Ideas - Do books have the power to heal us?

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

If you're someone who thinks reading is therapeutic, you aren’t alone. On the surface, bibliotherapy might sound like another personal wellness trend, but it definitely isn’t. In fact, it’s an approved form of mental health treatment in Canada. And it’s been around for at least a century. In this episode, researchers Sara Haslam and Edmund King discuss the World War Ⅰ roots of this practice in the UK. Author Cody Delistraty considers its role in moving him forward in the grieving process. And psychiatrist Martina Scholtens explains why she created an evidence-based reading list online, tailored to a range of mental health diagnoses.

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Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. Bibliotherapy is a term you may have heard in recent years, the use of books for improving mental health. And on the surface, that might sound like another personal wellness trend, the book as touchstone for reflection, dreaming, and healing. If it all sounds a little faddish, it's actually not. The First World War is certainly a key inflection point. Bibliotherapy has taken different forms, but is at least a century old.

The term bibliotherapy was coined in 1916. It's true that anyone can offer bibliotherapy services, but some psychiatrists have been including it as an evidence-based option. It's recommended in the Canadian Guidelines for Treatment of Depression and Anxiety. And while books are written with an author's intent, they're imbued with meaning by readers. We've always looked to books for soulless, for healing, for a way of profoundly changing the way in which we see the world. So in this episode, getting the story on bibliotherapy. Here is Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey. You can say this about a crisis. It can focus the mind.

We really had a blueprint for when she was sick. There was a real sense of, okay, you go to the doctor, you go to the clinical trials. Our family, my father, my brother and I were pretty focused on what are we doing to get mom better? And then she dies and there's a total lack of focus. After four years of helping his mother through cancer, Cody Delestrati was no longer a caregiver, just a guy in his 20s whose mother had died too soon. He found himself lost in the daily fog of grief, but he fully expected a path would emerge. You know, go through the five stages to get the closure,

getting to acceptance, the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross five stages of grief. The most famous grief guide of all, except... Her study was about patients who were dying and coming to terms with their own death, and it's not about people grieving, but it's often one of the very few things people think they know about grief.

but it's often one of the very few things people think they know about grief. For Cody, grief persisted. He was functioning. He was working as a writer, an editor, but a major presence in his life was now absent. He says he felt broken and numb. He says he felt broken and numb. So he set out to forge his own path in the fog. A series of not-so-clinical trials, brief experiments to help himself and others. Trying psilocybin, creating dead bots using artificial intelligence, attending and researching this realm of laughter therapy. My name is Cody Delestraty and my book is called The Grief Cure Looking for the End

of Loss. He was willing to try just about anything, but felt himself pulled in certain directions. Something like bibliotherapy, that really appealed to me individually. I love to read, I love to write. Cody reached out to a well-known bibliotherapy practitioner, an artist and writer in England, Ella Burtude. I sent her an email, I paid her, I think it was like 90 pounds, which is like 100-some US dollars, but she sent me a questionnaire.

On that questionnaire, she had things like, what's your all time favorite book? Train Dreams by Dennis Johnson. What is my ideal reading spot? I said an empty dining car on a train. Why do I read? To expand my perspective, how I choose what I read, the books I couldn't finish and have most hated,

and just lots of questions really about my reading habits. One of her questions nudged something in him. Did you read? Were you able to read after your mom died? And I thought that was interesting because for me, reading has always been a way through which I'm able to filter the world

and I felt a real inability to read anything of great depth. Shortly after my mom died, I was reading kind of what I consider fun books, like David Sedaris' funny type stuff, adventures, books I'd read and reread many times already, like Donna Tart's The Secret History, where I had a real sense of comfort in them as they're books that I knew well. They arranged an online meetup.

We went through, had this sort of very odd, not like your usual therapy session essentially, and then she emailed me a few days later my prescription. Cody's bibliotherapist was not a pharmacist. Her prescription was a plan of action. Reading action. It included things like writer living in Brooklyn, pondering the death of his mother, considering his grief. And then she goes dosage. Try reading aloud when feasible, preferably by a fire or by a lake. Keep reading a notebook in which you write down the title of the book, author, date you finished reading, place you were when you read it, and a few thoughts about the book. Create a reading nook in your house."

