Books are my (prescription) drug

I’ve always been a ravenous reader, so it came as no surprise to me when, earlier this month, the UK began a program called Books on Prescription.

Under the new program, doctors would be able to literally prescribe self-help books to patients with mild mental health problems like moderate depression and anxiety.

Unfortunately, the program doesn’t leave any room for doctors to prescribe fiction for their patients.

I know books aren’t medicine, and I’m not suggesting cancer patients read Solzhenitsyn or clammy, feverish individuals pick up Camus and expect all their groans to disappear.

But anyone who has ever seen me break down into tear-soaked, snot-streaked heaving mental shambles at the end of “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” or fling “American Psycho” across the room because Patrick Bateman is a despicable human being knows a book has significant power.

In many ways, the books that pepper every surface of my apartment are the most constant aspects of my life.

As I change, so does what they mean to me. But a pill is only ever a pill.

It doesn’t change its chemistry simply because I need something different today than yesterday.

The idea that capitalism incentivizes doctors and pharmaceutical companies to medicate their patients above and beyond what they need is not a new one.

Somewhere in that film of the written word that coats my home is Charles Barber’s book “Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation.”

In it, Barber explains the endless cycle by which pharmaceutical companies magically identify a disease and then create a drug for it.

Somewhere else is “The Last Normal Child” in which Lawrence Diller explores why Americans medicate their children with psychiotropics more often than any other country in the world.

I don’t mean to set forth fiction as a mental health panacea, nor am I suggesting there aren’t individuals for whom medication is necessary — or helpful — in managing their mental health issues.

But I do think literature is undervalued and underutilized as a therapeutic device.

All this program has  done is acknowledge self-help information is out there and endorse books as a means of legitimizing and conveying it.

But a book is not just a means of communicating an idea, nor is a novel just a story or a diversion.

A book is also an expansive, endless, self-renewing expedition of internal and external discovery.

That’s the most effective form of therapy I can imagine.

Summer or winter; good day or bad; depressed, anxious, panicked, tired or giddy, a good story constantly evolves to meet the needs of the reader because those needs are indelibly linked to the way he or she experiences the story.

Let’s see Xanax do that.

— drlreed@indiana.edu