Public libraries and adolescents with mental health concerns: What's in it (the collection) for them?

The mental health of Australian adolescents has declined considerably since COVID, however, has been of significant concern for many years. In regional and rural areas of Australia, engagement with mental health services is often difficult due to a lack of services, distance, or high cost to access (Ivancic et al., 2018). The movement towards whole person librarianship (Zettervall, 2019) has seen an increasing focus on public libraries as community hubs where addressing the psychosocial needs of patrons is leading to a greater need for social work/ers in libraries (Shephard et al., 2023; Adams & Krtalic, 2022).

As the personal development of adolescents is influenced by the people, systems and cultural activities that surround them, public libraries and their collections represent an important environment in which young people can be supported with their mental health. In this, young adult literature is one device that can open discussions that may lead to mental health awareness, increased mental health literacy and greater help-seeking.

Studies have shown that well-researched and well-written fictional texts providing an authentic reflection of adolescent worlds are able to help readers see different lives and worlds than those they might normally encounter (Chance, 2014; Djikic & Oatley, 2014). As suggested by Webb (2016), these texts seek to inform and promote understanding, helping readers to discover how their own problems could be alleviated, as well as being helpful for young people to gain empathy for others. Raising awareness and gaining an understanding that they are not alone in their experiences can have positive long-term benefits for adolescents (Pung, 2017; Reynolds, 2010). Further, research in schools showed that adolescents were keen to read texts like these, and that reading them in a classroom situation promoted discussion of mental health, important for improved mental health literacy (Shephard, 2022).

The important place of public libraries in supporting adolescents who have a mental health concern led us to explore how available these texts were in our public libraries. In this, our work supports Sustainable Development Goal 3, Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages. Focusing on inner and outer regional and remote libraries in New South Wales, exploratory desktop research undertaken in late 2022 explored the holdings of young adult fiction that was catalogued under ‘mental health’. Across 49 libraries, 261 individual items that fit the search criteria were found through online catalogue searches. This was made up of 71 titles held across 35 physical libraries plus digital and mobile libraries listed on the catalogues as ‘locations’.

On the day that the catalogues were searched, 204 items (78%) were available to be borrowed, being shown in the catalogue as ‘in’. Early analysis of the data is leading to questions around cataloguing systems that may impact accessibility and findability for library patrons who could benefit from these texts. This presentation will report on initial findings from this research and seek to promote discussion on how the ways libraries catalogue texts could influence access to those texts by adolescents in their communities.