Reading and Mental Health

Josie Billington

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030217617
• eBook ISBN: 9783030217624
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Psychology

This book brings together into one edited volume the most compelling rationales for literary reading and health, the best current practices in this area and state of the art research methodologies. It consolidates the findings and insights of this burgeoning field of enquiry across diverse disciplines and groups: psychologists, neurologists, and social scientists; literary scholars, writers and philosophers; medical researchers and practitioners; reading charities and arts organisations.

Following introductory chapters on the literary-historical background to reading and health, the book is divided into four key sections. The first part focuses on Practices, showcasing reading interventions and cultures in clinical and community mental health care and in secure settings. This is followed by Research Methodologies, featuring innovative qualitative and quantitative approaches, and by a section covering Theory, with chapters from eminent thinkers in psychiatry, psychology and psychoanalysis. The final part is concerned with Implementation, incorporating perspectives from health professionals, commissioners and reading practitioners.

This innovate work explains why reading matters in health and wellbeing, and offers a foundational text to future scholars in the field and to health professionals and policy-makers in relation to the embedding of reading practices in professional health care.

© The Author(s) 2019

J. Billington (ed.)Reading and Mental Healthhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21762-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Josie Billington¹

(1)

Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

Josie Billington

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Over the last two decades, the vital importance of reading to human flourishing and whole-life fulfilment has attracted strong and public notice. Reports from influential international and governmental bodies have shown recreational reading to have a more powerful effect on cognitive development, educational achievement and social mobility than socio-economic status. ¹ During the same period, there has been unprecedented attention to the relationship between literary reading—specifically the reading of literary fiction and poetry—and mental health and wellbeing. ² The impetus for this interest has been threefold, influenced by: the increase in third sector organisations and governmental bodies promoting reading; the urgent need of health providers to find economical and humane solutions to health problems; the successful growth of the arts in health and medical humanities movements. This wide constituency of interest has led to research and practice in this area crossing diverse groups and disciplines—reading charities and arts organisations; academic psychologists, neurologists and human scientists; literary academics, writers and philosophers; medical researchers and practitioners. Research alone embraces a wide range of approaches—theoretical, empirical, experimental—and while some such ‘applied’ studies are specifically related to health outcomes, there is a growing body of ‘pure’ research with key, and as yet under-mobilised, implications for health and wellbeing.

‘Reading and mental health’ is thus a recognisable and burgeoning field of enquiry. What the field currently lacks, however, is a comprehensive recognition of its findings and a core consolidation of its insights: it lacks a ‘centre’. The key priority of this book is to begin to carry out this vital task of consolidation. The volume thus brings into one place some of the best practice and best evidence currently available in the field, together with the diverse and complementary perspectives of practitioners and beneficiaries, pioneers and researchers, commissioners and policy-makers. By gathering and distilling these findings into centralised coherence, the book seeks significantly to advance knowledge of why literary reading matters for mental health. It also provides a foundational text for future practitioners and researchers and a guide to health professionals and policy-makers in relation to embedding reading practices in health care.