And I thought that was very wise and I did heed her words. She included a book list for Cody, annotated and personalized. Grief is a Thing with Feathers by Max Porter. Here's Where We Meet by John Berger. Mrs. Death, Mrs. Death by Selena Godin. Mostly international fiction. The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell, The Guide by R.K. Narayan, Comet and Mumuland by Tove Jansen. A kids book.

And Some by the Stanford neuroscientist David Eagleman. Cody read them all and resonated with that last one, a collection of short fiction called Some, a book that he says he would never have picked up himself. It's only about 100 pages. It presents 40 different possible afterlives, and it's done as a sort of philosophical thought experiment meets literary sci-fi.

You take all your pain at once, or 27 intense hours of it. Once you make it through, it's agony free for the rest of your afterlife. But that doesn't mean it's always pleasant. You spend 6 days clipping your nails, 15 months looking for lost items, 18 months waiting in line, 2 years of boredom staring out a bus window, sitting in an airport terminal, one year reading books. And I don't know, there's so many like this. There's one story where God is a microbe and

he is not even aware of our existence. A thinky book, in other words, not really the catalyst for a weepy emotional breakthrough. And yet for the type of reader, type of grieving person that Cody was, the book gave him something new. It encourages the reader to imagine their own possibilities. It accepts absurdity. Death is absurd. We all know it happens. Most of us pretend or at least live lives like it won't, and yet it's always there. So I don't know, grief can feel so sacred and so scary. And so to realize that it's just part of the wildness and the absurdity of life had, for me, a kind of peculiar effect of helping me to really see the world through a new lens.

Looking at what he'd read, he realized something. They're really about the stories we tell ourselves. That just opens so many new ways to think about it. There's no right way, there's no wrong way to grieve. Kodi Della Strade didn't discover the grief cure, but this experiment helped him move along. Encountering other minds, also trying to work out the meaning of death and grief, demonstrated to Cody that he wasn't alone in this story. In my sense of isolation, I think a lot of people get this feeling that they are alone in their grief,

that they are the only people who have ever experienced what they're experiencing. And to some degree, that is correct. I mean, the hyper specifics of your situation will never be exactly replicated, but it's such a universal phenomenon, and it's something that we, in our hyper individualized, really socially atomized culture, often come to forget.

Actually, this is something people have been dealing with truly forever, and having books where you have these very insightful, very smart people from either a thousand years ago or one year ago writing about something similar to what you've gone through can really provide a sense of support and of possibility really. There are plenty of ways that those ancient and modern, very smart people communicate through art. The spoken word, theatre, movies, visual art, music. So here in the not terribly bookish west of the 2020s, what's special about books?

Maybe it's the same things that they've always offered us. There's something about the immediacy of reading someone else's thoughts and having instant access to what they're thinking. And of course, when you're reading something from another place, another time, there is this kind of sense of magic thought transference from one mind to another. And obviously, reading has the power to evoke emotions instantaneously. When one reads a certain passage, there is this kind of contagion of emotion that takes place. So I think there has always been this sense that reading has 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, different contexts. So it's always been seen as this incredibly powerful technology. So my name is Dr. Edmund King. I'm a senior lecturer in English literature at the Open University in the UK. And I'm kind of an all purpose historian of reading. And I'm Sarah Haslam. I'm a professor of 20th century literature.

They've collaborated with another Open University colleague, Siobhan Campbell, on a book of essays. The name of the collection that we have co-edited is 100 years of bibliotherapy healing with books. Bibliotherapy as a practice is traced back to the start of the 20th century. books. Bibliotherapy as a practice is traced back to the start of the 20th century. The First World War is certainly a key inflection point. The term bibliotherapy was coined by an American Unitarian minister, Samuel McCord Crothers, in 1916.

