Don't Pop a Pill, Read a Book

Sandy Smith February 26, 2013

Transport your mood ... the healing power of reading. Photo: Ryan Osland

Everyone knows that curling up with a good novel is relaxing but what if reading can do more than just boost your mood? Experts believe reading can transform lives, helping people deal with a variety of psychological and emotional problems, from stress and anxiety to grief and depression.
Using books as therapy or bibliotherapy as it is known, is not a new idea. Sigmund Freud used literature during psychoanalysis sessions with his patients and books were used to help soldiers recovering from physical and emotional trauma following the First and Second World Wars.
Now reading as therapy is set to enjoy a resurgence. In May, a new pilot program, Books on Prescription, will launch in libraries across the Central West area of New South Wales. Under the scheme, funded by a $71,000 library development grant, GPs and other health professionals will be able to recommend self-help books on prescription from around 14 public libraries for people dealing with a variety of psychological issues.
"Books on Prescription is a highly effective way of helping people with common mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, phobias and eating disorders" says Jan Richards, Central West libraries manager in Orange. "There is first class clinical evidence to show that books can be just as effective as other forms of therapy."
Richards says the concept for the scheme came from the UK's Books on Prescription program where doctors can prescribe self-help books or mood-boosting works of literature to treat those suffering from mild to moderate mental illness. She hopes the Central West's Books on Prescription scheme "will complement traditional medicine and that in partnership with the medical community we'll be able to provide positive health outcomes."
UK research has found that reading is more relaxing than listening to music, going for a walk or having a cup of tea, reducing stress levels by 68 per cent. Cognitive neuropsychologist Dr David Lewis from the consultancy Mindlab International found that reading silently for just six minutes, slowed the heart rate and eased muscle tension in research volunteers.

In Victoria, Susan McLaine, project coordinator at the State Library of Victoria, has been developing the State Library's Book Well program since 2010. She says that whilst there are similar Books on Prescription schemes at different stages of development in Australia there is no state-wide or national model.
Inspired by the UK's successful Get Into Reading program, the Victorian Book Well scheme uses literature in the form of fiction, inspirational stories and poetry within read-aloud reading groups to improve health and wellbeing. "I think bibliotherapy development using imaginative literature shows great therapeutic potential," says McLaine who is also a PhD candidate in the study of bibliotherapy. The aim, she explains, "is to assist people to think about more creative ways to solve personal problems, through reading about how fictional characters similar to them faced problems and resolved them. These characters often seem to speak directly to us; keeping us company, reminding us we are not the only one feeling this way and at times offering us hope."
Associate professor Vijaya Manicavasagar, director of psychological services at the Black Dog Institute, agrees that prescribing reading in mild cases of depression "if it is part of a concerted effort to lift someone's mood, is a terrific idea."
Her own book, Overcoming Panic and Agoraphobia, is one of the books recommended on the UK's list of Books on Prescription.
"It would be wonderful to see a nationwide initiative" she says. Reading literature can give "a new perspective on life and problems that you might be encountering so you get to see how other people might have dealt with a similar problem or coped with a particular situation so it exposes you to new ways of thinking, a bit like cognitive therapy. As well as pure escapism, the experience of identifying with a character who comes through adversity may also build self-confidence."
Manicavasagar believes books can help a person de-stress by changing their emotional state. "You might start reading a book feeling quite strung out and anxious but if you really get into it you are transported to a different emotional state which is usually better than the one you started off with," she explains.
But, she stresses, "if you have got a serious psychiatric disorder like a major depression where your concentration is impaired and where you are finding it difficult to follow things or you have a psychotic illness for example, then of course prescribing reading is not going to be all that helpful."
For those dealing with the loss of loved ones Manicavasagar recommends Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life by Susan Duncan. "It is a about dealing with grief — which in the case of the author has to do with the deaths of her brother and husband. I think it is an uplifting book which could be helpful for people dealing with major life changes."
A selection of mood-boosting books from the The UK's Reading Agency
The Beach Café by Lucy Diamond
Big Stone Gap by Adriana Trigiani
Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
Life with the Lid Off by Nicola Hodgkinson
Men at Work by Mike Gayle
Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
Stop What You're Doing and Read This - Various contributors
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Carrier by Sophie Hannah

The Carrier by Sophie Hannah

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Sophie Hannah is a poet by profession and has now written a number of impressive psychological thrillers. Her writing skills are evident from the powerful dimensional characters she invents and the unfolding intrigue that entangles them.

