Can reading improve your health? Bibliotherapy says yes.
Reading as a hobby is inherently rooted in self-care – while you can do it with others around, it ultimately offers a moment to slow down and steep in a story.
But did you know it can actually be beneficial to your mental health? Enter bibliotherapy, the practice of using literature to heal.
Emely Rumble, a licensed clinical social worker, biblio/psychotherapist and professor at Queens College in New York, first encountered the term when she studied abroad in college. There, she found London's Poetry Pharmacy, which sells 'books chosen to address your mood or emotional ailment.'
Now, after nearly 15 years of prescribing literature on her own, Rumble's book 'Bibliotherapy in the Bronx' (out now from Simon & Schuster) aims to bring the therapy practice to those in need of comfort.
What is bibliotherapy?
It sounds like a buzzy wellness trend akin to 'rejection therapy' or 'apartners,' but in 'Bibliotherapy in the Bronx,' Rumble argues we've always used storytelling to make sense of 'who we are, where we've been, and the possibilities of where we can go.'
Have you ever read a book that seemed to read you? A character that felt like they were written straight from your mind or a plot that you could relate to a little too hard? Chances are, you were practicing bibliotherapy on your own.
In a clinical setting, bibliotherapy can be reactive or prescriptive. It can look like a therapist suggesting a book to their client, or a client bringing up a book that impacted them. In either scenario, books are used as a discussion tool to help better understand ourselves, our mental health and how we fit into the world. One systematic review published in 2017 found that bibliotherapy is effective in reducing depression symptoms over time.
You can incorporate bibliotherapy into your reading as well. It's a four-step process, Rumble explains:
Recognition: Emotionally connect with some aspect of the book Examination: Consider why you may have an emotional response to a character or concept Juxtaposition: Compare your life experience with a character's and put yourself in their shoes Self-application: Use this set of insights to examine how you feel about a situation, person or past trauma
'So much of the clinical process and therapy is making the unconscious, conscious and as human beings who live in a very production-driven, capitalist society, we don't have moments to pause and slow down,' Rumble says. 'One great thing about a reading practice is that it forces you to have to embody yourself, and it forces you to have to face yourself down with courage.'
Rumble has used books in her therapy practice to help clients understand bodily changes during menopause, challenges that come with depression and anxiety, come out as queer and heal from abandonment. Anyone can benefit from bibliotherapy, she says.
'A lot of folks would rather be at home reading or joining a book club than coming to therapy,' Rumble says. 'If therapists can be trained in this unique modality of incorporating literature as a therapeutic tool, there's a lot more people who will be willing to engage.'
How to incorporate bibliotherapy in your life
Making time for regular reading can seem like an uphill battle for those with busy lives, but setting a routine is an important step in using literature to heal. It's an intentional time to slow down and practice stillness.
Pencil in times where you can take a moment to read, whether it's on a lunch break, before bed, on your commute (audiobooks are great if you're driving) or first thing in the morning. Rumble recommends traveling with a book at all times, especially poetry, because it's a bite-sized, often meditative form to dive into.
She recommends clients keep a curated bedside stack of books – something 'nourishing' like a guided journal, religious text or poetry book and a few novels that you're interested in. This can help combat late-night doomscrolling.
It can also be helpful to find a reading community, whether that's belonging to a book club or reading with friends and neighbors at silent reading events.
Bibliotherapy is helpful for kids' emotional development, too
You might not think of it as therapy, but there's a good chance your childhood reads helped you develop an early understanding of your emotions and the world around you. 'A Bad Case of the Stripes' by David Shannon teaches kids to stay true to themselves rather than conform to peer pressure. 'Strega Nona' by Tomie dePaola can teach trust.
'We know, when you're in the business of building little people, how important emotional literacy is to cultivating a child's narrative exploration,' Rumble says. 'It really helps to get children thinking about really important aspects of who they are and who they want to become, and giving them the tools they need.'
