The Reader Organisation is calling for a new language to talk about mental health, with senior health professionals, readers and writers discussing the idea in the opening session of our annual conference, ‘Shared Reading for Healthy Communities’ at the British Library on 16th May 2013.

Our Get Into Reading project is commissioned by health services across the UK,  but unlike the growing number of ‘Books on Prescription’ and ‘Bibliotheraphy’ schemes, we have chosen not to limit the description of our model as ‘therapy’. We believe literature exists to address the human condition, as our founder and director Jane Davis explains:

“Those medical words – prescription, therapy – which at first glance carry a medical imprimatur of seriousness, have largely come from the pharmaceutical and psychotherapeutic industries, and actually point to a re-positioning of the inner life as a problem to be solved by experts, by others.