But the idea of attributing a special power to books obviously goes back much further. Yeah I think whenever bibliotherapists or literary specialists get together and try and write a history of this practice, obviously they want to look as far back as they possibly can and it's very tempting and I think in many ways quite insightful to go back to ancient sources. So people quite often go back to an anecdote about the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II, who supposedly had the phrase, the healing place of the soul engraved upon one of his libraries. Other people will look at Aristotle and the concept

of catharsis or the concept of purging the audience's emotions through drama and make some large-scale analogies with our current ideas of bibliotherapy and say, this is the same essential idea in the past. There's this grand continuity in the way in which we think about books and reading across time. And I think that is a very tempting and very attractive way of thinking about books and bibliotherapy. But I think there might be something a bit more complicated going on as well than just that grand historical story of continuity across time. You mentioned that books have been seen also as negative in their power. I think the quote was both remedy and poison.

When we think about bibliotherapy, there is this temptation to merely focus on the good, to see books as good things, reading as an inherently good practice that will make us into better people. But obviously, there has always been a dark side to reading. There's always been a sense in which there's danger beneath the covers. And I think that's what we often go to books for anyway. We don't always go there for positive emotions or for a sense of bliss. There's something disturbing about the process. There's something emotionally disturbing. And I don't think we should lose sight of that. You've always got to have a sense of a far more nuanced moral and emotional landscape. Bibliotherapy was conceived to use books for the greater good during World War I to help

physically injured and psychologically damaged soldiers. Initiatives and therapies involving books were developing on both sides of the Atlantic. They were happening concurrently, and in fact there was more of a transatlantic cultural conversation about bibliotherapy than we knew. So Theodore Wesley Koch was an official from the Library of Congress, and he was sent over in 1917 to do some kind of some fact checking. He was an exploratory mission, if you like, to see what was happening in terms of books at war in the UK. The US Library of Congress and American Library Association

collaborated on a library war service. It set up libraries at military camps and at military hospitals, books were dispensed to patients by uniformed librarians. It's where that medicalized bibliotherapy vocabulary, diagnosis, prescription came from. That is what happened when bibliotherapy went into institutions and organizations, which it tended to more quickly in the U.S. On the British side, things were less formal, less top-down.

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. Sarah Haslam has called these practices literary caregiving. And they are largely undertaken by women, largely undertaken by volunteers, largely undertaken not as part of professional organizations, but as part of charitable practices in the private sector, as it were, through private donations. The UK and US approaches still intersected at times. Take the fever chart developed for the British army by a scholar named H.R.

Bratsmith. Supposedly, what happened was there was an Oxford Don, an academic, who was too old for service, and he had volunteered for some form of war service. And so what he ended up doing was coming up with a list of books that could be read by severely traumatized or shell-shocked soldiers. So he was really compiling a list of books that could remedy people's emotional distress. And he ranked them in order of the most palliative or the most consoling. And the book which came at the top of that list or the author which came at the top of

that list was Jane Austen. Wow. So a female author and, you know, the queen of the marriage plot. What do you make of that? I think it's interesting. I think it's probably not a coincidence that Jane Austen had her centenary during the First World War. So there was already a sense that the Austen industry was forming and she had a certain profile, a rising profile at the time. So she was already someone I think it was topical. But if you look at what British soldiers were actually taking with them in their kitbags when they went to fight. They were quite often taking 19th century novels with them. And certainly I've come across some evidence of officers at least who were reading Austen. So I don't think it's entirely out of the question.

And of course, in the kind of culture around books that existed at the time, there was, I think, a far more, a far greater profile for those kinds of titles. You quite often come across 19th century novels being discussed in this context. It's really interesting. Was it this power of the novels to console somehow, you know, you're in a trench in World War One, somehow, you know, you're in a trench in World War I, transported to some fictional world, or are you looking for reassurance about the one that you're in? Obviously, we can't really know what Brett Smith was thinking when he compiled the chart,

but I certainly think that there was this concept of transportation that certainly existed this concept of transportation that certainly existed at the time. And in the accounts of soldiers that I've read who were talking about reading during the period, I've found some really striking instances where they talk about the power of reading when you're under shellfire. So quite often a position could be under shell fire for hours, there's a great deal of stress. Of course you expect the next shell to have your name on it. But having a novel with you could be a way

