Can Storytelling Help Reduce the Suffering of Homelessness?

Homelessness is the most glaring, visible, and unacceptable health injustice of our time. Research suggests that being homeless increases a person’s risk of death 10-fold.

When a disaster like Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Milton renders people stranded without shelter, sustenance, or safety, we (rightfully) come together to help those who are displaced. Governmental organizations such as FEMA and the National Guard deploy as many resources as possible to provide food, lodging, and other necessities. Meanwhile, Americans in communities across the country demonstrate decency, generosity, and basic goodness by helping rebuild people’s homes and lives. During these difficult times, we act like neighbors.

However, when job loss, a catastrophic health crisis, broken relationships, mental illness, or addiction force people onto the street, we often act like strangers. Few of us step up to assist. Most of us avert our eyes and shut down our empathy and emotions. Somehow this inaction is considered “normal.” There is no call for FEMA or the National Guard to get people back on their feet.

The unspoken sentiment seems to be that people who are unhoused don’t deserve help or decency. Thoughtful collaboration between policymakers and content creators could help shift these unspoken sentiments. Indeed, both Hollywood and institutions like Harvard have a role to play in reducing the suffering of homelessness. 

How we perceive homelessness

Although the challenge of homelessness presents real concerns for communities everywhere, often the focus is on removing, rather than rehousing, the people pushed to sleep on the streets. In fact, public officials, emboldened by the 2024 Supreme Court decision which enabled governments to arrest people for sleeping in public, are increasingly using force to move people out of sight. As Kevin Adler and Donald Burns write in their recent book When We Walk By, “we do not behave like neighbors at all.”

The dichotomy in how we react in these situations reflects a larger crisis of community: Who are we as a people and as a nation? The answer will go a long way to determining the outcome of a homeless crisis that continues to grow, with over 650,000 people without homes on any given night—and several times that number homeless in any given year. But we won’t be able to make progress unless the crisis is viewed as our problem. People without homes are our neighbors, the truth is that any of us could become homeless. And how we treat people experiencing homelessness says just as much about who we are, as how we care for neighbors displaced by storms. 

An important way to start to solve the problem is to use storytelling to reverse the relentless dehumanization of those suffering on our streets. This dehumanization has not only exacerbated the crisis but also led some of us to believe we are somehow freed from the responsibility of engaging in thoughtful solutions.

How Hollywood can help address homelessness

Hearing and sharing stories about people who are unhoused, in a variety of settings, can allow us to consider, if only for a moment, “What if it were me? What would I do in this situation?” Which we seemingly do with ease when we tell stories about those who lose their homes in disasters like Helene and Milton.

There is hopeful precedent that storytelling, when strategically deployed, can help change our thinking about health crises—and even spur change. For example, researchers have shown that people’s intentions to act against climate change can be increased by asking them to watch popular movies with climate-crisis storylines such as An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Other researchers have shown that people’s intentions to take climate action increase even more when a film—in this study’s case, Don’t Look Up (2021)—is coupled with a short educational video from an influencer giving additional context. 

And when it comes to the issue of mental health, the Norman Lear Center has shown that people who watch scripted and unscripted shows featuring mental health storylines report lower personal stigma towards people receiving mental health treatment. Meanwhile our own work at the Harvard Chan School shows that when TikTok users are exposed to evidence-based mental health storytelling, it improves the “health” of the mental health conversation in the comments section and can even shift mental health behaviors.

It’s time for storytellers to deploy these same tactics to change norms and build empathy about homelessness, both on our TVs, in theaters, and on TikTok. We need Hollywood to make more movies like The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), The Soloist (2009), and Nomadland (2020) which humanize our understanding of homelessness. We also need to produce more projects that explore the broken systems that shut many people out of housing. And we need to encourage public figures and influential creators who have experienced homelessness or housing insecurity to share their own stories on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Even if we don’t consider ourselves storytellers, we can play a role. Instead of always walking by, we can try, at least on occasion, to stop and listen to our neighbors’ stories.

When we make space for these stories, we begin to reweave the ties of community that hold us together and lift us up. We again become the neighbors, “people who are close to us,” that Fred Rogers encouraged us to be since we were children. We all have a role to play in changing the narrative when it comes to homelessness, whether we are a Hollywood screenwriter or a TikTok influencer. Or simply, a neighbor.

People who lose their homes, regardless of whether a consequence of hurricanes or homelessness, need a helping hand. Storytelling can start us on that journey. Only by bringing people together from all parts of society can we start to generate, as neighbors, the kind of empathy and action needed for change. And when we do, we will be able to imagine ourselves not only in the shoes of the survivors of a storm, but also in those of the unhoused. This act of imagination and empathy will bring us closer—to those suffering and to ourselves.