Biblioterapi i tidningsartiklar : En diskursanalys

Sammanfattning: Mental health issues and depression is an everprevalent issue in our society today. Library science has taken a step towards creating a safe medium and addressing the issue by bibliotherapy, or therapy through reading. Though it is an establish method in other countries, bibliotherapy is not a common practise in Sweden and it is through recent years that reports about bibliotherapeutic projects has started appearing. The question that rises then is: how is bibliotherapy being written about by journalists and in the end, how is bibliotherapy, libraries and reading presented to the general public? This research aims to investigate in what way bibliotherapy is portrayed in newspaper articles, relationship between bibliotherapy and the library itself as well as what role reading has in the discourse about bibliotherapy in newspaper articles. To do this, a discourse method based on Laclau´s and Mouffes’s (Bergström & Boréus, 2012, Svensson 2019) linguistic approach to discourse analysis, will be utilized through the analysis of 18 newspaper articles. The result of this study shows a mostly positive view on bibliotherapy as a method and that reading is a key element in its utilization. Yet libraries’ roles in the bibliotherapeutic work is not as apparent and might affect readers’ views on the libraries’ involvement in societies work to prevent mental health issues.