Why Do Book Bans Harm Mental Health? A Clinical Psychology Podcast Episode.

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of books being banned in the United States for having LGBT+ themes and characters. Yet books are also being banned for teaching Critical Race Theory, having black characters and a whole host of other reasons. In this clinical psychology podcast episode, you’ll learn why do book bans harm mental health, why book bans harm our children and what groups are most impacted by book bans. This includes straight white authors who are trying to make a living. By the end of this podcast episode, you’ll understand the issue of book bans in a lot more depth. If you enjoy learning about discrimination, mental health and social psychology then you’ll enjoy this episode for sure.

Today’s psychology podcast episode has been sponsored by Working With Children and Young People: A Guide To Clinical Psychology, Mental Health and Psychotherapy. Available from all major eBook retailers and you can order the paperback and hardback copies from Amazon, your local bookstore and local library, if you request it. Also available as an AI-narrated audiobook from selected audiobook platforms and library systems. For example, Kobo, Spotify, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, Overdrive, Baker and Taylor and Bibliotheca.

Why Do Book Bans Harm Mental Health?

In 2023 alone, according to the American Library Association, there was a 65% increase in title challenges as compared to the previous year. As well as nearly half of all these challenges were made by patrons, parents or political or religious groups and at the time of writing in 2025, this number has only increased. These pressure groups focus on public and school libraries and they typically challenge dozens, if not hundreds of titles at a single time. And 47% of these books that they challenged were about the lived experiences and voices of black and LGBT+ people. This includes books about black history and black main characters and stories that spoke about teen pregnancy and puberty (Haupt, 2022).

In addition, I saw a newspaper headline recently about the trend of book bans in the United States is spreading over to the UK and other Western countries. I was talking to a local librarian the other month who I talk to regularly during Student Ambassador work and she’s under a lot of pressure to ban certain books. For no other reason than they contain black and LGBT characters. The books are perfectly fine, enjoyable and children love them, but parents want them gone for no good reason.

Yet when a certain big name author is accused of rape and sexual violence against women, the same parents don’t want his books removed. That’s odd in my opinion.

Anyway, the reason why these book bans are harmful to society is because they don’t protect society, they don’t protect children and they don’t protect people’s mental health as shown in the following research.

How Do Book Bans Harm The Mental Health of Children and Teenagers?

Firstly, book bans harm the mental health of children and teenagers, the very people who these pressure groups claim to protect. Children as well as teenagers need diverse books during this developmental period of their identity formation because these diverse books help them to have the opportunity to have an open dialogue and use critical thinking in a safe and supportive environment (Pfiefer and Berkman, 2018). Also, book bans don’t solve this so-called problem because children and young people will still find out this information but they might find it from worse sources. A school and public library offer children and teenagers a safe and monitored place to find good sources of information for their identity and trusted adults can support this.

Keeping these books in libraries keep children and teenagers safe, not book bans.

Personally, even without talking about LGBT+ fiction, I flat out loved books and the library as a kid. It was a brilliant place to find fun books I could escape into for a few hours. I could solve an impossible mystery, I could travel to a magical place or I could travel the stars with amazing characters. Books are such a powerful and amazing thing for children and they really help shape me into the person I am today. So the very idea that we would rob our children of books is horrible.

How Do Book Bans Harm The Mental Health of Authors?

Secondly, book bans harm the mental health of authors because these brilliant people are just trying to make a living from selling books. Therefore, book bans harm the author’s income and might make them feel isolated and excluded. We know from research that social isolation and marginalisation harms mental health, so book bans do not protect authors. As well as book bans mean authors can’t get invited to school or library visits so readers and authors miss out on chances to understand each other’s perspectives and to connect.

Social media is another critical aspect because book bans increase online hate towards authors and we know that cyberbullying is associated with an increase in anxiety and depression for the victim (Hu et al., 2021). It was only the other week that I was reading an Instagram post from an author saying how much stress and anxiety he got from school visits because he didn’t know how badly he was going to be attacked and hated on by students and teachers alike.

Book bans only increase this awful behaviour.

