I am 67 years old, I am widowed and I live alone. I was always active and not much of a reader. During the pandemic I read the books that my wife (a literature teacher) had in the library that saved me from falling into depression. I recommend it.
(Ramón Javier Álvarez, from Villa Ballester)
History teaches that human beings have always been interested in art and literature, to seek emotional impacts or to mitigate the harshness of everyday life. Pharaoh Ramesses II (1303 BC) designed the oldest known library in Thebes and on whose entrance portal the inscription “the house to heal the soul” was read.
Reference was always made to the benefits of reading as something desirable and necessary. It acquired therapeutic value at the beginning of the 20th century, after the First World War, when English nurses began reading books in hospital wards where patients with symptoms of the so-called “war neurosis” were hospitalized.
Since then it began to be considered that books could be used as a medicine or a therapy and an easy but powerful resource to help in the healing of people, always accompanying the relevant treatments.
This acquired even greater development at the end of the Second War when it was necessary treat hundreds of thousands of veterans on their return to their respective countries.
Reading, through language and narrative, induces categorical changes in people and improves health, even when they are not sick, since when immersing themselves in a text something changes inside the individual because it is a vehicle that achieves a transformation in the reader’s perspective regarding your reality or your emotional state.
The Dictionary of Library and Information Science states that reading is a therapeutic resource: “The use of books, selected on the basis of their content, read as part of a program designed to facilitate the recovery of patients suffering from an illness mental or emotional discomfort as a consequence of your condition”.
There are two types of therapy through books, depending on whether they are self-help or narrative.
In self-help books, the reading is focused on certain conditions, such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance use, alcoholism… Experience indicates that These types of texts can be effective in some cases if the severity of the suffering is mild or moderate and as long as it is combined with psychological or psychopharmacological treatments.
It is only for informational purposes and should never be intended to replace the recognized therapies. Many people try to make them “self-healing,” which is just an illusion.
Reading, with language and narrative, induces changes in people and improves health, even when they are not sick.
On the contrary, in narratives through stories or novels conflicts are expressed that are usually intimate and intense, but by allowing the reader to take a certain distance, they facilitate empathy and identification processes about the characters and circumstances of life with emotional mobilizations that fulfill a significant cathartic function, facilitate thinking creatively and enhance the representations of the psychic apparatus, model it and help it become stronger and healthier.
If reading becomes a daily habit, it has profound repercussions on people’s lives because it is a simple activityeasily accessible, economical and with an almost infinite variety of possibilities applicable in different contexts and heterogeneous audiences.
In conclusion, reading is a journey towards well-being, where each page is a step towards healing.
