
nickh
Well-known member
Founding Member
I have only just seen this article which appeared in The Guardian on 5th January. It is lengthy but very interesting. Plaudits to whoever is supporting the Merseyside scheme. I have to post in three chunks due to size restrictions 
Saturday January 5, 2008
The Guardian
At a reading group in Birkenhead, nine women and two men are looking
at Act 1 scene 2 of The Winter's Tale, in which Leontes and his wife
Hermione urge their guest, Polixenes, not to rush off back to
Bohemia. Some of the language is difficult to grasp: what's meant by
"He's beat from his best ward"? or "We'll thwack him hence with
distaffs"? But thanks to the promptings of the group leader, Jane
Davis (from the Reader Centre at the University of Liverpool),
Shakespeare's meanings are slowly unlocked, and discussion ranges
widely over the various issues the passage raises: jealous men,
flirtatious women, royal decorum and what to do with guests who
outstay their welcome.
The rise of book groups is one of the most heartening phenomena of
our time, but this is an unusual one, including as it does Val and
Chris from a homeless hostel, Stephen who suffers from agoraphobia
and panic attacks and hasn't worked for 15 years, Brenda who's
bipolar, Jean who's recovering from the death of her husband, and
Louise who has Asperger's syndrome. Most of the group are avid
readers but for one or two it's their first experience of Shakespeare
since school.
Under the umbrella of Jane Davis's "Get into Reading" scheme, there
are now around 50 groups like this across Merseyside: groups in care
homes, day centres, neurological rehab units, acute psychiatric
wards, cottage hospitals, sheltered accommodation and libraries;
groups for people with learning disabilities,
Alzheimers, motor- neurone disease, mental health
problems; groups for prisoners,
excluded teenagers, looked-after children, recovering drug-addicts,
nurses and carers; groups that are small - no more than 10 - so
there's a sense of intimacy.
The educational backgrounds vary widely but there's no dumbing down
in the choice of texts - The Mayor of Casterbridge, Uncle Tom's
Cabin, Rebecca, Great Expectations, Adam Bede, Jane Eyre, Of Mice and
Men, Kes, even Robert Pirsig's The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
among them. The usual pattern is for a complete book to be read
aloud, cover to cover, at weekly sessions, which for a group spending
an hour a week on a Dickens novel can mean six months devoted to a
single work. Nobody is pressured to read aloud, but if and when they
do the boost to their confidence can be striking.
These reading groups aren't just about helping people feel less
isolated or building their self-esteem. Nor are they merely a
pretext, in an area of high unemployment, for giving the experience
of working as a unit. More ambitiously, they're an experiment in
healing, or, to put it less grandiosely, an attempt to see whether
reading can alleviate pain or mental distress. For Kate, who has
suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis for 30 years, the answer is
clear: "Reading pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer
seems important. No matter how ill you are, there's a world inside
books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on
something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things
that people usually skate over, like ageing or death, and that kind
of conversation - with everyone chipping in, so you feel part of
something - can be enormously helpful." Others say the same: "I've
stopped seeing the doctor since I came here and cut down on my
medication"; "being in a group with other women who have what I had,
breast cancer, didn't help me, but talking about books has made a
huge difference."
Medical staff tell stories of the remarkable successes they've seen:
the neurological patient who sat in a group saying nothing for
months, then after a reading of George Herbert's poem "The
Flower" ("Who would have thought my shrivelled heart/Could have
recovered greenness?") launched into a 10-minute monologue at the end
of which he announced "I feel great"; the brain-damaged young man
whose vocabulary significantly increased after he joined a book
group; the husband caring for his disabled wife whose exposure to
poetry has proved not just a respite but a liberation. To outsiders,
the outcomes might seem small, but to the staff and patients
concerned they're huge breakthroughs.
