggest institutions learn from independent content creators and include more content on how tools learned in an institutional treatment setting could be applied to life after treatment. Likewise, all content creators should consider the amount of time devoted to describing life in the disorder and consider storytelling strategies that send signals of recovery.