Poetry can be very helpful when it comes to mental health.  Many people use the medium as an outlet either in writing or reading.  While reading anything can be relaxing, poetry has a few aspects that prose lacks:

1. Shorter, which means one can read favorite poems at times of stress.  You can’t read a full novel to get out of a panic attack, but you can read a poem with a message before you lose your composure.
2. Poetry is more open to interpretation than prose.  This means, you can have less stress on getting your analysis ‘correct’.  Whatever you see in poetry is what is true.  It’s basically watching and describing clouds, but with words.
3. With poetry being a common release for mental anguish, it is fairly easy to find a poem that relates to what a person is facing.  Prose has plenty of themes, but you have to get through a lot to reach it.  Poetry is right to the emotional core since it typically doesn’t have to deal with characters, development, climaxes, etc.
4. In terms of writing, there aren’t any solid rules to writing poetry.  You don’t have to stick to an established style, so everything is optional.  This allows the emotions you are feeling to flow out of you and onto the paper with more ease than if you were trying to write a full story.

All of that combined can create a tension reducing activity regardless of you being the author or the reader.  As long as you don’t think your interpretation is wrong because other people think differently.  Poetry is great because of #2 when it comes to handling mental health.  Let me give you an example:

This is my favorite poem of all time even though I typically only remember the first stanza.  I heard it as a kid at the end of a nature show about tigers, which I watched multiple times a week.  It’s relaxing and stirs my imagination while my anxiety gets heavily reduced.  Moreso if I listen to someone speaking it.  Of course, the interpretation of it helps in my tension reduction, but my thoughts can vary:

• As a child, I really thought it was just about the beauty and danger of the tiger.  It was, and still is, one of my favorite animals.  So, I thought it was to honor such an amazing creature.
• The more adult interpretation is that this poem is about God.  It questions how an entity could create a gentle creature like the lamb AND nature’s perfect hunter, the tiger.  Of course, I feel God is neutral, so they would create both.  Still, the poem becomes a strong philosophical question, which can help reduce stress through distraction.
• As an author, I think of it in a similar way as the second option.  Only, I see it as how I have to create both heroes and villains.  One has to develop opinions and thoughts on good and evil at all levels.  Otherwise, everyone will turn out the same.  This can get me to analyze my own behavior and thoughts, which can bring understanding to my own situation.
• Sometimes, I think of the poem and wonder about how we are all created to serve some purpose.  It can be minor or major, but we have to exist for more than eventually dying.  I would say breeding, but not every can or will.  So, what is our purpose?  The lamb and the tiger clearly have roles in our world, so what about us?

All of these interpretations and thoughts can distract from what is harming my mental health.  It allows me to return to the situation with a clearer mind and possibly even get over the hump.  This is part of the magic of poetry.