Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading

Bibliotherapy: the Healing Power of Reading / Bijal Shah
Piatkus, c2024.
320 p.

Long time readers may know that I have been interested in bibliotherapy for a long while. I used to run workshops using this technique alongside journaling and meditative arts, at least a decade ago now. But it's still a topic that fascinates me! I have been following Bijal Shah online for a long time also, and when I saw that she wrote a book I knew I had to have it. 

This is a compilation of her expertise on the subject, more than just a list of books to read. It starts out by explaining literature as therapy, how it is applied, and the various other modalities than can be incoporated into bibliotherapy, like journaling, letter writing or other narrative responses. Shah is a therapist as well as a book lover, and she uses this therapeutic technique from that perspective. It is really informative for those of us who are not therapists, but maybe just librarians or readers, who believe in the power of literature to develop empathy and meet us in a time of life crisis or transition. 

She uses case studies to demonstrate how to use books in this way, from romantic issues to dyslexia and beyond. And then the book concludes with a large section of lists of suggested reads for topics running from A-Z, and suggestions on how to build your own list for yourself. It's useful and encouraging, and I really appreciated the professional tone and expertise behind this book, which was still an engaging read. It's the starting point for a lot more exploration. 

Read Yourself Happy

Read Yourself Happy / Daisy Buchanan
DK Red, c2025.
288 p.

After the book about reading poetry to enhance your life that I shared yesterday, I thought I'd also talk about a couple of books I have read that are all about how reading can help in facing life issues. This is called Bibliotherapy, and it's something I have always been interested in! 

This book is a collection of short essays about the author's life and her struggle with Generalized Anxiety Disorder - and how reading has helped. It shares recommended reads at the end of each section, and this is both helpful and not, as the suggestions are based entirely on her own tastes and experiences. This is the small downfall of books like this; in active bibliotherapy, the person making the suggestions is listening heavily to what the person looking for reading is asking for, both in content and in genre, style, and vibe overall. 

I found this a good read at the beginning - lots about her mental health and how reading is/was helpful. There are good takeaways, and it was interesting to see the development of her writing. However, there begin to be interviews with her writer pals, talk about writing as well as reading, and so many mentions of her podcast. So many. I felt that the energy and drive at the beginning began to peter out by half or 3/4 of the way through. 

So I did like parts of this book, and found some of the suggested reads interesting, especially when I wasn't already familiar with them. New titles to investigate! But it didn't hang together strongly enough for me, with the focus feeling a bit scattered. Maybe if it had been more heavily edited and/or condensed it would have been a stronger read. But the concept is great, and parts of the book were effective. Plus reading recs, which I'll never turn down! 

 

The Poetry Remedy

 

The Poetry Remedy / William Sieghart
NY: Viking, c2019.
224 p.

Another choice for poetry month reading! I was intrigued when I saw this book, as it's a form of bibliotherapy, which I have always found engaging. So I had to pick up this collection and check out what the author was prescribing, and for what conditions of life. 

Overall, I liked this a lot. I feel like this is a great concept, and a good introduction to poetry for those who might not often consider it as an option.

Caveats were that the descriptions of a condition were sometimes longer than the poetry itself, and that poetry was sometimes just an excerpt. I'd like to have had a few poems for each suggestion, rather than just one, and would have liked a wider variety of author. The poems are lovely and mostly accessible, but they are traditional and by standard canon authors for the most part. I wasn't convinced by the connection in a couple of cases, but for the majority of the book I did find it helpful and some of them really worked for me. 

Poetry really works for this purpose; Sieghart ties them to life conditions like anxiety (read The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry), existential crisis (Primary Wonder by Denise Levertov), regret (The Ideal by James Fenton), insecurity (Phenomenal Woman by Maya Angelou) and much, much more. 

What I came away from through reading this book was the sense that poetry makes great bibliotherapy. And it would be a fantastic idea to create your own index of poems that speak to the way you're feeling, as you come across poems that touch you. Then you could flip through your personalized collection anytime, according to your own categories of life experiences and helpful words. 

This book inspires thoughts like this, and introduces you to many new poems. Check out your library this month to see if you can explore more of it too! 

