What is bibliotherapy?

The short answer

Bibliotherapy is the use of reading to support emotional wellbeing. That is the whole of it. The word sounds clinical, and in some settings it is, but the practice underneath is older and simpler than the word suggests.

Most definitions you will find online come from hospitals, universities and therapist directories, and they describe it as something done to a patient, alongside other treatment. That version is real and useful. It is also not the version most people need.

The other version is the one anyone can do. You are going through something. You choose a book because of what you are going through, rather than because you fancy reading it. And somewhere in the middle of it, a stranger describes a thing you thought only you had felt.

Where it comes from

Above the door of the room where the Egyptian king Ramses II kept his books, there was said to be an inscription: the house of healing for the soul. That is the oldest library motto anybody knows of, and it tells you that the idea is not new.

The word itself is much younger. It was coined in 1916 by an American clergyman, Samuel Crothers, writing in The Atlantic Monthly. During the First World War, doctors and booksellers at a military hospital in Alabama were prescribing books to soldiers coming home with what we would now call post-traumatic stress. By 1961 the practice was established enough to appear in Webster’s dictionary.

Since then it has been picked up by librarians, teachers, nurses and therapists, and it has quietly split into two things.

Clinical bibliotherapy

Led by a therapist, as part of treatment for a diagnosed condition. The reading is chosen by the practitioner and discussed in sessions. This is the version the medical sites describe, and if you are working with a therapist it is worth asking about.

Self-directed bibliotherapy

You, on your own, choosing what to read because of what you are living through. No diagnosis, no referral, no appointment. This is the older practice, and it is what this site is for.

My own experience of it

I grew up in a house where things happened that should not have, and outside it, in a religion that decided what I was allowed to read, think and know. Between the two, there was not much room to be a child.

My grandmother gave me a book of poetry when I was seven. My grandfather used to walk me to the bookshop in his village and let me choose whatever I wanted, then buy it for me. Between them they handed me the thing that would hold me up for the next fifty years, though nobody involved knew that at the time.

So I read. Fairy stories first, then fantasy, then anything I could get hold of. Adults read that as a bookish child. It was not. It was a child who had found the one place nobody could follow her.

That was escape, and escape is a perfectly respectable use of a book. But the second half came much later.

When I finally named my father as an abuser, and he went to prison, and it emerged that my sister had been through the same, and my parents’ marriage ended, I had something to carry that I had no idea how to carry. So I did what I had always done. I went looking for books.

This time I was not reading to get away. I was reading to find out that other people had survived it. That is when non-fiction arrived in my life properly, and it is the difference between escape and bibliotherapy: I was no longer reading instead of my life, I was reading towards it.

I have done the same thing every time since. When I left the religion after forty-nine years. When my marriage ended in betrayal after more than thirty. Each time, the first thing I reached for was a book, and each time the thing that helped was not advice. It was evidence. Someone had stood where I was standing, written it down, and gone on to have a life afterwards.

How to do it yourself

1. Start with the feeling, not the genre

   Do not ask what you feel like reading. Ask what you are actually dealing with, and then look for that. It is a different question and it produces different books.

2. Do not assume it has to be self-help

   Fiction is often better. A novel lets you meet a feeling at a safe distance, through somebody else, which is sometimes the only way you can bear to look at it. Poetry works when prose is too much. Memoir works when what you need is proof.

3. Allow yourself to stop

   If a book is making things worse, put it down. Grief memoirs are not always right for the freshly bereaved. Trauma writing can arrive too early. There are no marks for finishing.

4. Keep the lines that land

   Write them down somewhere. The sentence that undoes you at two in the morning is worth more than the book it came from, and you will want it again.

5. Read it more than once

   A book you read at thirty is a different book at fifty. Returning to something is not a failure of imagination, it is the practice working.

What it will not do

It will not undo what happened to you. It is not a treatment for serious mental illness, and it is not a replacement for a doctor, a therapist or a crisis line. Anyone who tells you a book can take the place of those things is selling something.

The research is honest about this too. Guided reading has good evidence behind it for mild to moderate anxiety and low mood, particularly alongside other support. It is a companion to help, not a substitute for it.

Where to start

This site is a bibliotherapy practice, laid out. More than 230 pages, each one gathered for a single feeling or situation, with books, poems and lines worth keeping. Not a reading list. A shelf you can go to when you need one.