Mental Health and LIS, Are We The Interruptors?

Even as I enter my own library at work, engulfed by its calm, quiet and orderly spaces, places of refuge for our students and staff, I feel the inner anxiety and unease of the morning, of the news stories and frantic awakenings at night. My anxiety has increased since the pandemic, probably even before it, if I really think about it. My mental health never much concerned me until more recently. Like me, I believe that behind the service desks, in staff rooms, and across institutional hierarchies, library workers everywhere frequently carry invisible burdens into the workplace. But within the realm of library work, conversations about mental illness are too often pushed to the sidelines, whispered behind office doors, or softened for others’ comfort. Silence becomes a form of policy, professionalism a mask.  In our era, library workers learn, implicitly or explicitly, that struggling is to be done quietly.

One of the monographs I came across confronts this silence head-on. Amazingly, LIS Interrupted seems to be the only title that fully provides firsthand accounts from library workers. The book brings conversations about mental health into public view, where they can finally be named and understood. By centring lived experiences, LIS Interrupted refuses to admit mental illness as a personal failing or a mere “inconvenient interruption” to work. Instead, it reveals how mental health is deeply entangled with the conditions of library labour itself, work that is emotionally demanding, undervalued, increasingly precarious, and shaped by systems of power.

In weaving together personal narratives and critical analyses to explore how mental illness intersects with labour, race, gender, disability, culture, stigma, and identity in the LIS field, this book explores structural inequities, namely, ableism, racism, colonialism, and managerialism. It’s a rather chilling notion that these very inequities determine who is supported, who is surveilled, and who is expected to endure harm in silence.

However, this book is not solely about suffering, but about connection and possibility. For library workers who have felt isolated or unseen, LIS Interrupted offers affirmation and solidarity. For educators and students, it serves as a critical text that challenges dominant narratives of resilience and vocational sacrifice. For institutions, it is a call to action to transform workplace cultures to better support their staff's care and dignity. In my work on trauma-informed care in libraries, I’m deeply interested in how mental health is not addressed. Karena Hagelin, an LIS trauma-expert, frames saneism as a “systemic and structural oppression of mad, crazy, and mentally ill” individuals and is a manifestation of ableism. For those who have experienced trauma, which is many of us, the norm has been to hide and disregard these feelings during work hours. In the case of the institution, to rid itself of these workers who disrupt the calm and order if it gets out of hand. I’m fortunate to have some tools and support to get through some challenging days, but thriving is still the goal.   I’m not the only one.  Let's have this book on the shelves of every library and on every desk.