of just focusing on something else and just even just going through the motions of flicking from one page to the next, whether you take any of the content into your mind or not, that kind of automatic action could be a way of taking your attention away from a very frightening and traumatic situation. It could also be a way of revisiting a less stressful and more happily remembered period of life. So quite often these were young men in their early 20s. They might take the books they'd read during their teenage years with them to war or their favorite books they had as children. One of the authors I've dealt with, one of the readers I've come across is a dramatist who was

obsessed with Alice in Wonderland. And so he took Alice in Wonderland with him to the trenches and he read it obsessively over and over and over again. Either the well was very deep or she fell very slowly for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her and to wonder what was going to happen next. And he described the relationship between the British trenches and the German trenches

in terms of a looking glass or looking through the looking glass as he looked over toward the German positions. Down, down, down, would the fall never come to an end? It was an amazing discovery. It was one of those wow moments that researchers live for because it really did change what we thought we knew about books at war. The phrase that Sarah Haslam uses, literary caregiving, was inspired by a eureka moment she experienced in the main library at Oxford University. I actually came up with that term as a result of coming across a pamphlet called the Red

Cross and Order of St. John War Library, and it was by somebody called Helen Mary Gaskell. Britain too had assembled a war library, but in the place of governments and institutions, was a determined individual, Helen Mary May Gaskell. Gaskell unashamedly operationalized emotion. In her pamphlet, she talked about the fact that the day that war was declared, she thought, what can I do? I know what I can do. I can get people to donate books which can go to sick and wounded soldiers abroad. She had experience of doing this. In the Burr War, her son-in-law had been wounded and she couldn't think what else to send him. She sent him some books and he wrote back to her, talking to her of the amazing effect that these books had had for him and for his comrades. The books had been literally read to pieces, he told her.

So many people wanted to read them. They fell apart and they were passed around in sections. He'd said to her at the time how helpful they had been. When war was declared in 1914, she was a well-connected, wealthy woman. She was actually at a house party the weekend war was declared, which included the UK Prime Minister. She had powerful friends, she had wealthy friends, and she had her own money as well. So she was well positioned to put her concept into practice.

into practice. As I said earlier, she operationalised emotion, so she said, books are needed, books are being demanded, soldiers are imploring us to send books. And she felt heartbroken, She used the word heartbroken when they couldn't generate enough material to send. You're listening to Ideas. We're heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, on World Radio Paris, and in Australia on ABC Radio National. You can stream us around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. And you can find us wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayaad. It was over 30 years ago that Clifford Olson first called me. Secret phone calls from Canada's most notorious serial killer. I knew I was killing the children, but I couldn't stop myself. Now it's time to unearth the tapes

because I believe there are still answers to be found. I'm Arlene Bynum from CBC's Uncover, Calls from a Killer, available now. from a killer. Available now. Scholar Sarah Haslam came upon a 100-year-old pamphlet in the library at Oxford. It made her realize that one citizen, Helen Mary Gaskell, had the aim to create a war library for British soldiers on the eve of World War I. And her emotional plea to the nation worked. By 1917, 10 million units had been shipped, both domestically and internationally, by the war library.

And the majority of those 10 million units have been donated by the public. The plan worked almost too well. She was not expecting the response. The Postmaster General in the UK got involved and enabled people to donate for free. So you could take your books to a post office and they would come down to London to the War Library's headquarters headquarters which was on my marble arch. There's one story about somebody donating an entire library of 35,000 books at once and other stories of the traffic just coming to a standstill because people were sending so much stuff. It was a book donation on a different scale. And of course there were people who emptied their attics.

Of course there were people who thought, you know, I don't know what I'm going to do with all of these books. I'm going to give them to the war library. But people also donated first editions. It was happening around the market. It was happening below the market. It was coming from the donating public. And I find this deeply moving.

