Bibliotherapy and Reading to Patients

Bibliotherapy is the use of fiction and poetry to support and increase positive outcomes for people with mental health and wellbeing issues.  

Benefits include:

• alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety

• increase self-esteem and  improve social skills and concentration

David Chamberlain  (Lead Librarian, Service Development) set up a reading group with Psychiatric Nursing and Occupational Therapy support on two Older Adult Psychiatric Wards. Both ran for 10 weeks, with themed topics and there were over 80 participants. It was so successful the same model was run on a different hospital site and the group is planned to run yearly.

Comments from patients include:

“Re-kindled my passion for reading”

“We’re all in this together – reading and analysing the poetry”

“Did her the world of good – normally she doesn’t say anything, she opened right up after the war poems in the evening and had us all enthralled for 2 hours”