Can Bibliotherapy Heal the Pain of the World? 

As a librarian, I’ve often felt like a part-time therapist. People confide in librarians the way they do with bartenders; we form bonds with our regular customers, listen to their troubles and serve up more than just books. After I learned the word “bibliotherapist,” during library school 20 years ago, I became curious about both casual and serious uses of the word. Was bibliotherapy any kind of soothing literary experience? Or did it require a licensed mental health practitioner?

Art, music and drama therapy all have graduate degree programs and a place in the mental health landscape, but I never heard much about bibliotherapy. I kept wondering, When will “book medicine” have its big moment? That moment may be now, as bibliotherapy has a leader, Emely Rumble, LCSW, author of the new book Bibliotherapy in the Bronx (Row House, April 2025). Rumble’s book isn’t an academic tome with an audience limited to social workers, but a lyrical, unpretentious guide for book lovers. As Rumble shows, book medicine is hardly a new concept. In ancient Egypt, one of the very earliest libraries welcomed visitors with a sign on the door reading “The House of Healing for the Soul.”

The term bibliotherapy first appeared in a 1916 Atlantic Monthly piece, “A Literary Clinic” by Samuel McChord Crothers. This satirical advertisement describes Dr. Bagster’s availability to prescribe books to treat “Tired business men,” “Tired business men’s wives,” and “Tired mothers who are reading for health.”

During World War I, the Library of Congress and American Library Association circulated nearly 720 books and prescribed reading for therapeutic purposes to troops at home and abroad. Librarians debated about whether patients should avoid reading books about their conditions, and whether or not reading should offer escapism or a chance to reflect on one’s problems. “What genres make the best medicine?” is a question posed in a blog from the University of Connecticut Archive website on wartime hospital libraries. Librarians in these clinics generally wore medical uniforms and worked closely with doctors and nurses in prescribing books.

Rumble champions bibliotherapy as an accessible tool for those who are underserved by the mental health system.

Therapists and non-therapists alike can become licensed biblio- or poetry therapists through organizations such as the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy. Rumble herself is working on her credentials, but notes that such academic pursuits can be cost prohibitive, which limits the diversity in the field. I learned that if I wanted a formal credential as a non-therapist, I could offer a more basic level of bibliotherapy while referring those with serious depression to trained clinicians when needed. The number of required fieldwork hours seem daunting, but I’m intrigued to try it out.

A social worker with a degree from Smith College, Rumble currently runs a private practice, Literapy NY, and teaches graduate courses to librarians at Queens College. Regularly featured in mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times, Ebony, School Library Journal and numerous podcasts, Rumble hosts a vibrant IG page and free book club hosted on Fable.

Drawing on her own experiences as a Black, Latine and Puerto Rican mother and psychotherapist, the child of teenage parents who was raised by her grandmother and foster care, Rumble champions bibliotherapy as an accessible tool for those who are underserved by the mental health system. She distinguishes between clinical and developmental bibliotherapy. Developmental bibliotherapy occurs in schools, libraries and in programs serving youth, while clinical bibliotherapy is reserved for psychotherapy.

Rumble maintains that serious mental health conditions require licensed counselors, but at times Rumble’s definition of bibliotherapy seems intentionally flexible or vague. A wide variety of practitioners—licensed and not—offer bibliotherapeutic support in numerous ways. She also believes that anyone can self-heal through bibliotherapy.

Can a Good Book List Save You?  

When I first encountered descriptions of bibliotherapy in mainstream publications, I read about providers offering sensitively curated book lists, or “prescribing” books and then leaving the reader on their own to self-heal.

In Ceridwen Dovey’s article in The New Yorker, “Can Reading Make You Happier?” she describes working with a bibliotherapist with The School of Life, a London-based global nonprofit membership organization founded in 2016 by author Alain de Botton that offers bookstores, community spaces, podcasts, workshops and a book series.