Bibliotherapy can be helpful for kids dealing with mental health challenges like anxiety or depression. It can help them process big feelings. It can also teach them about the world. Rumble uses an example of a child asking about the war in Gaza.
'We're not going to explain the whole history of Palestine to an 8-year-old and help them understand what's happening from an adult perspective,' she says. 'Instead, let's find a book that talks a little bit about how everyone comes from a different part of the world or a different culture and all cultures matter. Let's give them some of the foundational language to understand the beauty in all of our cultures and center everybody's humanity as an entry point to them understanding that what they're seeing is really scary.'
In one instance described in the book, Rumble even used hip-hop to connect with a teen as a form of poetry bibliotherapy.
'When we listen to a song that matches the emotional tempo of what we're feeling, it's cathartic. It's healing,' she says. 'Sometimes we can't access the language, especially when we're hurting or traumatized or feeling overstimulated.'
Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@usatoday.com.
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Los Angeles Times
7 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
The easiest way to restore your attention span could be just outside your door
Walking in nature for as little as 15 to 20 minutes can improve your attention span — even if you don't always enjoy it. In his new 324-page book, 'Nature and the Mind: The Science of How Nature Improves Cognitive, Physical, and Social Well-Being' (Simon & Schuster), environmental neuroscientist Marc G. Berman lays out how our natural environment can help restore people's frazzled, overstimulated nervous systems. Berman, founder and director of the Environmental Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Chicago, is also professor and chair of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago as well as co-director of the Masters of Computational Social Science program. Through his lab's research, Berman and his team have found that walking for longer periods of time — say about 50 minutes — can substantially boost cognitive function, but the beauty is you can still glean a noticeable cognitive benefit from spending just 15 to 20 minutes in nature. In one study, Berman and his team asked people to walk at different times of the year: in June when it was pleasant in Michigan and in January when it was 25 degrees and the trees were bare. As you might have guessed, the summer group was blissfully happy, and the winter group did not enjoy their stroll. 'But they still showed the same cognitive benefit as the people that walked in June,' he said of the latter group. 'For these cognitive benefits, it's not about liking the interaction. It's something deeper. It's how we process natural stimulation.' The Times spoke to Berman about what he and others have discovered through studying how our natural environments affect the human psyche and how we could design more elements of nature into our cities to improve our overall well-being. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. What is environmental neuroscience? Where did that term come from? It's built off some earlier research where people did studies on rodents and found out that when rodents lived in rich environments that had toys and there were other rodents around, these rats had more synapses in their brain, more glia cells. The physical environment that these rodents were [living] in was impacting their brains. And I was really taken by that. [Then] I took this course with professor Steve Kaplan, and he was talking about this theory called attention restoration theory and how people could restore their attention by interacting with natural environments. Steve, an advisor and I designed studies to test attention restoration theory, and I saw in the field there wasn't really a place necessarily for this kind of research. All these studies on rodents were done years ago, and nothing was really tying it together. I saw all these different connections, and I thought, maybe I could help to define this new field of environmental neuroscience where we'd actually really see how the physical environment that surrounds us actually affects brain functioning and to try to combine cutting-edge techniques in cognitive neuroscience with ideas from environmental psychology. Can you talk about these terms you use in the book: 'involuntary attention' and 'soft fascination'? It seems like what you're saying is, when we are in nature, it has a way of recharging us because of the way we're dispensing our brain space or energy. [Let's] start with attention restoration theory. One of the key tenets that was posited by Steve Kaplan and his wife, Rachel Kaplan, is that humans have two kinds of attention. One kind of attention is called directed attention. Sometimes that's called endogenous or top-down attention. That's the kind of attention where you as the individual person are deciding what to pay attention to. So presumably you're deciding to pay attention to me and what I'm saying, even if it might not be the most interesting thing that you could find in the environment. I do find what you're saying interesting, just to be clear. [Laughs] Humans are really good at directing their attention, but we can only direct our attention for so long before we become mentally fatigued, and it's hard to focus. We've all had that sensation at the end of a long workday where you might be just staring at the computer screen and, you know, nothing's happening. When you can't focus anymore, like that, we say that you're in a directed attention fatigue state. You've exhausted this directed attention resource. That's different from involuntary attention, which is when our attention is automatically captured by interesting stimulation in the environment. Bright lights, loud noises, those kinds of stimulation automatically capture our attention, and we don't really have any control over it. Like the