The World Health Organisation defines Mental Health as “the state of well-being whereby individuals recognise their abilities, are able to cope with normal stresses of life, work productively and fruitfully and make a contribution to their communities” .
A range of Music Therapy programmes are available to assist those affected by a mental health condition, to help them restore some equilibrium in their lives. All of our programmes are tailored to meet the needs of the individual and can be provided in either an individualised or group manner. While active participation is the ultimate goal, Music Therapy can still be effective if the individual is not yet ready to participate in an active manner.
Music Therapy is used to explore personal feelings and make positive changes in mood and emotional states, while also providing the person with a sense of control through the opportunity to engage in choice making.
1. Emotion
Research indicates that music stimulates emotions through specific brain circuits. We can easily see how music and the brain engage mood and emotion when a child smiles and begins to dance to a rhythm.
Listening to music can create peak emotions, which increase the amount of dopamine, a specific neurotransmitter that is produced in the brain and helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. We often feel emotions are experienced from our heart, but an enormous part of emotional stimulus is communicated through the brain. Our newfound understanding of how music affects the brain and heart is leading to innovative ways to utilize music and the brain to create emotional understanding between people. A study from the Journal of Music Therapy shows that using songs as a form of communication could increase emotional understanding in autistic children. The study incorporated specific songs to portray different emotions. For example, a composition by Beethoven could be used to represent sadness, or the song “Happy” by Pharrell Williams could be used to represent joy. The children could then indicate and identify emotions based on the songs that represented them. Music succeeded where verbal language failed. Music was able to bridge the brain and heart. Music evokes and engages our emotions in many stages of our lives both individually and in groups. Music can evoke the deepest emotions in people and help us process fear, grief, sadness, and resentment, even if these emotions are held on a subconscious level.
2. Memory
Imagine an elderly man in a wheelchair. His head droops down to his chest, almost in a state of unconsciousness. His name is Henry and, sadly, he is disconnected from the world around him due to severe Alzheimer’s. What might reconnect him to the world and improve his awareness?
The movie Alive Inside chronicles how music can assist in regaining parts of memory and improve the brain health and quality of life of Alzheimer’s patients. One of the caretakers in Henry’s nursing home interviews his family to find out the type of music Henry used to enjoy listening to before Alzheimer’s affected him. By creating playlists incorporating music specifically for Henry, the caretaker helps Henry reconnect with the world around him and brighten his mood. His eyes open, he is aware, and he is able to communicate. He was reconnected to his life from the music—his music.
A 2009 study from Petr Janata at the University of California, Davis found that there is a part of the brain that “associates music and memories when we experience emotionally salient episodic memories that are triggered by familiar songs from our personal past.”
Some studies have demonstrated that singing (even bad singing!) provides emotional, social, and cognitive benefits.
3. Learning and Neuroplasticity
Neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life, and can be greatly affected by the harmony of music and the brain. According to MedicineNet.com, “Neuroplasticity allows the neurons (nerve cells) in the brain to compensate for injury and disease and to adjust their activities in response to new situations or to changes in their environment.”
To further clarify, when our brain is damaged, it can find or create new pathways to function properly. Amazingly, music can provide the stimuli to create these new pathways and to help the brain rewire itself in the case of brain injury. For instance, in a groundbreaking study by the University of Newcastle in Australia, popular music was used to assist patients with severe brain injuries in recalling personal memories. The music affected the patients’ brains ability to reconnect to memories they previously could not access.
This is an extreme case, but many of us have experienced some kind of neuroplasticity in our normal lives. Neuroplasticity, simply put, is our brain’s ability to repair connections and find alternate pathways to memories, emotions, and even physical systems such as speech—and utilizing music is a wonderful way to achieve this effect.
4. Attention
Ever hear a song that engages you so profoundly it takes hold of your mind’s full attention? By engaging our brain and our attention in the right ways, music is able to activate, sustain, and improve our attention.
Using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an obscure eighteenth-century composer, a research team from the Stanford University School of Medicine investigated the power between music and the mind to hold our attention and showed that peak brain activity occurred during a short period of silence between musical movements—when seemingly nothing was happening. This lead the researchers to theorize that listening to music could help the brain to anticipate events and hold greater attention, just as the listeners demonstrated when they seemed to pay closest attention during the anticipatory silences between musical movements.
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