I propose a new approach to examining bibliotherapy’s usefulness in the community-based care of individuals with serious mental illness (SMI), focused on producing a heuristic that benefits helping professionals who offer non-clinical and non-psychiatric services. Meant for writers designing bibliotherapy interventions in the helping professions, I conceptualize bibliotherapy in a model against the backdrop of community-based care’s history. A model has the potential to allow each writer to conduct situation-specific inquiry, invent bibliotherapy intervention designs suited to the unique needs of the profession’s help-seekers, and reflect on knowledge generated for intervention reiteration. Referring to Dewey, Rosenblatt and Barnlund to create a cohesive theoretical framework, I hypothesize that before bibliotherapy can be reliably operationalized in real-life settings, it must be conceptualized with fidelity to the processes of reading and communication. Departing from empiricism, I select multi-grounded action research as a pragmatic methodology for solution design that mirrors the writing process.