loud buzz of a motorcycle. Yes, and it's thought that that kind of attention is less susceptible to fatigue or depletion. So, you don't often hear people say, 'Oh, I can't look at that beautiful waterfall anymore. It's just too interesting to look at. I'm too tired.' One of the ideas with attention restoration theory is that if you can find environments that don't place a lot of demands on your directed attention while simultaneously having interesting stimulation that activates the involuntary attention, you could restore or replenish [your] directed attention. OK, what would be an example of that? We say that the kind of stimulation that activates involuntary attention has to be what we call 'softly fascinating.' When you look at that waterfall, it doesn't capture all of your attentional resources. You can still mind-wander and think about other things while you're looking at the waterfall. If you're in Times Square, it's also super interesting. It captures a lot of your attentional focus, but it does so in an all-consuming way. The kind of stimulation that gives you this restful, restorative experience has to be softly fascinating and not harshly fascinating. In the book, you write quite a bit about the curving design of nature and its benefits. For the cynics among us, I wanted to ask: Can we just design more nature around us and more of its elements into buildings and benefit without actually being in nature — without taking a walk in the park or in the woods? Is it just curves that we need? We can get some of the benefits that way. Antoni Gaudí and other architects knew that in how they designed buildings, and people really like those kinds of buildings that have biophilic design, where they mimic the patterns of nature in design. I don't view that as a replacement for nature. That's sort of like a supplement. We find that in a lot of our studies, going into actual nature gives you the biggest bang for your buck, because being in nature, you get all the modalities: the visual, the auditory, the tactile, even the olfactory, the smell. You're getting that whole kind of experience that I think you just can't really mimic in a built space. I wouldn't want to say, 'Oh, the takeaway is, if we found all the nature ingredients, we can destroy all the nature and then just build it.' No, we have to preserve all the nature, because we can't engineer anything as good as nature. You write about the benefits of experiencing nature when one is depressed, anxious or grieving. What is it about nature that helps the anxious or depressed mind? Is it that we are finally putting our phones away? We've done studies with people who have been diagnosed with clinical depression and we weren't actually sure if the nature walk would be as beneficial to them. We thought, 'Well, if nature increases attention and cognitive abilities and if somebody is suffering from depression and they're ruminating about negative thoughts and feelings, maybe a walk alone in nature might actually increase depression and increase depressive rumination.' We did the same walking study [with] a nonclinical sample. But with these participants with clinical depression, we actually induced them to ruminate about negative thoughts and feelings before they went on the walk. And we found that the walk in nature was actually more beneficial to participants suffering from clinical depression than it was for our nonclinical samples. We think that's because when you are in a depressive state and you're ruminating about negative thoughts and feelings, that's actually robbing a lot of your attentional focus and your directed attention. So nature is boosting them up, and we think that is giving them the cognitive resources to then deal with their depression and their rumination. In the book, you talk about how nature can make us see each other again as people. How do we, and especially parents worried about their kids growing up in this sort of dehumanizing culture that we're in, tap into that benefit? There was a study done by some researchers from China where they found that being in nature, you're not so egocentric. You feel like you're part of something larger. And then that actually increases feeling of humanization of others. Even though there may not be people out there, you start feeling more connected to everybody, in part probably because you're feeling more connected to nature. And they found this could even happen with indoor plants, which they found increased feelings of humanization of others and self-transcendence. And it wasn't just driven by nature making people feel good. It was about nature increasing these feelings of self-transcendence, and then that increased feelings of humanization. You and I have both said 'in nature' multiple times. How do you define 'in nature'? Like, what's the baseline for when our brain says, 'I am in nature'? It's a hard thing to define. It probably differs for different people, like your dad's definition of nature [in Oklahoma] might differ from somebody living in New York or Los Angeles. What does one person conceive as natural that another does not? What does appear to be very consistent across cultures is this nature preference — that people do prefer things that look more natural to things that look more built. How important is it, in terms of benefits of being in nature, that nature inspires awe? A walk in nature through a park that your average person would perceive as boring — does that benefit them? You don't have to be going to the most awe-inspiring beautiful nature to get these cognitive benefits. But if the nature is so boring, like, I don't think you would get a benefit like walking through a cornfield per se. And we've actually asked people, 'Do you like the cornfield more or walking through a tree-lined urban street?' And people like the tree-lined urban street better than the cornfield. You might argue maybe the cornfield is actually less natural than the tree-lined street because it's been so influenced by humans. But it's just to say that not all nature is created equal, and not all urban is created equal.
