The goal is to inform the audience, not horrify them. Describe the context and the recovery, not the graphic details of the incident. Leave the clinical details for the police report.

The opioid crisis laid this bare. Early awareness campaigns focused on young, white, suburban teenagers who had been “accidentally” hooked by a prescription. These stories were tragic and clean. They generated sympathy. But they also erased the face of long-term addiction—often older, poorer, Black or rural, with a history of self-medication and multiple overdoses. One survivor, a Black woman from West Virginia named Patricia, told a journalist: “They don’t want my story. My story started when I was twelve and my uncle put a needle in my arm. That’s not a campaign. That’s a horror movie.”

: Personal accounts humanize victims of systemic issues—such as police violence or human trafficking—making it harder for the public to dismiss these tragedies as mere headlines.