Personally, as an author myself, I flat out love connecting with readers and it really makes my day when a reader says they enjoyed my story, my characters and some aspect of my work. I love connecting with readers because I find it interesting to hear what they have to say and what they enjoyed most. Sometimes it isn’t what I enjoyed most and that’s the best bit about these interactions. Yet book bans would rob me of these wonderful interactions.

And if I’m having a bad day then these interactions can make a world of difference.

It is wrong to steal these interactions from authors.

How Do Book Bans Harm The Mental Health of School Staff and Librarians?

Book bans harm the mental health of librarians and school staff because it adds anxiety and stress to their already massive workload. It creates an atmosphere of censorship and this is one of the reasons behind the increase in mental health difficulties amongst teaching staff in recent years (Shahzad, 2024). As well as a lot of libraries are having to use their already strained budgets to hire people, like security and social workers, to respond to the rise of confrontational patrons who are becoming more and more aggressive towards librarians. All because they believe certain events and books should be banned, so they get aggressive about it.

I know how stretched and underappreciated librarians already are without the added stress and anxiety of censorship being added to their workload. Librarians are some of the most amazing, kindest and most brilliant people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting so it makes me sad that they are being abused for doing nothing wrong.

Book bans should never happen because they harm the mental health of these brilliant librarians and school staff.

How Do Book Bans Harm The Mental Health of Marginalised Individuals?

I left my main community until last because I wanted to show you first of all that book bans have further reaching implications beyond marginalised individuals. Therefore, it is books that are written by and include characters of marginalised individuals that are most often challenged in these book bans. And this is bad because LGBT+ individuals are nearly three times more likely than heterosexual people to develop a mental health condition, like depression, anxiety and some studies say that nearly 45% of LGBT+ youth seriously consider attempting suicide (The Trevor Project, 2022). Also, we know from research, like Williams (2018) that people of colour experience higher rates of mental health difficulties in addition to experiencing increased barriers to mental health treatment. Largely because of socioeconomic barriers, stigma and discrimination.

Ultimately, if you ban books about the history and lived experiences of marginalised people then this only increases feelings of exclusion and invisibility and intensifies the risk of them developing mental health difficulties (Pickering, 2023).

Book bans do not protect children, they do not protect mental health and book bans risk increasing the suicide rate of marginalised children.

Personally, reading gay romance as a late teenager, certainly didn’t make me gay and it saved me, it helped me and it showed me that no matter how dark and horrific my life seemed there was hope. It might have only been a sliver of light and hope at the end of a very abusive, twisted and terrifying tunnel where I was in fear for my life every second of every day, but gay romance books gave me a moment of peace. And maybe those precious moments of peace were why I didn’t end up being just another gay suicide statistic.

Books really can save lives.

Clinical Psychology Conclusion

At the end of this psychology podcast episode, we all need to know that when books are banned, nobody wins and everyone is harmed. Not only because of it decreases reading but because it turns out attention towards social media, television and doom scrolling on the internet. According to Firth et al. (2018) this negatively impacts the brain’s ability to sustain attention for longer periods of time, discourages analytic thinking and it reduces long-term memory formation.

In addition, book bans and the associated censorship increases discrimination as readers get the message that certain topics and groups are “bad” so this closes off our minds towards reading, understanding and learning what these topics and groups are actually about (Vogels et al., 2021) and often why these topics and groups are amazing.

A final negative impact of book bans is that it reduces the most important benefit of reading. It reduces our empathy. Research, like Kucirkova (2019), shows us that reading books with characters that aren’t like you is the best way to build empathy. Do we really want to live in a world with reduced empathy?

I don’t, and chances are neither do you.

Of course, I won’t deny that parents have the right to influence (not dictate) what their child reads, but banning books is detrimental to their mental health. As a result, you could argue that maybe the best thing to do is to have open, honest conversations with our children and other people about the topic or characters that people want to ban instead of banning the books themselves. This way we can all learn from each other’s perspectives and this means we can show our children that we trust them to make choices guided by their values regardless of

what’s written on a page.

Making decisions based on your values is one of the most important gifts and skills you could

teach children.

And this way, if we don’t ban books then we help to protect the mental health of our school staff, librarians, marginalised people, children and teenagers and the authors themselves.