As Sarah Haslam tells Ideas producer Lisa Godfrey, the ethos of bibliotherapy, books given with the intent to help and heal, was in the air. Robert Bridges, who was the poet laureate in 1918, and interestingly, like Chekhov, he trained as a doctor first, he trained as a doctor first and then he became a writer. And Bridges wrote an appeal for the War Library in 1918 in The Times in which he talked about bookland. He talked about, and it isn't beautiful as you

would expect from a poet, imaginative, creative language. He talked about bookland as a magic land and he said to the people reading the Times, we need books that are precious to you. We need books that are useful to you. We need you to give these books to those who need them more than you do. We need you to give these books to those who need them more than you do. I then see these books as invested, invested with caregiving from the donating public. Because there's a communication there. Exactly. They gave things that were precious, they gave things that were needed, they gave things that they loved.

And it went a long way to meeting the need that was being expressed by those who were fighting at the front. It's amazing to think of a soldier lugging a book around and then reading it in the trenches during actual warfare. Absolutely, and then passing it on. Because a lot of reading in the First World War happened in groups and books were shared once they got there. The books from the war library were aimed mainly at those who were sick or those who were wounded.

You quote a Times article from 1915, What to Read to the Wounded, which says volunteers searched for, quote, slow stories fit for the strong man on his back. That's interesting, isn't it? I mean, there are other articles also published in the Times which say that Jane Austen is perfect for a wounded man. I mean, I think possibly they hadn't realized quite how funny and quite how biting Jane Austen's satire can be, quite how energetic her satire can be. But I think the point was,

although it sounds a bit like we're getting into prescription territory there, doesn't it? I don't think that was the point. The point was books that distract, books that take people away from their day-to-day existence, their day-to-day experience. Other books that were very popular were by Robert Louis Stevenson. Nat Gould, he wrote books about racing, horse racing. For some reason, he was incredibly popular with men. And there was something about the familiarity, I think,

books that they'd loved when they were at home in their normal life, were also the books that they loved when they were away from home. And one of the important things about Gaskell's literary caregiving, about her vision of her war library, was that the choices would be generated by the men themselves. She didn't want it to be a top-down, prescriptive, to go back to that word, business.

She wanted the men saying, I love this writer, please can you get hold of some books by him. The thing that I think is really striking about the war library, not just that it was nowhere, literally nowhere in the historiography. The War Library was kind of confused with the Camps Library, which was an official kind of wartime response, and it was attributed to Kitchener, who was the Secretary of State for War in the UK. But that just locked out a whole section of practice, of wisdom, of female largely, female- literary caregiving, that inflects all of this history very differently. That gendered aspect had got lost. Nobody

was telling that story. Another female-led book project took place at the Endell Street Military Hospital, which opened in 1915 in London. It was the third wartime hospital operated by two medical women, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray. And they interestingly decided to have a library as part of the Endell Street Military Hospital. It was run by volunteer woman novelist called Beatrice Harridan. What was important to Beatrice Harridan

was that they got to know the patients. They wanted to sit down next to the patients. They wanted the men to tell them what they were like. They wanted them to say what reading they enjoyed. They wanted to find out a bit about them. And primarily, their aim was to remove any sense of shame from anything that the men wanted to express as desired reading. So lack of education, I think you can, you know, it's a good phrase, alongside care, sitting next to, eliciting

information, being gentle, asking questions, and then making perhaps a recommendation as to what the men might like to pick from the library. But the other important thing to note about Endle Street is that the shelves were open. So if the men could walk there, depending on their injuries, then they were able to help themselves to whatever they fancied from the shelves. You spoke of the physical wounds of the men. Can you remind us of the mental state that soldiers were sometimes in when they returned from fighting? Sometimes the mental wounds were as serious as the physical wounds, but obviously they were far

less visible. And both Louisa Garrett Anderson and Gaskell talked about the need to respond to the wounded minds. But what the women who were in these sites of literary caregiving were absolutely certain about was that they wanted to give as much attention to those wounds that could not be seen as the head wounds, as the leg wounds, which were obviously very common in trench warfare. LW We have a name now for what those soldiers suffered, PTSD, trauma, moral injury, and that still exists, of course. I understand that literary caregiving still goes on with veterans in England, is that right?

