bibliotherapy

by phil on Tuesday Aug 25, 2009 10:46 PM
"love of words" method

I was looking for a word for this! "Bibliotherapy," as its roots suggest, is "reading therapy." This is the process of reading a self-help book to alleviate negative symptoms.

Here's the citation. While it comes from the introduction to Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy, this book is frequently hailed as the most life-changing self-help book ever:

In a series of five remarkable studies published in the prestigious Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and in The Gerontologist, Dr. Forest Scogin and his colleagues at the University of Alabama studied the effects of simply reading a good self-help book like Feeling Good—without any other therapy. The name of this new type of treatment is "bibliotherapy" (reading therapy). They discovered that Feeling Good bibliotherapy may be as effective as a full course of psychotherapy or treatment with the best antidepressant drugs. Given the tremendous pressures to cut health care costs, this is of considerable interest, since a paperback copy of the Feeling Good book costs less than two Prozac pills—and is presumably free of any troublesome side effects!

I look forward to the day when general practitioners simply prescribe reading material!