Tena koutou katoa,
Haere mai and welcome to this workshop on Mental Health issues in books for Young Adults.
This is not your usual kind of workshop today in that once I have finished introducing it, I am going to be joining the audience.
Before that however I’d like to just open with a few words to background how thiscame about.
When I began working at Nayland College, in Nelson, I came from a public library background. So it came as a wee surprise to me that my ‘latest hot’ book that I purchased as one of my initial must haves for the school library was a contentious one. It was called “Looking for Alaska” and due to one of the main characters suicide in the story it turned out it was against schoolwidethinking – there is no written policy - to have it in our library. This I was informed of when having a general book discussion with one of the English teachers. As librarians we are pretty good at selecting books that are approriate for our age groups and the school library and we know to steer away from explicit violence, overly descriptive sexual scenes and so on but it is the books for young people that contain aspects of mental illness that are the ones specifically singled out as ‘to avoid’ buying or buy with caution.
This led to my having lots of discussions with the school guidance counsellors and English dept teachers – who were all unified in this stance. And it appears to be backed up by Ministry of Education publications such as Preventing and responding to suicide : Resource kit for schools (p23 & 77 specifically – classroom practices)
In it teachers are advised to choose another text or book or to deflect questions and turn them into a positive conversation. At Nayland it has been simplified to just stating to Journalism and English students that suicide is off limits as a topic to write about.
I have nowbeen given written guidelines by our Counsellors, who are most strident in their views that we can not safely and accountably have these books available for vulnerable kids to find – and they are magnetically attracted to these books as it turns out, as to what constitutes an alarm bell and I should therefore avoid buying.
This type of book selecting has meant having some great books from great YA authors missing from our shelves – like Thirteen reasons why, My heart and other black holes, More happy than not, Wintergirls, Tease, Paperweight and of course the All the bright places by Jennifer Niven – which was kind of the other catalyst for this workshop.
I had the Head of our Counselling Dept read this book and she was horrified at the information given out within the book – methods of suicide - and of course at the eventual suicide of the endearing character Finch. This book failed several of our School purchasing guidelines within the first few pages unfortunately. And I believe it may fail Goal 4 of the NZ Suicide prevention strategy 2006-2016 document which is to “reduce access to the means of suicide” and possibly Goal 5 of the same document of “promoting the safe reporting and portrayal of suicidal behaviour by the media”.
Now that the film of the book is in production I have said to her – how do we justify not having this book in our library though?
And, from a library perspective, why should we stop the huge percentage of students whom it will not affect in that way from having the opportunity to read it? It will be available at the public library – so we make it one step removed by not having it at the school library – but we will have to explain to requesting students why we don’t have it – and they will challenge us on this.
Doesn’t ‘banning ‘ the book everyone gets curious about it? Note how many times we have all recently been asked about the book Into the River and how many reserves there are for it once it becomes unbanned.
There have been suggestions we could place helpful contact information within the book or that the librarian has a conversation with the student about the book when issuing – but we are not trained to have these conversations - which have lots of safety issues surrounding them and should not be done lightly, with little knowledge.
And there is another aspect of this whole issue and itis a big one - it is the ‘normalizing’ of suicide and self harm within YA books – it seems to crop up with a character considering or dealing with this in more and more books these days. Why is it being presented as an acceptable response to adversity and does this not desensitise and admit it into the lexicon of the spontaneous, not often well thought through, thought processes of young adults?
I need help!
I am hoping for some enlightenment - what is best practice in this really sensitive area; where we buy for teenagers that do include those with varying degrees of mental health issues, where bullying does occur and things do happen via social media – can these books really be triggers?
So, here today, we have Moira ClunieDirector of Programme Design and Deliveryat The Mental Health Foundation in Auckland and David Cairnsis aSuicide Prevention Coordinator from Pegasus Health in Christchurch – both of whom work and deal with young people with mental illnesses. They can let us know just who they see, what they deal with and using evidence based research show how books and minds intersect and what actual potential there may be for harm to come of that .
Questions and answers will be taken after they have spoken – so can I ask you now to wait until we have heard everything they want to say to us before asking them.
And one final comment, which I will repeat at the end, is that I have created a Livebinder, titled Suicide and mental health issues in books for Young Adultswhich contains a lot of background material that I have sourced during preparation for today that may be of interest or help, including the documents shown here, book reviews, a TED talk and websites to go to for help.