KS Yes, it does. And I think that there's a huge amount of really interesting work that's happening now in terms of reading and what the benefits are. There was actually a report just written in the UK called the Reading Rights Report. And there is a neuroscientist who does report quotes, who wires people up, as neuroscientists do, and discovered that there's a, you know, a co-regulation of nervous systems when a mother reads to a baby. The heart rate, for example, goes into sync. And I like to think that for those men

who couldn't read to themselves, and were far away from those who loved them, if they were being read to, then there would be something similar, a kind of a pause, a pause in the beat of the clock, a kind of a moment that returned them to themselves and took them out of the experiences that they recently had and therefore set them perhaps on,

and hopefully on a path to something like recovery. something like recovery. Sarah Haslam's mention of science brings us back to a central question in 20th century book therapies. Was the practice of using books to heal a science, an art, or a simple act of care? Historian of reading, Edmund King. There's always been this tension, I think, certainly since the early 20th century between a more informal approach to bibliotherapy, particularly in hospital settings. There were people who wanted to make bibliotherapy into a science. And certainly between the World Wars and the 1920s and 1930s, these hospital librarians would wear white coats and they would take their

books from one bed to another in something which looked like a dispensing trolley. So there was this desire to represent the books on the most basic level as medicines and as part of a medical discourse and to say that they had certain particular effects in the same way that drugs would have particular effects. He thinks that's because, as ever, there was something to prove to others. He thinks that's because, as ever, there was something to prove to others. A desire by a profession to ground itself in expertise and in results, and to demonstrate to funders or managers or the people who are controlling the purse strings that this particular practice actually has a series of results. And there was an enormous effort to quantify the effects that books could have on patients and particular kinds of books could have on particular maladies or particular illnesses in terms of recovery. I'm not sure

that was ever particularly successful. I think there was a great deal of ambition to make bibliotherapy into that kind of science, but I don't think I could ever really kind of fulfill the expectations that were around it during this time period. Yeah, so there's always been this tension, I think, between the informal and the formal, the desire to demonstrate the power of bibliotherapy in the most direct way through quantification, through the production of results and figures that will demonstrate once and for all that this is doing good. 21st century bibliotherapy continues to be a mix of the formal and informal.

Search for a bibliotherapist online and you'll encounter creative people with a background in the arts, ready to prescribe a one-off book list relevant to you and your life questions. Bibliotherapists trained in psychology or social work, prepared to work with you at regular appointments with books as a springboard. Some bibliotherapists are now credentialed. A mentor-led training program with professional guidelines has existed since 2002. It's called the International Federation for Bibliopoetry Therapy.

And finally, there are clinicians who use bibliotherapy as an option among other therapies because they're convinced it can be helpful to certain patients. We know there's evidence for it in the scientific literature. It's recommended in the Canadian Guidelines for Treatment of Depression and Anxiety. We recognize that bibliotherapy is a high quality, low barrier form of therapy that's accessible, affordable. It's acceptable to patients because it's non-stigmatizing. It's easy to use. Martina Schultens is a psychiatrist in private practice based in Victoria, BC. I'm also a clinical assistant professor at the UBC Faculty of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry, and I'm a writer.

She spent an earlier decade of her career as a family doctor at a refugee clinic in Vancouver. During that time, actually, I became quite interested in narrative medicine, the practice of medicine that's influenced by reading and writing and holds that the practice of narrative medicine makes clinicians better clinicians. It's not much of a jump to then wonder how it might be beneficial to patients themselves. And so when I came across the idea of bibliotherapy as a family physician, it really resonated with me so much that I actually purchased the domain name, bibliotherapy.ca, years before I actually did the project.

