How bibliotherapy can help mental health professionals

Psychoeducation has long been a favoured intervention of mental health professionals. It is a theory that encompasses and recognises the inherent knowledge of the individual and their family. It is empowering, recovery-focused and respectful. Read a previous blog on psychoeducation here.

Bibliotherapy is a tool of psychoeducation - a way of passively enacting psychoeducation. Bibliotherapy is the use of the written word to help solve a problem; by reading a book, article or pamphlet with information relevant to the need. Given that reading is a popular past time in the literate population, surely bibliotherapy could become standard use of therapeutic homework. My own experience as a supervisor of mental health social workers tells me that it is. However, most Social Workers through my office are unable to name the intervention as bibliotherapy or are aware of the steps involved in bibliotherapy. This becomes problematic given that part of the definition of being a professional is the ability to clearly articulate what it is that you do. It is further problematic when bibliotherapy is an allowable intervention under psychoeducation as a focused psychological strategy and that it is a constructive and integral part of the Recovery and Lived Experience movement where individuals want the choice to heal the way they want/need to. For those who love to read this may be an under used intervention merely because professionals don't list it as an intervention in their report back to the referring doctor or to Medicare (in Australia).

Here's an example of how bibliotherapy can be used, and manipulated: A 2019 healthy eating study (Vaillancourt et al, 2019) compared perceptions and the potential effect of pleasure-oriented verses health-oriented messages promoting healthy eating among French-Canadians. Two almost identical pamphlets, different only in the messaging toward health or pleasure, were tested to compare perceptions toward healthy eating. There was no significant difference between the two pamphlets, one messaging the pleasure aspect of healthy foods and the other messaging the health benefits. The difference was in how the messages were stored in the individual: one was emotional and one was cognitive. The message orientation toward pleasure was better integrated by participants at an emotional level. 

Marketers know that it is emotion, not just thought, that sells (Gharib, 2017). Our cultures are partially based on emotion - how things make us feel. If intellect is a part of culture than perhaps the things we read and the way we read and access them are designed to keep us below the dominant culture: below that which heals and empowers us. Are we being manipulated by emotional design?

Books and magazines are expensive. Does the cost keep us from using popular culture as bibliotherapy? Is the cost-of-living crisis a blessing to the hegemony to keep intellectualism at a low? In 2022 Hidler showed that buying books is outside the reach of some working class aged Australians. My own Industry Partner is selling their book store due to reducing sales against rising rents and costs. Personal Communications with another book store owner informed me that independent book stores do not make money. Quote from them, "Best way to tear up a redundancy." 

Since enrolling in this PhD, I have paid attention to how people access what they read and why they read the authors they do. Limited Social Media Research questions and personal communications, that had not gone through an ethics committee but were merely used to gather information, inform me that people rely on recommendations from others, particularly in relation to pop psychology. This is significant when added to the above point that working class Australians cannot afford books.

An immediate learning for mental health professionals is to ensure that any bibliotherapeutic recommendations they make are accessible: give clients a copy from your agency library; provide chapter copies at intervals; check the title is available at your local library; form an industry partnership with your local independent book store and encourage bibliotherapy functions. Bibliotherapy is ineffective without 1) a book or pamphlet, 2) a therapist to discuss it with, and 3) an understanding of the stages of bibliotherapy (see the nine stages of bibliotherapy here). 

A reminder of my own thesis: By enacting this research through a process of book clubs, this doctoral inquiry is an act of political, social, and cultural resistance against the demeriting of the ways educative literature is read and used by the masses: grey and popular literature as worthy evidence of psychoeducation.

Disclaimer: This book review is written to fulfil partial requirements of my industry partner internship with Typeface Books. Antonio Gramsci is one of my PhD theorists, specifically, his theory on Cultural Hegemony is used to explain resistance to the status quo.

👵🏼 Megan Bayliss, Social Worker

👩🏼‍🎓 PhD candidate: social and cultural resistance to the status quo.

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