A book prescription for mental health?
Bibliotherapy is approved in Canada for treatment of depression and anxiety, says Dr. Martina Scholtens
On the surface, it may seem that bibliotherapy is another personal wellness trend. The practice promotes books and literature as touchstones, to aid mental health and healing.
While it's true that anyone can offer book recommendations, there is evidence in scientific literature to support its clinical use by mental health practitioners.
"It's recommended in the Canadian guidelines for treatment of depression and anxiety," said Victoria-based psychiatrist Martina Scholtens.
Bibliotherapy is one of the mental health approaches that she makes use of in her private practice, for certain patients. She might prescribe poetry or a memoir, a novel or workbook.
"I want the prescription to be evidence-based and tailored to the recipient of the book and their very particular circumstances," she said.
Dr. Scholtens, who is a clinical assistant professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, put together a list of recommended titles, based on evidence.
"I wanted to make book prescriptions more accessible to patients and their caregivers by reviewing, organizing, and disseminating recommended reading lists."
She first published the extensively-researched list as an academic paper in 2024, but has now created a website for it, divided by diagnosis, at bibliotherapy.ca.
Bibliotherapy as an art
Bibliotherapy can range from a science-based approach, to one that is primarily literary.
Brooklyn journalist Cody Delistraty sought out an arts-based bibliotherapist when researching ways to address the prolonged grief he felt after the death of his mother.
Then in his early 20s, Delistraty undertook a number of experiments and therapies.
"I love to read, I love to write. So [bibliotherapy] made sense for me to dive into," said the author of The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss.
After an "odd, not-your-usual therapy session" and an intensive reading questionnaire, English bibliotherapist Ella Berthoud furnished him with an annotated and personalized list of international fiction.
He particularly resonated with Sum, a collection of surreal and witty short stories by neuroscientist David Eagleman.
"Grief can feel so sacred and so scary," said Delistraty.
"To realize that it's just part of the wildness and the absurdity of life had the peculiar effect of helping me to really see the world through a new lens."
Literary caregiving
A Hundred Years of Bibliotherapy: Healing Through Books, is a new essay collection edited by three researchers from the UK's Open University. It takes a historical survey of the practice.
"The term bibliotherapy was coined by an American Unitarian minister called Samuel McChord Crothers in 1916," said 20th-century literature professor Sara Haslam.
"The First World War is certainly a key inflection point."
America's institutionally-backed Library War Service set up military camp libraries at the start of the First World War. At U.S. military hospitals, books were prescribed and dispensed to wounded soldiers by uniformed librarians.
The British version of bibliotherapy was somewhat less prescriptive and medicalized.
Sara Haslam calls it "literary caregiving."
In places like the female-run Endell Street Military Hospital, "it wasn't about medicalizing books as part of soldiers' recovery. It was about freeing wounded and sick soldiers to identify the kind of reading that they wanted to do."
Haslam discovered archival proof that a substantial UK war library was amassed by 1917, spearheaded by one woman. Donations poured in from the public after May Gaskell's emotional call-out asking for meaningful books for soldiers.
"I see these books as invested with caregiving from the donating public. They gave things that were precious, that they loved. So it went a long way to meeting the need that was being expressed by those who were fighting."
Reading in a digital era
A hundred years later, it seems that bibliotherapy has been experiencing a renaissance.
Two more new books about bibliotherapy are being published this spring: one by bibliotherapist Bijal Shah, and another from social worker Emely Rumble.
Edmund King, a co-editor of A Hundred Years of Bibliotherapy, is a historian of reading. He has a theory for the resurgence.
"I think the reason that we're so obsessed now with the idea that books can heal, or are good for us, is because we also fear the end of reading."
Despite the rise of BookTok, the books community populated by users of TikTok, King worries about the decline of time young people spend with books.
"The literary culture that we value so much might be coming to an end."
Yet throughout the history of reading, he says, it has been imbued with "this great power to change people's minds, change the way we see the world, transfer thoughts from one mind to another, preserve ideas, transmit ideas to different times and different contexts."
For Sara Haslam, books remain powerful. In her view, opening a book is always surprising, and inherently conducive to mental health.
"It's a moment when you are in the present. You have slowed down," she said. "I think it's fair to say that there is a wide readership of all ages who still recognize that that moment in engagement with a book is irreplaceable.
"And long may that continue."
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*Written and produced by Lisa Godfrey.
Guests in this episode:
Martina Scholtens is a psychiatrist in Victoria, and a clinical assistant professor at UBC Faculty of Medicine. She is the author of Your Heart Is the Size of Your Fist: A Doctor Reflects on Ten Years at a Refugee Clinic.
Cody Delistraty is a journalist in New York, and author of The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss.
Sara Haslam is a professor of 20th-century literature at Open University, UK.
Edmund G. C. King is a senior lecturer in English literature at Open University, UK, a historian of reading, and co-editor, with Siobhan Campbell and Sara Haslam, of A Hundred Years of Bibliotherapy: Healing Through Books.