New York Post
5 days ago
- New York Post
Rehab can keep you out of jail — but become a prison itself
Chris Koon didn't read the fine print. Sitting in the Cenikor Baton Rouge rehab center's intake office in 2015, flanked by his mom and grandmother, he signed where told. 'A lot of it read like legalese,' writes Shoshana Walter in 'Rehab: An American Scandal' (Simon & Schuster, Aug. 12). 'Incomprehensible but also innocuous, like something you might see before downloading an app on your phone.' Koon felt lucky. He wasn't going to prison. Just days earlier, he'd been arrested for meth possession. The alternative to five years in state prison? A brutal two-year Cenikor inpatient program. Koon took the deal. In signing the intake documents, he agreed to 'receive no monetary compensation' for work he did, with wages going 'directly back to the Foundation.' He signed away his right to workers' compensation if injured. He forfeited his food stamps, disability payments and any other government assistance. And he agreed to 'adopt appropriate morals and values as promoted by the program.' Koon's story isn't an outlier — it's a glimpse into what Walter calls 'America's other drug crisis.' While overdoses and opioid deaths dominate headlines, far less attention goes to the 'profit-hungry, under-regulated, and all too often deadly rehab industry,' writes Walter. Across the country, thousands of treatment programs are propped up by federal policies and rooted in a distinctly American blend of punishment and personal responsibility. People were 'lured to rehab with the promise of a cure for what ailed them,' Walter writes, 'only to repeatedly falter and fail inside a system that treated them like dollar signs.' The idea hard labor can cure someone isn't new. After the Civil War, US slavery was abolished except as punishment for a crime. That loophole became the foundation for a forced-labor system that conveyed newly freed black people into prisons and chain gangs. Over time, prison officials began marketing this arrangement as 'rehabilitation.' As Walter writes, this legacy has been repackaged for the modern drug crisis. The Affordable Care Act promised expanded treatment access through Medicaid. But the rehab industry that exploded in response was lightly regulated, profit-driven and increasingly dangerous. The result: thousands of people like Chris Koon, lured into treatment by courts, cops or family members, only to find themselves stuck in a system that looked less like therapy and more like punishment. They include women like April Lee, a black woman from Philadelphia. Despite growing up in addiction's long shadow — her mother died from AIDS when Lee was just a teenager, after years of selling sex to support a crack habit — Lee didn't start using drugs herself until after having her second child, when a doctor prescribed her Percocet for back pain. That opened the door to addiction. Child-welfare authorities eventually took her kids. Fellow users nicknamed her 'Mom' and 'Doc' for her uncanny ability to find usable veins, no matter how damaged. April Lee returned to her recovery house — as an unpaid house monitor. April Lee / ACLU She entered recovery in 2016. Every morning at 6, 18 women gathered in the dining room of one of two overcrowded houses to read from the Bible. Lee stayed 10 months. With nowhere else to go, she returned — this time as a house monitor, working without pay in exchange for a bed. 'She was still early into recovery, and she felt stressed by the intensity of the job,' Walter writes. 'On top of that, she wasn't getting a paycheck, so she couldn't save up money to leave.' 'Don't really know how to feel right now,' Lee wrote in her journal. 'The lady I work for — for free, mind you — wont me to watch over women witch mean I have to stay in every night.' She felt physically and emotionally trapped. 'I wanted to snap this morning. Miss my children so much.' Like so many others, Lee found herself stuck in the recovery-house loop — forced to work, unable to leave and earning nothing. She helped with chores, mainly cooking and cleaning. Residents' food stamps stocked the kitchen. Lee loved to cook, and she made comfort food for the house: mac and cheese, fried chicken, beef stew. But all the warmth she gave others couldn't buy her a way out. For others, like Koon, it was about more than just forced labor. During his first 30 days at Cenikor, the other patients policed each other. If one person broke a rule, the entire group might be punished with a 'fire drill' in the middle of the night. 