When books are banned, no one wins. When books are kept, everyone wins.

I really hope you enjoyed today’s clinical psychology podcast episode.

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Have a great day.

Social Psychology References and Further Reading

Bailey, J. L. (2024). To Read or Not to Read: How Book Censorship Affects Students and Undermines Different Worldviews.

Book Ban Data | Banned Books. (n.d.). www.ala.org. https://www.ala.org/bbooks/book-ban-data

CUPE Research. “TURNING THE PAGE: Library Workplace Violence and Harassment Survey Report.” March 2023.

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Firth J, Torous J, Stubbs B, Firth JA, Steiner GZ, Smith L, Alvarez-Jimenez M, Gleeson J, Vancampfort D, Armitage CJ, Sarris J. The "online brain": how the Internet may be changing our cognition. World Psychiatry. 2019 Jun;18(2):119-129. doi: 10.1002/wps.20617. PMID: 31059635; PMCID: PMC6502424.

Hammer, K. A. (2024). Book Banning in the United States: A Call for Multigenerational Activism. In Queering Desire (pp. 112-125). Routledge.

Haupt A. The rise in book bans, explained. Washington Post. June 9, 2022. Accessed June 2, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/06/09/rise-book-bans-explained/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/well-read/202405/why-book-bans-are-bad-for-mental-health

Hu, Y., Bai, Y., Pan, Y., & Li, S. (2021). Cyberbullying Victimization and Depression among Adolescents: A Meta-analysis. Psychiatry Research, 305, 114198. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2021.114198

Kucirkova N. (2019). How Could Children's Storybooks Promote Empathy? A Conceptual Framework Based on Developmental Psychology and Literary Theory. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 121. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00121

LGBTQ+. (n.d.). NAMI. https://www.nami.org/your-journey/identity-and-cultural-dimensions/lgbt…

McCluskey, T. Rippling Effects of Censorship and Book Bans in Education. Gleanings: A Journal of First-Year Student Writing, 35.

Pfeifer JH, Berkman ET. The Development of Self and Identity in Adolescence: Neural Evidence and Implications for a Value-Based Choice Perspective on Motivated Behavior. Child Dev Perspect. 2018 Sep;12(3):158-164. doi: 10.1111/cdep.12279. Epub 2018 Feb 8. PMID: 31363361; PMCID: PMC6667174.

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Pickering, G. (2023). “Harmful to Minors”: How Book Bans Hurt Adolescent Development. The Serials Librarian, 84(1–4), 32–45. https://doi.org/10.1080/0361526X.2023.2245843

Ross, C. J. (2024). Are" Book Bans" Unconstitutional? Reflections on Public School Libraries and the Limits of Law. Stan. L. Rev., 76, 1675.

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Schwering SC, Ghaffari-Nikou NM, Zhao F, Niedenthal PM, MacDonald MC. Exploring the Relationship Between Fiction Reading and Emotion Recognition. Affect Sci. 2021 Apr 20;2(2):178-186. doi: 10.1007/s42761-021-00034-0. PMID: 36043173; PMCID: PMC9382981.

Shahzad, K., Khan, S.A. and Iqbal, A. (2024), "Mental health issues of university librarians: a systematic literature review", Global Knowledge, Memory and Communication, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/GKMC-07-2023-0261

The Trevor Project. (2022). 2022 National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health. The Trevor Project. https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2022/

Vogels, E., Anderson, M., Porteus, M., Baronavski, C., Atske, S., Mcclain, C., Auxier, B., Perrin, A., &

Ramshankar, M. (2021, May 19). Americans and “Cancel Culture”: Where Some See Calls for Accountability, Others See Censorship, Punishment. Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/05/19/americans-and-cancel-cu…

Williams DR. Stress and the Mental Health of Populations of Color: Advancing Our Understanding of Race-related Stressors. J Health Soc Behav. 2018 Dec;59(4):466-485. doi: 10.1177/0022146518814251. PMID: 30484715; PMCID: PMC6532404.

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Woodward Jr, M. A. (2024). Burnout, Banned Books, and Incivility: A Mixed Methods Study on South Florida Librarians (Doctoral dissertation, Barry University).

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