Hannah's protagonists in all her books are strong resourseful women that have unconventional lives and professions but have a dogged desire to pursue the truth when events challenge them.

"The Carrier" her lastest thriller, is 'un-put-downable'.

The protagonist, an intelligent analytical woman, carrying traumatic baggage from her past , meets the characters who have inflicted this trauma. The protagonist is forced to confront her demons, and pursues the truth so that the killer is exposed and her past lover is released from prison, for a crime she does not believe he has committed.

At every turn, events are not what they seem. Eventually the protagonist must relinquish any emotional assessment of events and rely on theoretical analysis to come to the truth. Each mistake in her thinking is a dangerous turn. The police have to use their most skilled officer to untangle the events and conduct parallel enquiries alongside the protagonist that will expose the killer before any other tragedy strikes.
Review by Cathy Hewett ( A Thesaurus loyalty club member)  

The Rosie Project

The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion 

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You will love this book. Enjoy the review below.

 

Just the right combination of humour, mayhem and sweetness to appeal to a broad audience. Whether or not it will work for romance readers remains to be seen.
I have a special spot for romantic fiction from Text Publishing. This is the publisher who introduced me to Krissy Kneen and Toni Jordan, so when I heard about The Rosie Project, I couldn’t wait to read it. This book has received some pretty spectacular attention, garnering local awards and becoming the Aussie darling of the Frankfurt Book Fair when Text sold it to 30 different territories.
I admit to some ambivalence towards the book’s success. It’s fabulous to have an Australian author do so well, particularly for a locally set book in a genre that so rarely gets accolades from the literary establishment. But this is a romance written by a man, featuring a male protagonist, written in the first person, ostensibly in a genre that generally prides itself for being written by women for women. I don’t have anything against male romance—in fact, this type of book is right up my alley—but part of me resents that this type of a romance novel is marketed to be somehow more worthy of merit and attention, without the stigma of genre, than the novels regularly published under romance imprints.
That aside, there’s no denying that this is a well-written book with just the right amount of humour, mayhem and sweetness to be enjoyable as well as satisfying. Genetics professor Don Tillman is an unconventional hero—meticulous, efficient, intelligent and socially inept. His only friends, married couple Gene and Claudia, who also provide therapy in an unofficial capacity, have attempted to help him but with dismal results.

Gene and Claudia tried for a while to assist me with the Wife Problem. Unfortunately, their approach was based on the traditional dating paradigm, which I had previously abandoned on the basis that the probability of success did not justify the effort and negative experiences. I am thirty-nine years old, tall, fit and intelligent, with a relatively high status and above-average income as an associate professor. Logically, I should be attractive to a wide range of women. In the animal kingdom, I would succeed in reproducing.
However, there is something about me that women find unappealing. I have never found it easy to make friends, and it seems that the deficiencies that caused this problem have also affected my attempts at romantic relationships. The Apricot Ice-cream Disaster is a good example.

