Music Therapy in Mental Health

To the selfless and generous people that give us hope in humanity, particularly to Claire

“Music can lift us out of depression or move us to tears - it is a remedy, a tonic, orange juice for the ear. But for many of my neurological patients, music is even more - it can provide access, even when no medication can, to movement, to speech, to life. For them, music is not a luxury, but a necessity.”
― Oliver Sacks

Suffering from any kind of mental trauma or illness is an often distressing and daunting experience. Conditions such as depression, anxiety, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and OCD can sometimes be lifelong that they require time and patience to overcome, as sufferers will face many ups and downs, as the temptation to relapse into old habits can present themselves at any time. 

Conditions involving severe mental health issues and depression can be complex to treat and every patient will have different needs and goals to meet. A GP or doctor will often be the first point-of-call once the decision to address a specific type of mental illness has been made, but the options available to anyone wanting to recover from anxiety or depression are multifarious. Alongside conventional talking therapies and drug treatments, there are other ways and means of helping people overcome debilitating and chronic mental issues which can feel overwhelming. One of these is Music Therapy.

Music Therapy

It is not all about trips to see doctors and psychiatrists, hospitals and sharing your deepest thoughts and feelings during group sessions, while recovering these days. Creative therapies are proving themselves to be an equally effective form of treatment. The advice given in the DrugAbuse website is that the choice of treatment is important to the recovery process of an individual, whatever the type of mental illness they suffer from is. Choosing the right program should depend entirely on the person’s needs. Music therapy creates sensorimotor responses from the body. This means that both the patient’s sensory and motor capabilities are active at the same time, making it possible to tailor the treatment for each human being based on the depression and anxiety stages the patient is going trough.

Techniques such as this can also be useful for treating people who suffer from addictions, just as they can be used to treat people with other mental conditions. The most extreme end of the spectrum will see a client who will be anxious, easily upset and maybe prone to violent outbursts. Playing a series of compositions at a slow tempo with mellow characteristics, such as soft vibrations, will alter the state of the patient’s autonomic nervous system.

The ANS is a form of control system the body uses to heighten certain feelings (such as anger) as it affects a person’s heart rate, and controlling these nervous feelings; by creating a safe and secure environment the patient relaxes, like when breathing in a paper bag during a panic attack.

Using music therapy, it is possible to teach people to control anxiety. The treatment is broad and does not just involve listening exercises, but also practical sessions where the patient will be involved in playing instruments, combining music with writing and physical exercise.

“There is certainly a universal and unconscious propensity to impose a rhythm even when one hears a series of identical sounds at constant intervals... We tend to hear the sound of a digital clock, for example, as "tick-tock, tick-tock" - even though it is actually "tick tick, tick tick.” 

― Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

Consider the above quote too. There is something to be said for the calming, distracting, repetitive action of intoning the same note over and over again, continually repeating the same sounds and phrases, or for instance, if you were playing an instrument such as the guitar, learning to play a riff, or pick – starting off slowly and first, then learning to play it faster over time. The continued action of fingers on string, coupled with the brain’s keen-ness for repetition can be very calming and distracting.

Background Research

Over the past decade there has been several attempts to understand why music therapy provides such effective results. A 2003 report, looks into the effect that drumming groups can have on an addict’s recovery process. 

The report found that drumming, as an activity, was a successful form of therapy due to the repetition involved. Concluding, drumming puts the mind into a state of relaxation, enhancing synchronization between the brain and body, putting the patient into a meditative-like state, as they concentrate solely on the task. Focusing attention on sensorimotor treatment, it's also important to provide an overall balance, taking into consideration all aspects, mentally and physically, of the patients’ well-being, while providing this kind of treatment. Enhancing the understanding of the cognitive and emotional process, is key for the patient's mental healing. 

Comments about Meaning, Language and Music

Meaning

1. Meaning is the human desire to "know" & "understand". Meanings are the concepts we build to see order where apparently there is none.

2. Realization is the meaning. This is true especially for poetry and all modern art.

3. Is Abstraction more real than nature? Is meaning individual, as opposed to collective?

4. If I look for the meaning of a word in a dictionary - I am given the meaning in terms of other words and if I don't know the meaning of them, I can look them up... to infinity.

5. Someone once told me the world itself is abstract, it's only the way we perceive it that makes it concrete.

6. All meaning is context dependent. Nothing has inherent meaning. Which leads me to think that meaning is in the relationship and interaction between things.

7. Our objective view on the world can only ever be subjective simply because we have to give meaning to everything because nothing is concrete; we bring it all into existence in our minds.

8. I always felt that worry was somehow a terrible mutation of anticipation.


Language and Music

9. I choose to believe in the theory enunciated by my beloved Laurie Anderson, in which "Language is a virus from outer space".

10. I still wonder what that first language was. and who invented spelling???

11. I believe in never-ending storage theory (were we have an unlimited memory). If we could know the whole of our minds, we could know the hole universe probably.

12. Language bgaen wehn i ievtnned it jsut now.

13. Sometimes I think it's not the world that is moving faster, it's me that is moving slower. In a relativistic universe, how do I tell the difference? (While talking about how fast language changes)

14. I don't need to know why. music makes me smile, cry, takes me back in time, builds dreams and wishes, drives creativity, lifts me up, takes me down. music just is...

15. Interesting that music can so emotionally charge us, and yet the very nature of music is basic mathematics.

Now try to match as many sentences as you can with their correct author, I should warn you that there are a couple that do not belong to signed comments.

Authors

Steve E, Rob Bryanton, tape, /t, Ariel, Shadow, Shubajjit, Lane Savant , Debora kay, human being , Medicated Lady, Janetk, Gingatao , paulandrewrussell ,tinkerbell the bipolar faery

Music Function

Making music is one of our most basic instincts. There’s a reason we refer to music as the “universal language”; there has been no known human culture without music. Dancing and music came before agriculture, and possibly even before language. Bone flutes were found in Europe dating back 53,000 years ago.

Music has the ability to change the emotional and physical status of people, whether they are in bad moods, good moods, or sad moods. Music can also make people feel the suspense or excitement while watching a movie.

Music is part of the complex organism that is the human being and emotional expression is a very great part of that. I would prefer to say that music is a unique way of knowing the world, which goes along with other ways of knowing the world: visual, linguistic, phonetic, psychological, and mathematical.

Music is utterly entwined with notions of memory, of emotion, of identity, of relationship with place and time; of relationship with other human beings, with all living and inanimate objects, relations with the heavens, with the gods, people's ways of interpreting their worlds or their cosmologies in their own particular ways, very culturally specific ways.

Different types of music directly trigger different emotions. While happiness causes you to breathe faster, sadness causes a rise in blood pressure and temperature and a slower pulse. Faster music played in a major key caused the same physical reactions associated with happiness, and slower music played in a minor key resulted in those associated with sadness.

We may wonder what is the utility that music provides to humanity, and if there is one indeed. There are tree main theories that try to explain this mystery:

1. Music evolved through sexual selection - Charles Darwin
2. Music allowed for social cohesion on a larger scale than was available to more primitive primates, which create and enforce group ties through the physical process of mutual grooming - Robin Dumbar
3. The enjoyment of music is just a “happy accident,” a by-product of mental mechanisms that evolved for other purposes - Steven Pinker

What is music for? How does it work? What can it teach us? We feel there must be answers to such questions, but they tend to be scattered throughout a wide range of different areas of study, from acoustics to music history, from psychology to composition. This makes the answers very difficult to find.