'If anyone stepped out of line or did something wrong during the drill, they'd have to stay awake even longer,' Walter writes. Discipline was obsessive. In his first month, Koon sat in a classroom with about 30 other residents, most sent by courts like he was, reciting rules out loud, line by line. There were more than 100. 'He could get in trouble for not having a pen, not wearing a belt, for an untied shoelace, for leaving a book on the table, for his shirt coming untucked,' Walter details. Koon learned the punishment system fast. A common one was 'the verbal chair,' in which any participant could order him to sit, arms locked and knees at a 90-degree angle, and stare silently at the wall while others screamed at him. 'Go have a seat in the verbal chair. Think about having your shirt untucked,' they'd say. And Koon, like everyone else, was expected to respond, 'Thank you.' There were others. 'Mirror therapy,' where he'd stand and yell his failings at himself in the mirror. 'The dishpan,' where he'd be dressed in a neon-green shirt, scrubbing floors and dishes while loudly reciting the Cenikor philosophy, 'a paragraph-long diatribe about self-change,' Walter writes. And the dreaded 'verbal haircut,' when another resident, sometimes even a staff member, would berate him as part of his treatment. Dressed up as a therapeutic community, Koon thought instead, 'This is like a cult.' Walter believes he wasn't far off. Everyone was required to tattle. Koon had to turn in weekly at least 10 'pull-ups' — written reports detailing rule infractions committed by fellow residents. If he didn't, he could lose points and with them privileges like phone calls, family visits or permission to grow a mustache. Confrontations were public and ritualized: Residents would sit in a circle around one or two people forced to listen as everyone else denounced them. 'They took turns confronting that person, professing their faults and errors, while the person was permitted only to say 'thank you,'' Walter writes. Staff called it 'The Game.' He saw grown men cry. He heard women called bitches and sluts. He realized many employees were former participants enforcing the system that once broke them. Not everyone saw a problem. Many in the legal system embraced tough-love rehab programs, especially judges looking for alternatives to jail. One of Cenikor's biggest champions was Judge Larry Gist, who ran one of the first drug courts, in Jefferson County, Texas, in the 1990s. 'The vast majority of folks that I deal with are basically bottom-feeders,' Gist told the author. 'They've been losers since the day they were born.' Cenikor's extreme model was ideal for 'the right people,' he believed. Cenikor rewarded such loyalty, giving judges and lawmakers steak dinners served by participants and annual awards banquets, complete with gleaming, diamond-shaped trophies. Gist 'proudly displayed his' in 'his chambers, where he liked to host his happy hours with prosecutors and defense attorneys.' Koon was booted out of Cenikor after just two years, for faking a urine sample and contracting a contagious staph infection, but managed to stay sober on his own. He proposed to his childhood sweetheart, Paige, moving in with her two daughters, and finding the stability he'd been chasing for years. He went back to school to learn welding, and the daily rhythms of family life kept him grounded. 'He hasn't taken a drug recreationally for eight years,' Walter writes. Lee's path out took longer, and her recovery was, as Walter writes, 'in some ways a stroke of luck.' She left the house after landing a job at a law firm that helped women reunite with their children in foster care — a world away from the nights she'd once spent tricking at the Blue Moon Hotel but one that barely covered her bills and pushed her just over the poverty line, cutting off assistance. She earned her GED, took online college courses, regained custody of her kids and bought her own home by 2021. 