The Reading Cure by Laura Freeman

 

The Reading Cure: How Books Restored My Appetite / Laura Freeman
London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, c2018.
260 p.

I recently gave a class on Bibliotherapy for my library, and in my research I came across this book. It looked so good, I immediately requested it via Interlibrary Loan. I've just finished reading it, and I wholeheartedly recommend it as an excellent bookish memoir, but more, as a story of how literature helped the author (and still does) through her experience of anorexia starting at age 13. 

Freeman is a fantastic writer. Her evocation of her life experience and how and why reading came to be a salve to her is so honestly and harrowingly done. She's clear about the terrible affliction of anorexia, and how it is a mind disorder that she still has to fight with -- and she also powerfully engages with classic British literature to find her appetite again. She's a British writer, and one educated traditionally, so the books she reads are older and canon, for the most part. But she can make Dickens sound so exotic and colourful, and Virginia Woolf so terribly fragile and yet strong. She recoils from the vulgar appetites and indulgences of books like Gargantua & Pantagruel, but is encouraged by the homely love of boiled eggs and tea in Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man. 

It's not that she read a book and then rushed to recreate meals and suddenly eat with no issues, it's that the books showed her that enjoying food, anticipating meals, eating communally, can be a reasonable and healthy appetite to have. That food often meant comfort and community, and that it was alright to want to eat. 

Books also gave her sustenance in other ways: her habit of extreme walks was reflected in Virginia Woolf and in Dickens, but for both of them, a walk was preceded or concluded by a hot bit of food -- so she realized it was best to walk when fortified. And in one of the most moving parts, for me, she reads T.H. White's The Once & Future King, & finds her key to surviving the vicissitudes of her condition.

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world works and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting."

I imagine this works for a certain kind of bookish person, of whom the author is one. It resonates with me as well. 

If you love reading about the deep experience of books and reading in another's life, and want to engage with a writer examining English novels, memoirs, children's books, food writers and more, this is a wonderful choice. Beautifully written, full of passion for the enchantment of books, and for life, I highly recommend it. 

Reading for the Health of It

I'd like to share some exciting news...

I am speaking this afternoon (as part of my regular day job) at the Ontario Library Association Super Conference on "Reading for the Health of It". This is a subject I love to talk about; there is so much research to support the health benefits and I always love giving people even more reasons to read! I'd like to share a few highlights of my presentation with all of my blog readers so that you can also discover some of the key health benefits that arise from the simple act of reading.

1. Physical Health

The obvious physical health benefit of reading is in its power to strengthen and develop our brain. As we read we create new neural connections and pathways; our brain literally expands. Having higher numbers of neural pathways helps us to ward off the effects of brain diseases like Alzheimer's or dementia, or to recover from traumatic brain injuries. The brain has more options to rewire itself to keep us symptomless for longer in the case of these situations.
But reading also benefits us physiologically in a number of ways. Reciting certain types of poetry can benefit our blood pressure, as I've written about previously. And reading has been shown to be one of the best and quickest ways to experience stress relief and relaxation. Reading can benefit our immune response as well.

2. Mental Health

More than just our physical brain, however, reading supports our mental health. The psychology of reading is a key area of study right now, with a great number of researchers located in Canada (with a wonderful website, OnFiction.ca) Reading in groups is one method to combat depression or social isolation, with studies showing that the act of reading results in some of the same benefits as medication can give a person. And a book serves as a kind of cheap virtual reality machine: parts of the brain that light up while reading about an activity are the same parts that light up when a person is actually performing that activity.

3. Emotional/Social Health

One of the biggest effects of reading lies in the emotional, or social, realm: reading about other lives and experiencing life through another perspective builds empathy. Empathy is the key to building a society that is cohesive and supportive for all its citizens.

Literature gives us one of the only ways that we can enter another person's mind and see through their eyes, have access to their thoughts, and truly experience their perceptions. Reading a novel gives us a way to experience unfamiliar situations or to find others who've had the same difficulties as we have and to learn how they've dealt with them. A book can give us the words to name our experience, and in this way, make it easier to comprehend and communicate. This is the principle behind bibliotherapy, which is part of what I do over at my business, Four Rooms, and which I've also talked about previously.

