How The Catcher in the Rye helped a clinical psychologist get to know herself better, and have empathy and compassion for her teenage patients
- Jamie Chiu works extensively with teenagers and the novel helped give her a better perspective on what they were going through
- Generations of people have grown up identifying with the book, and it has helped many feel less anxious and isolated
Both a literary classic and one of the most popular English-language novels of the 20th century, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is a tale of teenage angst and alienation, depicting protagonist Holden Caulfield’s struggles to come to terms with an adult world that he finds fake, shallow and hypocritical.
Jamie Chiu Chin-mee, a clinical psychologist who works extensively with teenagers and who is co-founder of The Brightly Project, a Hong Kong-based start-up that creates digital mental health programmes for schools, tells Richard Lord how it changed her life.
When I first read it, I’d just moved to Australia. I got it from my English teacher. I had been living in Ghana, where my dad was running a Chinese restaurant. We’d lived in Australia before, when he was working in a restaurant – but he got a chance to run one in Ghana, and part of the deal was that my brother and I could go to an international school there.
When I was about 13, my parents split up and my mum took me back to Australia. I went from an bubble “bubble” environment, with 10 kids per class, to a public school in Australia. My mum doesn’t speak English, the finances weren’t good – it was a hard adjustment. That was why I very much identified with Holden. “Why do people keep expecting things from me?” These were things I thought adults should do, like translating at the bank. I felt I didn’t have a say.
I’ve read it a number of times throughout the years, and the feeling I get each time is different, which I find interesting.