The book is divided into five parts. Part I, Reading and Health: Medicine to Literature; Literature to Therapy, offers an introductory awareness of the rich cross-boundary and in-between ground which the reading and health field occupies. In the first chapter of Part I, Christopher Dowrick, a professor of primary care and world-leading expert in depression, who is also a general practitioner (GP) in an inner-city surgery in the UK, argues that the general practitioner’s essential obligation to patients is the recognition of suffering and the offering of hope. Dowrick considers how GPs who are daily faced with the pressure of patient distress in their consulting rooms might gain from engagement with literature. Three writers who have mattered personally to the author, and who are themselves at the boundary of philosophy and literature and the spiritual and the sick—Robert Burton, Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Paul Sartre—provide rich insights for the modern understanding and management of depression and the interaction of suffering and hope. As Chapter 2 is an example of a medical mind turning towards literature, so Chapters 3 and 4 are written by literature scholars crossing, quite literally in their case, over to medicine. Josie Billington and Philip Davis are co-founders of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS), the first such centre to take academics from a School of English Literature into a Faculty of Health and Life Sciences in order to bring literary reading into closer relation with health and wellbeing. This collaborative enterprise is the inspiration for this book and, as we shall see, supplies much, though by no means all, of the material it comprises. In the second and third chapters of Part I, therefore, these literary people explore what motivated that turn towards health from within their own scholarly backgrounds: namely, the existing grounds for, and origins of, reading as ‘therapy’ which are to be found within the English literary tradition. In ‘The Sonnet “Cure”: Renaissance Poetics to Romantic Prosaics’, Grace Farrington and Philip Davis trace the therapeutic value of literature to Renaissance poetics. Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme (1602) held that the poet made form out of human chaos through the creation of structured rhythmic patterns, a holdfast against disorder. George Puttenham in his Art of English Poesy (1589), drew a direct analogy between poet and physician: a poem offers, cathartically, he said, ‘one short sorrowing’ as ‘the remedy of a long and grievous sorrow’. These concerns were re-introduced into the modern lyric tradition, the authors suggest, through the work of Romantic poet, William Wordsworth, for whom ‘the turnings intricate of verse’ effected ‘sorrow that is not sorrow/… to hear of’. In the final chapter of this section, ‘The Victorian Novel: Laying the Foundations for Bibliotherapy’, Farrington and Davis, together with Josie Billington, take up, historically, from the preceding chapter. Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, as has long been acknowledged, offered a blueprint for the nineteenth-century novel’s principal literary achievement, realism, which committed literature to ordinary experience during an era when (with the spread of education, literacy and written material) reading itself was becoming democratised. The authors’ contention here, however, is that Victorian realism’s mission was not simply to represent real life for its own sake, but to reach into the real life of the reader, transformatively. Literary realism, as it developed from Charles Dickens to George Eliot, it is argued, offers a model and rationale for modern-day reading therapies.

Part II, Practices, turns to contemporary reading practices and modern-day real readers who are engaging, often for the first time, with literature from earlier times. Clare Ellis and Eleanor McCann recount their experiences of taking Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays—the Renaissance literature regarded as foundational to reading therapy in Chapter 2—into both community and hospital contexts as part of mental health provision. Katie Clark and Charlotte Weber demonstrate the power of Wordsworth’s poetry to trigger spontaneous access to core autobiographical experience, in dementia (residential and day) care. The geographical reach of such practices is shown in Anne Line Dalsgård’s report on public librarians’ delivery of reading groups to psychologically vulnerable people in Denmark as part of a collaboration between third sector, psychiatric and municipal organisations, and by Susan McLaine’s account of a state library’s reading programme for older people in Victoria, Australia, in partnership with public health promotion. At such times Part II anticipates the focus on implementation of literary reading within health provision which will come in Part V, by featuring some ‘on-the-ground’, practical lessons learned by pioneering practitioners and researchers. This is true, too, of Alexis McNay’s and Charles Darby Villis’s illustration of the unique challenges and rewards of setting up the protected ‘thinking space’ of reading groups in male and female prisons in the UK. Their experience is contrasted and complemented by an interview with Canadian author and journalist Ann Walmsley on her acclaimed book, The Prison Book Club, in which she compares her experience of reading groups in high and medium secure prisons in Ontario, Canada, with her continuing participation in a women’s book club in Toronto. The Practices section concludes with Grace Farrington’s and Kate McDonnell’s accounts of reading with people suffering from long-term and often severe health conditions (personality disorder, psychosis, chronic pain) in clinical (in-patient and out-patient) contexts. The final testimony comes from Helen Cook, an NHS service-user living with chronic pain, who recounts her journey from reading group member to reading group leader.

Many, though not all, of the practices represented in this section are based around UK charity The Reader, with whom CRILS has enjoyed a research partnership since its foundation. The Reader’s mission is to ‘bring about a reading revolution so that everyone can experience and enjoy great literature which we believe is a tool for helping people survive and live well’. ³ Its distinctive model of Shared Reading is one of the most widely used arts in health interventions in this country and internationally (there are related organisations and partnerships in Denmark, Belgium, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Australia and New Zealand), and, as this volume will show, there is now a strong body of evidence demonstrating the model’s success in promoting mental health. Shared Reading groups are distinct from conventional book clubs. ⁴ The material is not read in advance nor confined to contemporary works. Nor is the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Reading and Health: Medicine to Literature, Literature to Therapy
• Part II. Practices
• Part III. Research Methodologies
• Part IV. Towards a Theoretical Understanding of Reading and Health
• Part V. Reading and Health: Implementation—Barriers and Enablers
• Correction to: Quantitative Methods
• Back Matter