Crochet or bridge might serve equally well if it were merely a matter
of being in a group. But as Judith Mawer of the Mersey Care Mental
Health Trust explained, focusing on a book is the decisive factor:
"People who don't respond to conventional therapy, or don't have
access to it, can externalise their feelings by engaging with a
fictional character, or be stimulated by the rhythms of poetry."
One particularly successful initiative has been reading poetry to and
with dementia patients, some of whom have lost all sense of who and
where they are but can recite the words of a poem learned at school
70 years ago. As Get into Reading worker Katie Peters describes it:
"One lady was shouting and swearing at anyone who approached, and
when I mentioned poetry told me in no uncertain terms to go away. But
as I sat and read poem after poem, she visibly relaxed, her mood
changed completely and she happily chatted about the poems to other
residents.
"Nurses tell me that patients seem less agitated after our sessions.
There is something about poetry, not just the rhythms and rhyme but
the way it provides an opportunity to hold a thought together through
time, that really helps, even with people who are not natural
readers." Katie's experiences echo those of Oliver Sacks with
patients suffering from severe Parkinson's disease, who found that
"people who could not take a step could dance" and "people who
couldn't utter a syllable could sing".
"One sheds one's sicknesses in books," DH Lawrence once wrote, and
the people I met on Merseyside agree with him that books - good
books, anyway - are a form of therapy. "Prose not Prozac" is the
prescription. Literature not lithium. A talking cure in the presence
of Keats, Dickens or Shakespeare rather than a physician or
psychiatrist.
Bibliotherapy, as it's called, is a fast-growing profession. A recent
survey suggests that "over half of English library authorities are
operating some form of bibliotherapy
intervention, based on the books- on-prescription
model". That's to say, an increasing number of people
are being referred by their GPs to the local library, where they'll
find shelves or "reading pharmacies" set aside for literature deemed
relevant to their condition. Lapidus, an organisation established in
1996 "to promote the use of literary arts in personal development",
has played a key role in bringing together writers and health
professionals; as has the current editor of the Poetry Society's
magazine, the poet Fiona Sampson.
End of part one
Nick.

Saturday January 5, 2008
The Guardian
At a reading group in Birkenhead, nine women and two men are looking
at Act 1 scene 2 of The Winter's Tale, in which Leontes and his wife
Hermione urge their guest, Polixenes, not to rush off back to
Bohemia. Some of the language is difficult to grasp: what's meant by
"He's beat from his best ward"? or "We'll thwack him hence with
distaffs"? But thanks to the promptings of the group leader, Jane
Davis (from the Reader Centre at the University of Liverpool),
Shakespeare's meanings are slowly unlocked, and discussion ranges
widely over the various issues the passage raises: jealous men,
flirtatious women, royal decorum and what to do with guests who
outstay their welcome.
The rise of book groups is one of the most heartening phenomena of
our time, but this is an unusual one, including as it does Val and
Chris from a homeless hostel, Stephen who suffers from agoraphobia
and panic attacks and hasn't worked for 15 years, Brenda who's
bipolar, Jean who's recovering from the death of her husband, and
Louise who has Asperger's syndrome. Most of the group are avid
readers but for one or two it's their first experience of Shakespeare
since school.
Under the umbrella of Jane Davis's "Get into Reading" scheme, there
are now around 50 groups like this across Merseyside: groups in care
homes, day centres, neurological rehab units, acute psychiatric
wards, cottage hospitals, sheltered accommodation and libraries;
groups for people with learning disabilities,
Alzheimers, motor- neurone disease, mental health
problems; groups for prisoners,
excluded teenagers, looked-after children, recovering drug-addicts,
nurses and carers; groups that are small - no more than 10 - so
there's a sense of intimacy.