Dovey reports that she and her therapist, Ella Berthoud, mostly emailed back and forth to explore how she could address her fears and emotions. At the end of their email conversation, Berthoud—not a licensed therapist—presented her with a book list that she tackled over several years. This style of bibliotherapy relies on the patient to be independent and motivated. It doesn’t seem geared for someone in crisis or with major depression, but seems best for someone who wants to wrestle with deep questions about humanity over an extended period of time. Dovey explored her personal pain around mortality and found the experience enlightening.

The text is a springboard for exploring issues of family, relationships, anxiety and trauma.

Berthoud and her colleague at the School of Life, Susan Elderkin, published a book in the format of a medical dictionary that matches ailments with book titles, suggesting that we can all self-prescribe and self-treat. The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zealousness, 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (Penguin, 2014) offers a starting point for independent reading journeys.

In contrast, Rumble states in her book and several interviews that she doesn’t believe in offering standard-issue book recommendations for experiences like grief or heartbreak since they are experienced in such individual ways. When she works with a client, she begins with a “reading intake,” (which is one of the materials available on her website). The reading syllabus she “prescribes” isn’t the end result, but only the beginning of the patient’s journey in therapy. Rumble reads the book with the patient or patients, and uses the text as a springboard for exploring issues of family, relationships, anxiety and trauma.

Reading about these two methods, I could see that I’ve practiced more of a School of Life approach as a librarian. After I give a patron book recommendations, I generally send them off to heal themselves, although sometimes if I’m lucky, the reader comes back to me to share their responses to the book. The librarians during WWI also seemed to put most of their energy into book selection and matching the book to the patient. Rarely, if ever, did they sit down and discuss the book with the patient.

Can We Read to Become Empathetic? 

How might bibliotherapy be more effective than traditional therapy? Rumble argues that literature provides a wider space to reflect on humanity than traditional therapy, which can be narrowly focused on individual suffering. Bibliotherapy invites us to compare our journeys to other characters or understand their experience in a larger social and historical context, which can be particularly useful for intergenerational trauma. As Rumble writes:

Bibliotherapy is about the way a love of reading activates us by allowing us to engage on an emotional and creative level with texts. It’s about the way texts we read empower us to fulfill our inherent potential. It’s about how reading grants us a respite from our self-consciousness in a way that allows us to be more at home with ourselves and in our bodies. This is huge, especially in marginalized communities, because rest can seem a lifetime away when you’re overburdened by circumstances such as poverty, housing instability [and] racial trauma.”

Research published in Time, NPR and elsewhere shows that reading literary fiction has been shown to increase our capacity for empathy, which might be useful when grappling with anger or betrayal. Can fiction help us build our capacity to understand others—and also ourselves?

In Sigrid Nunez’s National Book Award-winning novel, The Friend (Riverhead, 2018), her unnamed protagonist, a creative writing teacher, offers a sharp commentary on the topic. “If reading really does increase empathy, as we are constantly being told that it does, it appears that writing also takes some away,” her character reflects. In the humorous remark that we are “constantly being told” that reading makes us more empathetic, Nunez casts some doubt on the idea that reading is like a vitamin that can help us become better or more understanding people.

New mothers need an invitation to recognize fury and terror in the middle of all the sweetness and joy.

I’ve never embarked on bibliotherapy, but I did discuss books with my therapists such as  Joan Didon’s The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage, 2007). This memoir of Didion’s daughter’s long-term hospitalization in an induced coma, and her husband’s sudden death, helped me feel alone in my early 20s when I spent more than six months sitting with my father in the ICU when he was unconscious. My experience was so surreal, I’d never read about it or seen it acknowledged before. Didion’s book illuminated anticipatory grief and gave me language for my experience. When we are anxious or depressed, precise and vibrant language can wipe the dirty windows of our minds.

Department of Speculation by Jenny Offill (Knopf, 2014) and Elisa Albert’s After Birth (Houghton Mifflin, 2015) supported me through postpartum upheaval. I recently gave these books to a neighbor with a 3-month old baby in our shared laundry room and warned her, “Albert’s book has a lot of cursing!” The exhausted new mom looked pleased to hear that. New mothers need an invitation to recognize fury and terror in the middle of all the sweetness and joy. Liars by Sarah Manguso (Hogarth, 2024) offered a release valve during my (mostly) amicable divorce last year. All of these novels provided a magnified, more extreme version of my experiences. Books about unhinged characters can be deeply reassuring.

