A friend gave me Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” at a sleepover for my fourteenth birthday. After the other girls fell asleep, I stayed up and read the entire novel. A likely choice for a moody teen-ager already contemplating the inexorable passing of her youth.
So when I heard that a study published this month had found that reading books improves the moods of adolescents, I became curious. Did the study’s authors take the types of books into consideration?
“We noted the titles of books,” Dr. Brian Primack, the lead author of the study, said, “but there are so many ways to examine some of those titles. It’s unlikely many teenagers in the study have been exposed to ‘The Bell Jar’ or books that are purely happy. The books that a lot of young people are reading these days are all of these weird vampire things. A lot of them are kind of creepy.”
Primack and his research team examined six types of media—television shows and movies, video games, magazines and newspapers, music, the Internet, and books—and concluded that major depressive disorder is common among pop-music-listening teens and drastically less common among their bookish counterparts. But the study has less to do with the content of books and more to do with the act of reading. It doesn’t claim that well-read teen-agers don’t become depressed.
“People who are very depressed might not be able to read a book,” Primack said. “Reading takes a lot of mental energy.”
A depressed teenager is more likely to seek out emo music or watch a mindless television show than read a book, which requires more creativity, Primack said. Or, in my case, absorb one of the world’s ten bleakest books.