Mentally ill library staff exist, yet vocational awe has created a version of libraries where we can only be the “sane helpers.” We can be expected to be put together and give our all to help.
(Morgan Rondinelli, “What’s Missing in Conversations About Libraries and Mental Illness,” June 19, 2024)
This is such a lovely article. Such a lot to unpack.
A lot of librarians and library workers live with mental illness and neurodivergence. A lot. Half of academic librarians? Nearly 80% of new librarians? We could pick those numbers apart a bit, self-selection and all. But I would bet a large and random sample would show something north of the 20+% estimated in the general US population. Why is this?
Is there something about librarianship that draws people with psychiatric diagnoses and conditions? I fell for libraries after abandoning healthcare. Psychiatric nursing was perhaps too stressful, partly because I never had the speed for it. I want to help people, but I don’t want to be needed that much. Before that, I left politics because I couldn’t stand having to bury my authentic self so deeply, and because the sheer brutality of it guaranteed I would go back to drinking daily. Before that, the disembodied intellectual exercise of academia triggered my hypomania and anxiety, sometimes alternately, sometime together. I got lost.
There is a spurious perception of the public library as a low-stress haven, a paradise of isolation for the bookish introvert. “That must be nice,” people say when they hear you work in a library. “I wish I could sit around and read all day.” It sounds like our domain, our place of strength, our Fortress of Solitude from which heroic things are possible. That “vocational awe” may be the draw for those of us beset by depression and anxiety.
Of course, once we start working, we find that we have been deceived, or deceived ourselves. Public contact is a constant and sometimes intense part of the job. In the past year or two, libraries seemed to be the battleground of choice for the armies of Right and Left. And yet, if any place is going to demand adult behavior from us, it is best if it is a place we’re passionate and knowledgeable about, a place worth fighting for.
Sisyphus in the Stacks 