Some mental health experts believe that the use of music therapy for depression can be very helpful for patients. The therapy itself can be handled in several different ways but it usually includes more than just listening to music, and may involve a specific prescription of planned activities that are related to music. Since music can sometimes have an influence on human emotion, the actual experience of undergoing music therapy can sometimes be an enjoyable activity for patients, and this may be one reason for the effectiveness of the therapy. There have been a few clinical studies of music therapy for depression, and they have generally shown a measure of success, but the exact therapeutic methods used have varied a lot between studies and the results have been somewhat inconsistent.
Music is generally well-known for its power to influence a person’s emotions. For example, someone who’s about to compete in a sporting may listen to fast, aggressive music to help get in the right mood. It’s also generally well-understood in the medical community that music has the ability to trigger strong nostalgic memories in people, and those memories can bring mental states along with them, including both positive and negative emotions. When doctors use music therapy for depression, they are generally attempting to tap into this emotional power and use it in a scientific way as a medical treatment.
There are several different approaches to treating depression with music. Sometimes it may be as simple as asking the patient to listen to music that is linked to positive emotions for a certain number of hours per day. In other cases, the therapist may directly participate in the therapy, by having the patient bring in music to listen to during the therapy session. Sometimes the therapy may involve other activities besides just listening to music, such as dancing, or attempting to play an instrument.
With all the different approaches to music therapy for depression, doctors have had some difficulty figuring out which approach is most useful. There have been quite a few studies trying to test the effectiveness of music therapy, but generally, all these studies have had totally different methodology, and the results have generally varied as wildly as the methods. For these reasons, more experimentation may be needed in order to sort through all the different approaches to find the best standardized recommendations for individual patients.