AMT – That project was part of Martina Shultin's psychiatry training. A scholarly project, but one that addressed a wider need. There was no kind of readily accessible resource that might tell you which book to prescribe for which patient. I wanted to make book prescriptions more accessible to patients and their caregivers by reviewing, organizing and disseminating recommended reading lists for patients. Hers was built from many books. So I found 35 existing recommended reading lists

and scanned those for titles that were recommended by more than one organization. This generated a list of, I think it was 84 titles, and I reviewed all of those books. I physically, I wanted to hold and page through any book that I would consider recommending to a patient. The result is a clear, simple, user-friendly website. Organized by diagnosis, whether it's adult or child, and kind of further categorized by the level of

evidence that was used to generate that recommendation. As you mentioned, you break it down into specific categories from depression and anxiety right through to major mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Can books really help patients across such a wide spectrum? Certainly the evidence suggests that they can, and organizations also do recommend reading for patients with a wide range of psychiatric diagnoses and patient advocacy groups as well for everyone from people with diagnosis of schizophrenia or eating disorder or Alzheimer's or children with anxiety. There's recommendations for books that either clinicians or patients or their families or

librarians have noted to be helpful. You know, many of the books are non-fiction. They're guides, they're helpful, they're there to provide support for patients and their families. You do include in the schizophrenia section a novel and a literary memoir. What place do creative kinds of works have? So when making a recommendation for a book to a patient, there's a number of things to consider. So of course, first would be the diagnosis,

but then also looking specifically at the patient's current symptomatology, the severity of illness, and where they are in the course of that illness. So someone who is acutely ill with schizophrenia, for example, it's unlikely that I would recommend a memoir or a novel about schizophrenia. But that is something where perhaps if loved ones or family members are trying to understand a new diagnosis, a book like that might be helpful for them. Or perhaps someone with a psychotic disorder who's currently in remission and wants to

understand more about the illness or be able to read material by someone who has had a similar experience to them might be helpful. These books, when they're prescribed, I want the prescription to be evidence-based and tailored to the recipient of the book and their very particular circumstances. So not just a diagnosis, but the person with the diagnosis. That's right. In terms of the effects,

is giving patients hope one of the goals of bibliotherapy? Yes, I think it's quite powerful for patients to read about symptoms and experiences that align very closely with their own. Because I do see in my patients that often their own experiences and symptoms, particularly those that generate shame that they haven't shared with anyone else, there's often a sense that they are the only ones experiencing such symptoms

or that it's something specific to them. And patients have told me that reading, whether it be in a fictional form or going through a workbook, seeing the symptoms of their illness, whether it be depression or obsessive compulsive disorder is something that can really address the isolation that comes with living with some of these conditions. What else do you see books being able to do for people who are suffering? It can provide them with skills that help them to get better and to stay better. And some of the experiences my patients come to me with aren't necessarily part of their illness, but are part of experiencing loss and grief and suffering and guilt and all sorts of human emotions.

I think books can help people to understand what it is to be human. Dr. Martina Scholtens has made her book recommendations available to everyone at bibliotherapy.ca. Evidence-based book therapy would be a high note to end on here, but to be honest, there's something missing in this discussion. The status of books themselves in our 21st century culture. Yeah, I'm not sure if you wanted me to say anything about bibliotherapy and the crisis of reading. Edmund King. So I think the reason that we are so obsessed now with the idea that bibliotherapy can have

results or that books can heal or that books are good for us is because we also fear the end of reading. We look at the declines of time that young people are spending with books and we worry that our literary culture that we value so much might be coming to an end. So I think as we kind of think of ourselves as being imperiled or endangered or in danger of extinction, I think there is an enormous temptation to then emphasize the power of reading, the importance of books. And that I think is why we are so obsessed now with the idea of the healing book, because it speaks so powerfully

to our sense of the importance of books in a world in which that culture seems to be slipping away. CB' Books are seen as weirdly powerful. By the right in North America, there's a call for restriction in censorship and saving young minds from this malignant material. I think there is this heightened sense now around the danger of books, particularly books which have a different ideological flavor to those you might want to be promoting. So it's got away, I think, from the sense that all books are appropriate, or we should provide a full range of books across the full range of people's tastes, to the idea of kind of directing reading, or making sure that there is a particularly kind of curated list of

books which is available for, as you say, vulnerable young people to read. And again, it comes back to that sense of the heightened sense of power, almost totemic power that books now seem to have, this idea that they will instantly convert someone to another ideology, that they will put bad ideas in people's minds, that they will mimic or cause certain behaviors to be copied. So there I think there's an enormous anxiety now which exists around books, which goes along with the kind of idea of power of books. Are you worried about the diminishment

