Poetry Pharmacy: The Healing Power of Words
The world’s first Poetry Pharmacy, created by Deborah Alma, is in the UK. Most of the people who visit help to mitigate the stress and tension of modern life.
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason. ~ Novalis
The United Kingdom Welcomes the Poetry Pharmacy
The new Poetry Pharmacy is located in the town of Shropshire in the United Kingdom. There, the poet Deborah Alma prescribes poems instead of medicines to her “patients.”
According to Sky News, Alma organizes books according to “humor,” because she believes poetry can even help a wide range of emotional illnesses, such as stress or even broken hearts.
This is also a new center in the Midlands for poetry and creative writing and will host a regular reading and writing workshops in The Distillery space upstairs as well as bookbinding and printing workshops and more, with an emphasis on good mental health and well-being.
In addition to running the pharmacy, Deborah Alma is also responsible for poetry workshops and poetic consultations, inviting “patients” to a room and carefully prescribing the poem by answering their questions.
“I think if there’s any skill in what I do, it’s getting the right poem for the right person, after meeting her and talking to her,” explains the writer. “When I prescribe a poem, that person becomes its owner.”
Clinical studies of what happens when a person reads (or writes) poetry have demonstrated parallels with hypnosis …. it can have the effect of slowing the reader’s mind down to its alpha brainwave state of highest creativity, which it shares with dreaming. …… and stimulates the body’s production of endorphins, which resemble opiates in their analgesic and euphoric effects’ ~ John Andrew Denny
Alma has worked with dementia patients for several years and has seen closely “how poetry can change one’s mood.” Besides, he realized that people “like to be listened to very carefully.”
Read More about Deborah Alma here
It was then that Deborah Alma, in a “crazy moment,” saw an ambulance for sale and decided to buy it. From that day on, she knew that she had become the “emergency poet” who travels the 
country to distribute verses to those who most need the comfort of words.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released a report confirming the health benefits of the arts. In the case of Poetry Pharmacy, the right poem for the right person can make all the difference.
Deborah Alma is a UK poet, with an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from Keele University and taught for 3 years at the University of Worcester. As well as teaching part-time at Keele, she works as a writer in the community, especially in schools and with vulnerable groups.
She is also Emergency Poet prescribing poetry from her vintage ambulance.
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About Deborah Alma
Deborah Alma is the editor of Emergency Poet-an anti-stress poetry anthology, The Everyday Poet- Poems to live by (both Michael O’Mara), and #Me Too – rallying against sexual harassment- a women’s poetry anthology (Fair Acre Press, March 2018). Her True Tales of the Countryside was published by The Emma Press in 2015and her first full collection Dirty Laundry, was published by Nine Arches Press (May 2018). You can follow her on her Facebook