'And yet many days she felt she was teetering on the edge, one crisis or unpaid bill away from making a terrible mistake,' Walter writes. That year, she returned to Kensington, where her addiction had once thrived, bringing fresh food and water to people still living on the streets. As for Cenikor, its time in the shadows ended, at least temporarily. Investigators found evidence of exploitation: residents forced to work without pay, unsafe housing conditions, staff-client relationships, even overdoses inside the facilities. The state of Texas fined Cenikor more than $1.4 million in 2019, but the agency struck a settlement, and it continued to operate. Koon and Lee don't represent everyone who's experienced addiction, treatment or recovery. But they do reflect a system that often promises far more than it delivers. 'When rehab works, it can save lives,' Walter writes. 'It can mend families and be among the most redemptive narrative arcs in a person's life.' But sometimes, rehab not only fails to help people, it actively harms them, recycling them through a gauntlet of relapse, shame and risk: 'Despite the rehab industry's many claims, there is no magical cure for addiction.'
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Yahoo
'Romantic' sunflowers help to save newborn babies
In 2021, a farming couple planted a 6m-strip of sunflowers on their land to celebrate their 10th wedding anniversary. It was not open to the public initially but before too long, families emerging from the Covid lockdowns, keen to get back in touch with the outdoors, were asking for a closer look. Four years later, Crewe Green Sunflowers, at Park Farm near Crewe, Cheshire, grows almost a million flowers covering 10 acres, with hundreds of visitors picking or walking among them every summer for the few weeks it's open. Owner Alex said the idea was born from a "romantic" idea suggested by her husband Simon and it also marked 100 years of the family's farm. "It's really intense but the public reception is amazing," she said. "Everybody comes with smiles on their faces and leaves with smiles on their faces. "The only smiles that we don't have are from the children who are upset because they don't want to leave." A portion of the proceeds collected through donations and visitor charges go to the neonatal unit at nearby Leighton Hospital, with £25,000 raised so far. It is a cause close to Alex and Simon's hearts, following the traumatic births of their children Dexter and Penny. Dexter, 10, was diagnosed with suspected meningitis after he was born and was in the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for eight days. He went through numerous lumbar punctures, a test involving a needle being inserted into the lower spine, and several courses of antibiotics, Alex said. "As a first-time parent, being in the NICU was absolutely harrowing but the nurses were incredible," she added. About three years later, Penny, now seven, was born 11 weeks early after Alex became ill with HELLP syndrome – hemolysis, elevated liver enzymes and low platelets. Penny weighed just above 2Ibs and she spent several months in the NICU until she was well enough to go home with her parents. "It [NICU] just became like a second home," Alex said. "A lot of the nurses we met with Dexter were still there, with Penny, and it was evident that funding with the NHS, as with anything, was really stretched." After Penny recovered, Simon signed up for the London Marathon the next year, marking the first bit of fundraising the family did for the unit. Alex said they never kept track of how much they raised and they were "amazed" when the hospital contacted them after reaching the £25,000 milestone. The money has been used to buy hospital equipment, including a £13,000 video laryngoscope, which helps with intubation procedures. Alex said she would be "forever grateful" to the hospital's staff for helping her children, adding: "They're like extended family now. "They work massive, long shifts and deal with emotional people, it is very difficult. They all go above and beyond." Read more Cheshire stories from the BBC and follow BBC Stoke & Staffordshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram. More on this story 'Sea of sunflowers' thriving as weather changes Pick your own is the future, says sunflower farmer 'People come to petal field with outfit changes' 'Blooming hot' heatwave sees festival open earlier Related internet links Crewe Green Sunflowers Mid Cheshire Hospitals Charity
