Right Book Can Be A Healing Tool!

A good book can be an absolute pleasure but research shows that the right book can also be a healing tool.

- Sophia Auld

When Rese Rose suddenly became very ill, a friend gave her a gift voucher for an unusual treatment called bibliotherapy. Rose says she was “deeply intrigued at what it may offer, probably because my approach to health has never been completely conventional”.

Bibliotherapy involves using literature to aid mental and emotional healing. The term comes from two Greek words: biblion, meaning book, and therapeia or healing. The term was coined in 1914 by American minister and author Samuel Crothers who described bibliotherapy as a “process in which specific literature, both fiction and non-fiction, was prescribed as medicine for a variety of ailments.”

While the term is relatively new, the benefits of bibliotherapy have been recognised for millennia. The ancient Egyptians, for example, had an inscription above the portal of the library of Pharaoh Ramses II, describing it as “the house of healing for the soul”.

Bibliotherapy was used by medical professionals like Sigmund Freud in the early 20th century. During World War I, as doctors and nurses searched for ways to help soldiers with their mental health, the idea came into its own.

A pioneer of bibliotherapy, Helen Mary Gaskell, described the beginnings of her war library in 1918: “Surely many of us lay awake the night after the declaration of War, debating ... how best we could help in the coming struggle ... Into the mind of the writer came, like a flash, the necessity of providing literature for the sick and wounded.”

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in bibliotherapy as studies explore its benefits for common mental health conditions like depression, stress, anxiety, social phobia and addictions.

Bibliotherapy in practice