I also collect nonfiction and fiction recommendations geared towards healing. For example, this booklist about loss by classist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and a New York Times article that includes neuroscientists’ and psychologist’s recommendations of books on overcoming trauma. I will trust any text recommended by Diane Zinna, author of The All-Night Sun (Random House, 2020) and the forthcoming book Letting Grief Speak: Writing Portals for Life After Loss (date TBA, Columbia University Press).

Bibliotherapy for Kids  

Child and Family therapist Brooke Marlin in Astoria, New York, considers books essential to her practice. When I asked if she received additional credentials from an organization like the International Federation for Biblio/Poetry Therapy, she admitted that she’d never heard of an academic pathway to gaining expertise in book medicine. However, she affirms my idea that books can be most useful in therapy for offering us “authentic language” for emotions. Reading a well-written children book helps Marlin get into the child’s point of view.

In the book, Once I Was Very Scared by Chandra Gosh Ippen and illustrated by Eric Peter Ippen, Jr. (Piplo Productions, 2017), we learn about PTSD from the perspective of a squirrel, and the book uses no clinical jargon but helps children recognize their own experience through the animal’s narrative.

Jill Leibowitz, PsyD. a therapist specializing in play and a children’s book author herself, recommends one of my favorite children’s books about perfectionism and shame, Barney Saltzberg’s Beautiful Oops! (Workman, 2010). She also uses Go Away, Big Green Monster! by Ed Emberley (L.B. Kids, 1993)  Some Things are Scary  by Florence Parry Heide and Jules Feiffer (Candlewick, 2011) to address fear. For children experiencing separation or death, she offers The Invisible String by Patrice Karst and illustrated by Joanne Lew-Vriethoff (Hachette 2018) and Death is Stupid by Anastasia Higginbotham (Dottir Press 2020). Marlin notes that children avoid more didactic books and prefer absorbing narratives.

Bibliotherapy and Biblioactivism 

One of my favorite parts of Rumble’s books is her focus on bibliotherapy’s roots in activism. Social worker and librarian Sadie Delaney (1889-1958) was a groundbreaking bibliotherapist who worked in a hospital library in Tuskegee, Alabama, and at the New York Public Library’s 135th Street branch, the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. Delaney, like many other activist librarian-healers, worked when “…Jim Crow laws sought to segregate and subjugate, Black librarians became beacons of hope in a sea of adversity […] The legacy of Black librarianship is a testament to resilience…There was a time when our ancestors were not allowed the right to read and could be killed for it.”

The very existence of a library or bookstore can be radical. National Book Award-winning author Lauren Groff and her husband founded the Lynx Bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, to highlight books that have been banned in Florida.

Reclaiming Reading 

We all spend more time with screens and less time with the page. Rumble reassured me that bibliotherapy can work even if we don’t “conquer” or finish a book. Reading “fragments” and  “whispers” can also be restorative. Louisiana school librarian Amanda Jones, whose book That Librarian (Bloomsbury 2024), explores the rise of white nationalism in the south, and the alarming spike in censorship and violent threats against educators, has found strength in “whispers” of text. During her censorship battles and harassment, the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henly (1849-1903) was her rallying cry, especially the last line, “I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul.”

Washington State school librarian Gavin Downing turned to Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury after students’ parents and his principal censored an LGBTQ book, and he and his wife received death threats. Downing often reread the last lines of Bradbury’s book, “It was a pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed.”  These lines helped him reign in his free-floating anxiety by focusing his attention on the freedom to read.

As Rumble states, “We live in a time where fear is fed through ignorance, polarization, and erasure. Bibliotherapy offers a counter to despair: it helps us move from an individualist, survivalist mindset toward a collective one.”