At The Reading Cure event in the beautiful surroundings of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London yesterday more than 70 people from health and mental health services, libraries,homelessness organisations and publishing companies, as well as interested writers, journalists, counsellors and an architect joined us to hear about the power of reading groups, and eat cup cakes.

Andrew McCulloch and Jane Davis

Jane Davis (Director, TRO) read ‘Crossing The Bar’ by Tennyson, showed photos demonstrating the huge range of people coming to reading groups, and shared some experiences of the impact of reading on children, vulnerable adults and firefighters; Lindsey Dyer (Director, Service Users and Carers, Mersey Care NHS Trust) talked about the learning and understanding she’s gained from books (particularly Laurie Lee) and why she commissioned Get Into Reading at Mersey Care; Dr David Fearnley (Medical Director, Mersey Care NHS Trust) told us about his group in a secure psychiatric unit at Mersey Care and their enjoyment of stories by Anton Chekov, Emily Bronte, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie.  Andrew McCulloch (Chief Executive, Mental Health Foundation) worked hard to keep the speakers to time, allowing the audience to get involved and ask questions, and at the end lots of people stayed around to ask more questions, share their enthusiasm and desire to get reading groups happening in their organisation.  Get Into Reading London has truly arrived!

The documentary, about the incredible power that reading unlocks in the brain,  also features Philip Davis, editor of The Reader magazine, investigating the ‘Shakespeared Brain’ – how the shapes of Shakespeare’s lines and sentences effect our minds:

Poetry, “a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man” (John Keble).

I am currently at the beginning of a doctoral research project that will look at and aim to test the value of the foundations of bibliotherapy that are to be found within the literary tradition. Writers and thinkers such as the Victorian John Keble will be key to this research. Their work provides an existing tradition of thinking around the question of the use of reading to health. In this sense it is an ideal starting point for research.

As I am beginning to discover, current research on reading’s relationship to health covers a broad spectrum of interests. At present research in this area is growing, but is often carried out by individuals scattered across different disciplines, organisations and institutions. We would like to encourage and develop connections between these in order to enable a sharing and learning from each other’s research (and difficulties encountered along the way). If you are engaged in related research, or interested in developing a related research project, it would be really helpful if you could email me some basic details such as your name, how we can contact you, institutional affiliation and your specific research focus.

You can contact me by email (gracefarrington@thereader.org.uk). I look forward to hearing from you.

24 – 26 February 2010

National and international experts will host a series of seminars to review current knowledge and discuss the importance of Health Literacy (HL) in the UK. Seminars will be interactive, with speakers and the audience reviewing current knowledge and the relevance and importance of HL in UK health, education and society.  Sessions will be recorded and proceedings of the conference will be published.

Cost: £50 ($84) per day (or £120 ($200) for all 3 days)

For more information, directions and a booking form: email Alison or Saffron on info.esu@lsbu.ac.uk tel: 020 7815 6934/44 or visit our website: www.lsbu.ac.uk/enterprise

Dr Fearnley, who is also a member of The Reader Organisation’s Research Team, has written about his experience reading with patients weekly in this secure unit, and why he thinks it is so important, in The Reader issue 34, which you can download for free here, or buy your copy of the magazine here if the ‘real thing’ is more your thing.

The Reader Organisation pioneers new approaches to reading, reaching people across the community from children who don’ t attend school to older people with dementia.

We know that reading fiction and poetry is good for us, but just how good? Can reading poetry help people with neurological dysfunctions, can reading Dickens cure depression? Jane has also developed innovative read-aloud and personal response models which are at the heart of these approaches.

Events are from 7pm prompt until 9pm and are held at the Urban Café, Dance City, Temple Street, NE1 4BR.

Further details about Cafe Culture can be found here.

The researchers, led by neuroscientist Manuel Carreiras, recruited a group of ex-paramilitaries who could read less than five simple words on a Spanish reading and writing test, and compared them to a similar group who learnt to read and write from an early age.

The research team use MRI scans to compare differences in brain structure between the two groups to allow an insight into how brain anatomy changes to accommodate reading and writing.

While it is possible to do this with children, it is almost impossible to separate out which are the brain changes due specifically to acquiring literacy and which are just part of the massive changes that constantly take place as children develop.

Here’s the link.

Posted by Chris Routledge

Dr David Fearnley (left) receives his award

He also has a wider role as Medical Director and Deputy Chief Executive of Mersey Care NHS Trust, the specialist mental health trust for adults in Liverpool, Sefton and Kirkby. The Trust has around 10,000 people who use its services at any one time, most of them living and supported in the community.

David did his postgraduate studies in psychiatry in South Wales and moved to Merseyside in 1998 to train as a forensic psychiatrist before being appointed as consultant forensic psychiatrist at Ashworth in 2001. In August 2005 he was appointed medical director and deputy chief executive in 2007. He says:

I enjoy the challenge of management as well as my role as a clinician. I work closely with service users to improve our services and as part of a process which helps keep me focused on the right approach to take I involve service users and carers in my annual consultant appraisal.

David received his award at a prestigious ceremony at the Royal Society of Medicine in London, hosted by journalist and broadcaster Libby Purves, of The Times and Radio 4. He was nominated by Catherine Mills, Chair of the Service User and Carer Forum at Mersey Care, which represents the views of people who use mental health services.

Entrants for the award had to demonstrate they had made a positive impact at a national or local level to service user and carers’ wellbeing. They also had to show how they had improved the perception of mental health issues, encouraged change in the development of mental health policy, and been an accessible role model to the general public. David says:

I am delighted to be the first winner of this award. It is also recognition of some of the pioneering work we are doing here in Merseyside with in-patients and community-based service users. I am particularly proud of the success of our network of 27 therapeutic reading groups which we run in partnership with The Reader Organisation across all our services.

The 28 study participants […] spent about 10 minutes reading four narratives, each less than 1,500 words, taken from the book “One Boy’s Day.” The words from the book were flashed onto a screen that the participants could read on a mirror in front of their faces.

[…]The researchers coded the four narratives for six types of changes “that people might be monitoring while they’re comprehending” — changes they would notice both in everyday life and possibly in reading, Zacks said. These changes included: spatial changes (when a location changed); object changes (when a character picked up a ball, say); character changes; causal changes (when an activity occurs that wasn’t directly caused by the activity in a previous clause); and goal changes (when a character begins an action with a new goal).

Monitoring such changes in the environment is adaptive, because it likely helped our ancestors to predict what might happen next: where prey might dart to next or what a predator might do. Similarly, today it helps us predict what might happen next in a story.

In other words, “reading a simple verb such as “run” or “kick” activates some of the same regions of the brain that would be activated when we actually go running or kick a ball.”

The Guardian published a related article back in January, which you can read by following this link.

The partnership with Mersey Care NHS Trust, which serves a population of one million across Merseyside, builds on a successful record of association with The Reader Organisation, which is now a nationally recognised centre for the promotion of reading as an intervention in mental health.

This PhD is likely to be the first if its kind to seek to reclaim English Literature as pivotal in relation to health and well-being, and, through a mix of practical and theoretical methods, to give the existing language of English Literature an equal place alongside social and biomedical sciences in the observation and analysis of human experience.

For more information on the PhD project and how to apply, please visit our website, or you can email Dr Josie Billington.