The educational backgrounds vary widely but there's no dumbing down
in the choice of texts - The Mayor of Casterbridge, Uncle Tom's
Cabin, Rebecca, Great Expectations, Adam Bede, Jane Eyre, Of Mice and
Men, Kes, even Robert Pirsig's The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
among them. The usual pattern is for a complete book to be read
aloud, cover to cover, at weekly sessions, which for a group spending
an hour a week on a Dickens novel can mean six months devoted to a
single work. Nobody is pressured to read aloud, but if and when they
do the boost to their confidence can be striking.
These reading groups aren't just about helping people feel less
isolated or building their self-esteem. Nor are they merely a
pretext, in an area of high unemployment, for giving the experience
of working as a unit. More ambitiously, they're an experiment in
healing, or, to put it less grandiosely, an attempt to see whether
reading can alleviate pain or mental distress. For Kate, who has
suffered from severe rheumatoid arthritis for 30 years, the answer is
clear: "Reading pushes the pain away into a place where it no longer
seems important. No matter how ill you are, there's a world inside
books which you can enter and explore, and where you focus on
something other than your own problems. You get to talk about things
that people usually skate over, like ageing or death, and that kind
of conversation - with everyone chipping in, so you feel part of
something - can be enormously helpful." Others say the same: "I've
stopped seeing the doctor since I came here and cut down on my
medication"; "being in a group with other women who have what I had,
breast cancer, didn't help me, but talking about books has made a
huge difference."
Medical staff tell stories of the remarkable successes they've seen:
the neurological patient who sat in a group saying nothing for
months, then after a reading of George Herbert's poem "The
Flower" ("Who would have thought my shrivelled heart/Could have
recovered greenness?") launched into a 10-minute monologue at the end
of which he announced "I feel great"; the brain-damaged young man
whose vocabulary significantly increased after he joined a book
group; the husband caring for his disabled wife whose exposure to
poetry has proved not just a respite but a liberation. To outsiders,
the outcomes might seem small, but to the staff and patients
concerned they're huge breakthroughs.
Crochet or bridge might serve equally well if it were merely a matter
of being in a group. But as Judith Mawer of the Mersey Care Mental
Health Trust explained, focusing on a book is the decisive factor:
"People who don't respond to conventional therapy, or don't have
access to it, can externalise their feelings by engaging with a
fictional character, or be stimulated by the rhythms of poetry."
One particularly successful initiative has been reading poetry to and
with dementia patients, some of whom have lost all sense of who and
where they are but can recite the words of a poem learned at school
70 years ago. As Get into Reading worker Katie Peters describes it:
"One lady was shouting and swearing at anyone who approached, and
when I mentioned poetry told me in no uncertain terms to go away. But
as I sat and read poem after poem, she visibly relaxed, her mood
changed completely and she happily chatted about the poems to other
residents.
"Nurses tell me that patients seem less agitated after our sessions.
There is something about poetry, not just the rhythms and rhyme but
the way it provides an opportunity to hold a thought together through
time, that really helps, even with people who are not natural
readers." Katie's experiences echo those of Oliver Sacks with
patients suffering from severe Parkinson's disease, who found that
"people who could not take a step could dance" and "people who
couldn't utter a syllable could sing".
"One sheds one's sicknesses in books," DH Lawrence once wrote, and
the people I met on Merseyside agree with him that books - good
books, anyway - are a form of therapy. "Prose not Prozac" is the
prescription. Literature not lithium. A talking cure in the presence
of Keats, Dickens or Shakespeare rather than a physician or
psychiatrist.
Bibliotherapy, as it's called, is a fast-growing profession. A recent
survey suggests that "over half of English library authorities are
operating some form of bibliotherapy
intervention, based on the books- on-prescription
model". That's to say, an increasing number of people
are being referred by their GPs to the local library, where they'll
find shelves or "reading pharmacies" set aside for literature deemed
relevant to their condition. Lapidus, an organisation established in
1996 "to promote the use of literary arts in personal development",
has played a key role in bringing together writers and health
professionals; as has the current editor of the Poetry Society's
magazine, the poet Fiona Sampson.
End of part one
Nick.