The Art of Healing – Music Therapy

We very often spend vast amounts of money on doctors, antibiotics and conventional medical treatments, but give little thought or credence to more alternative methods of healing. Less traditional techniques such as music therapy are not only cheaper, they can be just as effective as the most intensive medications. Music therapy not only introduces people to a new way of thinking, but can help heal some of the deepest wounds.

What is Music Therapy?

Music therapy is a way of reaching a patient and forming a patient-therapist connection through the medium of sound and music. Each individual music therapy patient has a set of therapeutic goals - anything from improved motor co-ordination to mental recovery - and music is used to try and achieve these goals. Often compared to occupational therapy and physical therapy, music therapy simply uses music as its equipment. During a music therapy session, music is used as a creative and non-verbal medium through which specific difficulties are addressed and faced. One of the strengths of music therapy is that it is a non-verbal form of communication and people can still express themselves even when words are or seem impossible.

Who Benefits from Music Therapy?

One of the greatest things about music therapy is that it can help a range of people and a range of conditions or problems. Patients often tend to be children with learning disabilities or behavioural problems. Using music to express themselves teaches these children to both listen and interact with other children, greatly improving social skills and concentration levels. Children suffering from mental disabilities can also benefit from music therapy as it offers them an alternative way to express themselves. Very often bad behaviour in challenged children stems from frustration as they cannot make their needs clearly known. This alternative form of expression allows them to release this frustration and possibly find an alternative form of communication.

Another significant group of people who can benefit from this type of therapy is children and people who have witnessed traumatic events or who have undergone an abusive or traumatic experience. Humans often bottle up their emotions or suppress frightening or unhappy memories. Music therapy provides a safe space for these emotions and experiences to be let out and worked through, allowing the patient to finally moved past them and live a happier life.

It is also not only children who benefit from music therapy, but it is often an effective treatment for adults suffering from disabilities, mental illness, terminal diseases or arthritis. For these adults, the relaxing and de-stressing ability that music therapy has goes a long way to help with pain relief as the patient is left in a calmer emotional state. Music therapy is used extensively with stroke victims in many countries as the rhythmic entrainment (or allowing the brain waves to fall in sync with the music and thus synchronise the two hemispheres of the brain to encourage co-ordinated physical and spatial movement) is incredibly helpful for physical rehabilitation.

How Does it Work?

Humans all intrinsically respond to music, regardless of creed, colour or disability and music therapists use this to reach a certain set of outcomes. The techniques used include musical improvisation, singing, composition, listening, performance and movement to express what often feels inexpressible in words. The power in this lies in the fact that a voice is given to that which the patient cannot express which allows the healing process to begin.

One of the best ways to understand how music therapy works is to follow a real-life account of music therapy in practice. Little Caylem was three years old when he was witness to his father's brutal murder. His trauma was left unaddressed for three years and his behaviour steadily declined. In his first music therapy sessions under the Heideveld project, he almost instantly reverted to toddler-like behaviour, indicating that he still needed to deal with what he witnessed as a three year old. By his fourth session Caylem felt secure enough to re-enact his father's murder through the safe medium of music. He used the instruments to show what happened, with the bass drum essentially killing the piano. This first step in the healing process has already made a remarkable difference, with his teachers commenting that his classroom behaviour has greatly improved.

Music Therapy in South Africa

Music therapy is particularly successful and powerful in South Africa as music is an intrinsic part of almost every culture contained within our borders. With many issues facing the children of South Africa, from HIV/Aids to poverty, abuse, violence and trauma, music therapy is one way that children can begin to heal.

Many charities recognise that helping people is not always all about food and shelter, but that emotional healing through music, arts and culture projects can be just as important. Many projects, such as the Heideveld Project that helped Caylem, head out into the poorer areas of South Africa, like the Cape Flats and offer individual and group sessions where they teach children to cope with and overcome some of the many difficulties that they face. Music therapists are all fully trained and need to be registered with the Health Professions Council of South Africa and most volunteer their time for these projects. This means that many music therapy projects are run by charities and rely on donations to survive, making education among the more fortunate about the benefits of music therapy vital in order to ensure continuing donations.