Why people are turning to bibliotherapy

None of this is to say that fiction can’t help improve certain conditions. One small study tracking two groups of up to eight people with depression reported better mental health over a year in which they attended group readings of poetry and fiction. Carney suspects that certain kinds of fiction could be helpful for people with anxiety which, at its core, is driven by unpredictability. He suggests that reading fiction featuring predictable character types – like a lot of 19th-Century, Sherlock-Holmes-type stories – could be helpful, “because you’re essentially flooding the world with evidence that the world is predictable”.

Outside the context of treating specific conditions, reading fiction, drama or poetry could help boost general mental wellbeing. For instance, people with chronic pain who took part in a reading-aloud programme hosted by the UK charity The Reader Organisation reported they felt a sense of shared community, improvements in mood and quality of life. 

Such wellbeing boosts may depend on how people engage with books. In one of Poerio’s studies, she and her colleagues had 94 senior-aged people listen to audiobooks that they had selected from a list of popular fiction and non-fiction books. Remarkably, even two weeks after the programme, participants reported an improvement in their wellbeing and felt their lives to be more meaningful – but only those people who said they had engaged deeply with, and appreciated, their book. “When people were emotionally engaged with the content of the book – it was transporting them, they were feeling absorbed, it resonated with them, it had a lasting impression on them – that’s where we saw benefits to wellbeing,” Poerio says. 

Carney agrees that merely giving people a novel won’t have much effect; his research suggests that reflecting on books afterwards – especially together with other people – provides a much bigger wellbeing boost. Discussing literature gives people a way to think about distressing things that doesn’t impinge on their wellbeing, Carney says. “When you’re reading fiction, you’re not bothered by Heathcliff or what Heathcliff’s going to do, because Heathcliff is insulated from you by the fact that he’s not real. Fiction gives you a way to rehearse all these difficult, challenging social scenarios,” Carney says. And “if you can do that with other people, it makes it more real, it makes it more impactful”. 

For people wanting to try out bibliotherapy for themselves, Carney recommends trying to find a club for group discussions. Jolly recommends public libraries, where you can try lots of books for free – and if a book isn’t resonating with you, pick up another one instead, try something shorter, or a different genre like poetry. And if reading isn’t for you, Poerio adds, maybe there are other ways to improve wellbeing, like music or visual art. “If you feel it’s helping you, if you’re feeling the benefit… you’ll want to carry on,” Schuman says. “But if it feels unhelpful or intrusive, then [you] should feel completely at liberty to stop at any point.”