Rewriting approaches to literature and mental health

Dr Patrick Errington, Dr Daniel Mirman and Professor Sarah McGeown are innovating new ways to engage young readers with poetry and boost mental wellbeing.

Anxiety and mood disorders present a health emergency in the UK and worldwide, especially in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic. These mental health issues can have a profound impact on individuals’ quality of life, as well as making wider social and economic impacts. Adolescents and young adults are especially vulnerable, making this life stage pivotal for interventions, but with mental healthcare battling funding cuts and a surge in demand, and with stigma around mental illness still lingering, alternative approaches to the crisis are required.

Interdisciplinary interventions

Dr Patrick Errington, Lecturer in Creative Writing in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, blends literary theory, cognitive psychology, and creative writing to explore modes of literary response, their effects on the reading process, and their potential to impact mental health. In 2020 he began collaborating with Dr Daniel Mirman, Senior Lecturer in Psychology of Language in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, whose research examines language processing from a psychological and neuroscientific perspective. Together they explored why certain kinds of poetic language is pleasing to read and the potential of reading for pleasure to reduce anxiety and depression within the adolescent population.

Taking a highly interdisciplinary approach that combined their respective strengths, Drs Errington and Mirman took select ideas from literary and poetic theory and used methods from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to explore them in a brand-new way. Asking participants to rate dozens of variations on familiar metaphors like “I dash for the office” and “I grasp the meaning and shake it vigorously”, they found that tension between literal and figurative meanings can make metaphors more pleasing. They are now using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to explore which brain regions respond to this tension as well as more behavioural and fNIRS studies to examine how a reader’s “mindset” can influence the pleasure they get from reading metaphors and poems.

Moving out of the lab and with funding and support from the Wellcome Institutional Translation Partnership Award (iTPA) team, part of Edinburgh Innovations, they formed a small Young Person Advisory Group (YPAG). Comprising adolescents from around the country, the YPAG provides insights on why they do or do not read for pleasure, how this might be increased, and what role it might play in improving young people’s mental health. One insight that has emerged is that while screen-based engagement with media is not very convenient for longform literature like a novel, poetry is an ideal medium for that format. Together with Professor Sarah McGeown, Director of the University of Edinburgh Literacy Lab, and partner Playable Technology, the team is laying the groundwork for a digital poetry platform to foster creative ways of engaging with poetry.

With their research gathering momentum, the team are now building relationships with external partners, including the National Literacy Trust and The Poetry Society, and exploring the viability of an app for poetry engagement. The app’s primary goal is to make poetry more fun and enjoyable for young people, but with that enjoyment may come mental health benefits such as mitigating anxiety and depression. This would be an inexpensive, scalable and non-stigmatising intervention for adolescents that would also function as a tool for researching reading and mental health more broadly. This innovative, interdisciplinary approach has the potential to reach large numbers of young people and foster creative forms of engagement that not only support their literacy habits and wellbeing, but do so without the stigma associated with many traditional therapies.