of book reading in school? We're seeing a lot of threats to humanities education. I think there is this increasing sense that the humanities and the art subjects need to be accountable and they need to show that they are having concrete results. They need to be focused on a particular outcome. They need to be instrumentalized. It can't just be about learning for the sake of learning. It's got to be about learning for a particular project. I find this very disturbing,

this reduction of learning to pure economic outcomes or pure kind of ideological outcomes. But I think what I find most disturbing is that it's across the spectrum politically as well. So that you can see a very obvious right-wing flavor to that for sure. But there is also a desire to connect things up on the left as well in terms of this kind of instrumentalism that we need to be reading to let ourselves know about the climate crisis, the Earth crisis. Obviously those things exist, but I want to think of reading as something which is beyond that.

It's about a wider sense of our engagement with the world and it shouldn't just be focused on these particular instrumental ends. It shouldn't just be about addressing this particular challenge, addressing this particular crisis, letting us know about this particular issue. Those things are very important, but it's got to be embedded in a much wider view of the world, a much wider sense of the world, a much wider sense of the reader's own power to engage with whatever it is they want to engage with. We live in such a relentlessly online world now and yet judging by social media, physical

books really do seem to interest young people, people who grew up online. Is it fair to say there's a bit of a resurgence around reading? Yeah, I think what they call Book Talk, which is the community on TikTok, which is about books and reading, is obviously a large phenomenon right now. People are paying a large amount of attention to it. The publishing industry is seeing it as a place that they can promote certain titles, that certain influencers will read a book and then want to talk about it in front of millions of people potentially on the app. And so I think there is this new buzz around books, but I'm not even sure it's about reading. I think it's about the materiality of books,

because there's something a bit nostalgic, I think, about reading in a physical format. So there is a certain extent to which people in these videos fetishize bindings, the edges of books, the smell of books. All of the physical things that we might've taken for granted in the pre-internet age become more important, I think, in a more virtual environment when there aren't these sets of physical traces that we take meaning from.

So those things become important again. In a way, I think the internet has shown us what's important about books, and it's made us focus on those parts of books that cannot be replicated in the digital realm. What happened to the e-book taking over? Yeah, I think we're always faced with these narratives of technological progress and we're always told that what we currently think will become obsolete or outmoded and that the new is always better. But I have a great deal of time for ebooks. I think they're

amazing in terms of their portability, the way in which they can just be instantly available to you. But there is something about an ebook which is quite different in terms of reading. It has a different relationship with the body, I think, as you scroll through the pages on a kindle or a device or even on your phone. As you're reading a book, you know how far through it is. It is simply by what page you're up to. You can see it in terms of your bookmark, for instance. You don't necessarily get those same kind of traces from an e-book, which is far more like an old-fashioned ancient scroll in some ways. Edmund King. His colleague on the 100 Years of Bibliotherapy project is passionate about where she stands on reading now, Sarah Haslam.

For me, the important thing is always going to be the opening of a book. And the fact that that is a beautiful moment and it's an unpredictable moment and it's a moment when you are in the present, you have slowed down, you're opening a book and it's a welcoming space as a physical object and that's why, for me, a Kindle will never take the place of a material book. So I think that the death of print was certainly predicted way too early and even as Kindle use is increasing, the sales of print books are not dwindling as was anticipated. So I think it's fair to say that there is a wide readership still of all ages who recognizes that that moment

in engagement with a book is irreplaceable. And long may that continue. What you're saying makes me think when we think about books having the capacity to help or heal us, that can come in many different ways. It can come in a direct sort of, I have a problem or I have a mental health issue and need some kind of guidance or advice or a reflection of what I'm going through in a memoir. But it can also be as subtle as finding a beauty in a book that still reminds you that the world is a decent place despite what's going on everywhere.

I think that's very true. I think that there are a range of processes being enacted when we pick up a book. You've been listening to an episode about bibliotherapy. It was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Lisa Ayuso is the web producer for Ideas. Danielle Duval is the technical producer. Our senior producer is Nicola Lukcic. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas. And I'm Nala Ayed.

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