HADGER MELAKHESSOU
HEALTH & WELLENESS
Writing Therapy We all remember writing essays at school and how boring many of us used to think they were. A writing assignment was the ugliest form of torture we could think of from teachers, especially now that social media took over, people would rather reduce everything to one picture with maybe a short sentence. That allows the following question: why do we write? One might think that writing is a form of communication, the very first forms of writing in history were made to inform about daily life or to eternalize a memory of stories that people back then believed are worth remembering. Mesopotamia was where it all started as far as archaeologists can say, writing was used for administrative purposes as well as legal functions and literature. As life became more sophisticated, so did people, creating the need to use writing for more than just informing or entertaining. The experts reported that the idea of writing as a form of therapy goes back to the reign of Ramses II, about 1,200 BC. Some even argue that on the entrance to his royal library was inscribed: “House of Healing for the Soul.” Later in the 20th century, the 1980s specifically, James Pennebaker, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, led the modern writing therapy movement in a research study that showed the clear health benefits of “expressive writing” about emotional distress, pushing writing to become a legitimate tool for therapeutic purposes. 82
