On May 5, the Hangzhou Library joined with the other two organizations in Hangzhou to formally launch a “Reading Healing” project. 

“Reading healing”, also known as "reading therapy", is a psychological adjuvant therapy, which helps the reader to relieve negative emotional distress and achieve physical and mental balance through reading. Reading therapy has been quite common in other countries, but it is still rather rare in China. The “reading healing” project of the Hangzhou Library targets readers with “emotional disorder”. The library is like a hospital, and the psychological experts and volunteers recruited from outside the library community are like health care personnel. After an interview with readers with emotional distress, psychological experts can recommend appropriate books as prescriptions according to their professional judgment. On the day of launching the project, the first batch of readers and psychological experts had interviews. The interview took place in a relatively quiet book club located in the basement of the library. The library made reservations with experts in advance. Taking into account of the privacy of the psychological and emotional problems, experts and readers had the interview in a one-to-one way.

 “Emotional distress is very common for people today. We hope that through this project, a wider audience can enjoy reading, as well as receiving psychological help.” Accdording to Zhou Yulin, one of the advocates for “reading healing” and Director of Reading and Circulation Center of the Hangzhou Library, in addition to one-on-one initerview, the project will have a long-term development in a variety of ways in the future, including reading activities and expert lectures.