Exploring bibliotherapy

I think one enduring quality among folks that I have met working in Libraries is that we chose our profession because of a desire to help others. What I find particularly rewarding in my own work is using information to empower people to help themselves. Academic Libraries are particularly good at doing this in scholarly settings, but the value that they can bring to the personal lives of their users is often overlooked.

Tamarcus Brown

I came to be involved in bibliotherapy in a rather round-about way. But I was quick to recognise the value that it can add to Library users everywhere. Bibliotherapy is the use of reading for therapeutic purposes. This might include shared reading (such as book clubs and reading groups), reading events (such as poetry readings, and other events featuring the spoken word), and self-help reading. There is a growing body of clinical evidence to suggest that reading for self help can be an effective treatment for common conditions and life-stressors.

At least one in three people will struggles with their mental health at some point in their lives, but I'm sure it's something that almost all of us will encounter. And we all experience the pain of self-discovery, stress, and major life transitions at one point or another. Sometimes simultaneously. Libraries have a wealth of support material that users can turn to when dealing with difficulty.

Let me be the first to say quite clearly that this isn't a new or original idea. I didn't come up with this all on my own! Using self-help reading in academic libraries has been practised elsewhere for some time. But I thought it was something that we could do ourselves that would have a positive benefit to our users, and with minimal investment. I spent some time investigating bibliotherapy initiatives from elsewhere and doing quite a bit of benchmarking. Colleagues involved in mental health services at the University were incredibly supportive, as was my manager. I was able to make a case for turning my idea into a small project, with time and a budget attached. Which made Getting Stuff Done so much easier.

It was important to me that the collection of items included not only self help reading, but also works of fiction, graphic novels, music, films and documentaries, and even apps. Not everyone has the time, inclination, or ability to read a dense tome. As well as this, a lot of the material in our collection that deals with mental health is written from a practitioner perspective, and is of little value to the individual. So fiction and autobiographies needed to be represented in our recommended reading as well. And while we had plenty on depression, stress and anxiety, I was somewhat saddened to discover that our collection had almost nothing on bullying, AD(H)D, or LGBT+ identity for example. (what did it say about us that we hadn't thought to include these subject areas until now?)

But I did it! And I'm proud of the result. Soon I will begin collecting data to see whether or not the initiative has been "successful" or not. A difficult thing to measure. At best I will be able to show that whether or not our users have engaged with the resources. After all, it's difficult to put a value on mental health or to quantify it in any way.