4. Spiritual Health

It may seem strange to think of reading as benefitting us spiritually. But the process of reading itself, that reaching out which we must do to encounter another, separate and distant mind -- that of the writer -- can be considered a spiritual process. That mind can never be fully known, but we can encounter it and strive to get outside ourselves briefly. Spiritual disciplines like our capacity for attention, our ability to listen, or our mental organization and alertness are also mirrored in reading; we build these strengths when we read narrative fiction.

So, in these ways reading interacts with all aspects of health and is measurably a healthy practice! There are many more examples of how it can benefit us and different areas to talk about, but, I am just highlighting some of the ones I find most fascinating -- I don't think you want to read a whole paper about the topic ;) So the next time someone tries to make you feel guilty about reading instead of exercising, just think of how you are benefitting your health in a different way, and keep on with your novel!

Blog Hop: Bibliotherapy

While I was on my holidays, I missed The Blue Bookcase's Literary Blog Hop -- in fact, I wasn't aware of this event previously -- but I just saw it over at C'est La Vie and although I am a couple of weeks late, I must join in and answer their very appropriate question!

The topic:
Discuss Bibliotherapy. Do you believe literature can be a viable form of therapy? Is literary writing more or less therapeutic than pop lit or nonfiction?

This topic is very close to my heart, both as a librarian and as an owner of a company devoted to the principles of bibliotherapy, Four Rooms Creative Self Care.

I think it's important first of all to note that there are two generally accepted forms of bibliotherapy: clinical and creative or developmental. Clinical Bibliotherapy is practiced by therapists and licensed professionals, and incorporates the use of non-fiction, topically relevant books for the patient's needs, to be read and responded to under the guidance of the professional.

Creative Bibliotherapy, on the other hand, is aimed at healthy populations. Its intent is to provide an arena for people facing regular life transitions and troubles to explore the possibilities for the story of their own life. Literature, both fiction and poetry, is used to share the creative ways in which other people perceive the world and face the same kinds of dilemmas that a reader might. Reading in this case gives us words for experiences or emotions that are common to all humanity -- and once we can recognize and name such things they become vastly more manageable. Reading gives us the chance to explore life from inside another person's head, to develop empathy and at the same time to give us the chance to distance ourselves a bit from our own crises and provide a bit of perspective. Besides simply content, the act of reading itself is healthy -- it builds new neural pathways and increases brain health, while giving our minds the opportunity to slow down and find relief from everyday stressors.

Bibliotherapy involves writing as much as reading. Responding to and exploring our reactions to our reading is an important factor in metabolizing our experience of a book. In our writing we discover our impressions of plot, character, setting and why we might have loved/hated or been especially affected by any of these elements. With some thoughtful examination we can understand more about life than we did before we read a particular book. This calls for a conscious, active style of reading and a willingness to respond to a work of literature.

While I think that "literary fiction" and poetry are very suited to this approach because of their natural inclination to explore the grey areas of life and more serious issues overall, a good genre novel can speak to our particular situation as well. Reading a Great Novel out of a sense of obligation will only feel like homework -- if, rather, you prefer science fiction, romance, or westerns, then read those with attention. As a bibliotherapist I try to match reading preferences with themes that connect with the client's needs, and to facilitate deeper exploration of what the books offer.

As to some of the concerns that others who've responded to this question have raised about reading being counterproductive in some situations, it may be true in some cases. In such, however, it seems to be that a clinical relationship is called for. Therapists recognize situations in which they need to limit rather than encourage journal writing; the same could be true of addictive reading that is an avoidance strategy rather than a healthy habit.

In Creative Bibliotherapy we can approach such health issues as low-grade depression and find benefit (severe clinical depression should always be treated medically). The immensely successful British The Reader Organisation has just published a study of the benefits of group reading via Get Into Reading, one of their core programs.

While the last thing I wish to do is to reduce literature to a basic "usefulness factor" I think we can recognize the power of all Art, but especially the interior nature of literature, to enrich our lives and help us along our way.