Don approaches the question of finding a life partner the same way he does the rest of his life—with logic and unrelenting focus. To maximise efficiency, he devises a comprehensive questionnaire with which he can screen prospective girlfriends. His attempt to use and then calibrate this new productivity tool is the stuff of romantic comedies. It helps that Don is, deep down, a nice guy, who is trying his best to find happiness in a world that he finds deeply puzzling. Even when he rejects the internet dating, speed dating and blind date candidates, it all seems very logical from his point of view, with no malice intended.
All this careful planning is thrown into disarray when Rosie turns up at his office after Gene offers to screen Don’s candidates. Don assumes she passed the questionnaire, but after an evening that absolutely does not go to plan, he knows that Rosie is definitely unsuitable as wife material. Yet when Rosie confides to Don that she’s searching for her biological father, Don finds himself a willing participant in the Father Project, despite Rosie’s uncanny ability to disrupt his life.
The Father Project challenges all of Don’s comfort zones. His daily schedule is constantly readjusted. He confronts ethical dilemmas. He travels to New York on a whim—three of the potential father candidates are located there—and agrees not to visit the American Museum of Natural History every day. He even contemplates giving up his academic career to become a part-owner of a cocktail bar. And all the while, he comes to realise that Rosie is an incredible person, despite her failure to meet the Wife Project criteria.

Rosie took our champagne glasses to the bar to top them up. It was only 9.42 a.m. in Melbourne, but I was already on New York time. While she was gone, I flipped open my computer again and connected to the Museum of Natural History site. I would have to replan my visits.
Rosie returned and immediately invaded my personal space. She shut the lid of the computer! Incredible. If I had done that to a student playing Angry Birds, I would have been in the Dean’s office the next day. In the university hierarchy, I am an associate professor and Rosie is a PhD student. I was entitled to some respect.
…In less than fifteen minutes, my entire schedule had been torn apart, shattered, rendered redundant. Rosie had taken over.

During a Twitter discussion about this book, @katydidinoz made the general comment that ‘the manic pixie dream girl doesn’t normally fly as well with genre readers’. Rosie does fit the mould, but author Graeme Simsion doesn’t over-emphasise these characteristics, and because the focus is less on how amazing and unique Rosie is and more on Don’s reactions to what she does, she never comes across as an easy stereotype.
There’s so much to love about this book, and I sped through it, charmed and amused and sometimes appalled at Don’s adventures. But although I enjoyed the romance intellectually, I struggled with Don’s inability to emotionally connect with Rosie. Even towards the end, when he understands what love means for him, I felt distanced from Don. Despite the first-person POV, I was always conscious of being the reader, rather than feeling that I were in the story with the characters. And because Don is fairly self-absorbed for most of the narration, there’s only a very shallow sense of why Rosie comes to love him.
To be fair, a socially inept romantic hero is never an easy beast. Even the most beloved of all such heroes, Christian from Laura Kinsale’s Flowers From The Storm, left me cold; more recently, I could barely get through Jennifer Ashley’s The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie (note that the link goes to Wandergurl’s review, and she loved it). Simsion does it as well as could be expected—I definitely liked Don much more than I did Christian or Ian.
Outside of the romantic arc, Don is an excellent character study. Despite the fact that a real-life Don would probably irritate the crap out of me, Simsion creates a wonderfully nuanced narrator for the story. There’s an underlying humour, even when Don doesn’t intend it, that softens his bluntness, and a guileless charm that allows the author to elicit sympathy from the reader even at Don’s worst displays of social incompetence.

‘Don, can I ask you something?’
‘One question.’
‘Do you find me attractive?’
Gene told me the next day that I got it wrong. But he was not in a taxi, after an evening of total sensory overload, with the most beautiful woman in the world. I believed I did well. I detected the trick question. I wanted Rosie to like me, and I remembered her passionate statement about men treating women as objects. She was testing to see if I saw her as an object or as a person. Obviously the correct answer was the latter.
‘I haven’t really noticed,’ I told the most beautiful woman in the world.

Yay or nay?

This book has the right combination of humour, mayhem and sweetness to appeal to a broad audience. Reading this book is fun, but it’s also filled with bits of science and observations that challenge conventional thinking. It’ll be interesting to see if it gets as much attention within the romance reading community.
Who might enjoy it: Men who think romance books are only for women
Who might not enjoy it: Romance readers looking for emotional intensity