Reading and Mental Health

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.  

Josie Billington is Reader in English Literature and Deputy Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society at the University of Liverpool, UK. She has published widely on Victorian fiction and poetry and on interdisciplinary studies of the value of literary reading for health, including Is Literature Healthy? (2016).