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Required Reading: Books Take Over the Asylum
January 9, 2008
Devoted readers know that stories, poems, and plays have power. Literature can make us think, help us heal, and change our moods (I'm sure I'm not the only person who has suffered from what I call a "reading hangover" -- that is, feeling unaccountably depressed after finishing a terribly sad book).
This article by Blake Morrison in The Guardian is long, but well worth your time -- it's about books and reading used in therapy and mental-health care in England. Many of the groups reading at care centers are part of an organization called
Get Into Reading (the Web site asks, "Are Books the New Prozac?). Founders Jane Davis and Sarah Coley are associated with
The Reader magazine (check out the mag's blog
here).
Morrison points out that "Crochet or bridge might serve equally well if it were merely a matter of being in a group. But as Judith Mawer of the Mersey Care Mental Health Trust explained, focusing on a book is the decisive factor: 'People who don't respond to conventional therapy, or don't have access to it, can externalise their feelings by engaging with a fictional character, or be stimulated by the rhythms of poetry.'"
Or consider what a rheumatoid arthritis patient involved in a bibliotherapy group says: "Reading pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer seems important. No matter how ill you are, there's a world inside books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things that people usually skate over, like ageing or death, and that kind of conversation - with everyone chipping in, so you feel part of something - can be enormously helpful."
Did a book help
you work through something? What book was it?
Posted by Bethanne Patrick on January 9, 2008 | Comments (3)
