Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity

In the UK, a range of everyday activities are being re-framed as interventions to promote public mental health. Drivers of this include the rising burden of mental ill-health and constrained funding for community-based arts and educational provision, in the context of austerity. A consequent interest in evaluating the health and wellbeing benefits of ‘non-pharmacological’ interventions has brought into play some diverse logics of effect. Taking Creative Bibliotherapy–reading and discussing fiction for therapeutic ends–as a case study, we explore what happens when these logics intersect. Our analysis draws on qualitative data on how reading is understood as therapy by those involved in one area of the UK. In accounting for what it was and how it worked, these actors negotiated a series of tensions in advocating for bibliotherapy. These included: reading is inherently worthy, but has instrumental benefits; reading is universally therapeutic, yet implicated in signalling social distinction; Bibliotherapy demands a widened vision of the ‘therapeutic’, yet resists medicalisation. These ambiguities, we suggest, means that Creative Bibliotherapy troubles biomedicine, in foregrounding its limitations for addressing contemporary public mental health crises, and the paucity of its dominant models of therapeutic effect.