Our knowledge and library service can help you to understand and manage your health and wellbeing using self-help reading. The library has a good collection of books, including reading well books on prescription.
There are many good reasons for taking a self-help approach towards addressing your problems and issues:
- Self-help is empowering - Developing a self-help plan keeps you in control of your own destiny. The skills and methods you learn while engaging in the self-help process are likely to be generally helpful to you across many different aspects of your life. It is also emotionally satisfying to address issues on your own; doing so helps you to feel like a responsible and capable adult.
- Self-help means a customized plan - Designing your own self-help plan means that you can customize your efforts so that they fit your particular strengths and weaknesses, and reflect your personal choices about how to best address your specific issues.
- Self-help makes you a better, wiser person - By increasing your self-awareness capabilities, self-help efforts can help you learn to recognize potential problems before they occur (or at least early on in their progression) so that you can head them off before they become substantial. As your objectivity (your ability to see things as they are, rather than how you would like them to be) increases, you'll find yourself increasingly able to be your own best adviser, steering yourself away from bad decisions and towards good ones with a minimum of fuss.
- Self-help can be a time saver - Pursuing self-help efforts saves you the time you might otherwise need to spend with a therapist or counselor who could help you with your problems.
- Self-help is private - If you are a private person who gets uncomfortable with the thought of sharing secrets with others, self-help can save you the embarrassment of sharing your issues and problems with another person.
The reading well books are available within our library and can be found in the Be Well collection.
Full membership of the Library is open to all Trust staff, to social services staff who work within the Trust, psychiatry doctors on rotation within the Mersey Deanery area and to students, whilst they are attending courses run by the Trust or are on placement at the Trust. Proof of identity may be required.