“Every Virus Tells a Story”: Toward a Narrative-Centred Approach to Health Policy

Combining insights from narrative inquiry and participatory policy analysis, this article analyses the “illness narratives” of people with hepatitis C, a blood-borne liver disease that affects millions of people around the world. In particular, we explore how a narrative-based approach to health politics and policy can illuminate our understanding of the social dimensions of health and illness. In incorporating the “experiential” knowledge of people living with this chronic condition, we seek to challenge the dominant approach of Evidence Based Medicine, in which randomised controlled trials operate as the Gold Standard against which all other forms of evidence are judged. Narrative approaches can be particularly useful, we argue, when examining newly emerging illnesses that are only beginning to receive public attention. Moreover, in the case of chronic illnesses such as hepatitis C, which can be relatively invisible in a public and media landscape dominated by diseases with dramatic, “punchy” storylines, rendering an illness “narratable” may be an important task of the policy analyst.