Resources & references

In his studio at the Montreal General Hospital, music therapist Dany Bouchard uses music to connect with patients of the Mental Health Mission. Through regular sessions, Dany helps access their emotions, patients express their feelings, and open new doors to healing.

As community spaces for LGBTQ+ individuals continue to expand and evolve, a variety of music and art-based programs have begun to develop. This article seeks to present a therapy program developped by an art therapist and a music therapist, targeted towards transgender, nonbinary, gender creative, and questioning youth, age 10-14, who are seeking support in navigating their gender identity and the challenges of identifying outside of the “norm” of cisgender. At a crossroads between traditional clinical mental health services and community-based approaches, it addresses the intentionality behind “queering” this program development as well as a spectrum of challenges and opportunities faced in piloting the program.

This news report features an interview with Canadian music therapist Kevin Kirkland. He explains how he uses rapping to help persons with mental health and substance use issues to process their experiences and express themselves. 

This study aimed to investigate the impact of Remini-Sing RCT, community-based therapeutic choirs led by music therapists and offered to individuals with dementia and their caregivers. Preliminary results  showed a decrease in anxiety and depression. Considering the limited number of participants, the article also addresses the issue of  recruitment and retention of participants, to help future research and improve sustainability of such programs.

This article provides recommendations for music therapy practice and research among individuals with chronic pain using sickle cell disease as an exemplar condition. The research on music therapy for chronic pain management has shown that music therapy is particularly helpful in improving people's pain-related self-efficacy. Self-efficacy is well recognized to play an essential role in effective management of chronic pain.

This paper hopes to provide an insight into the role of music therapy as a Salutogenic approach within a biopsychosocial framework and its need to be accepted in the Indian context. Music therapy may play the role with preventative and curative periods of treatment, as well as support to cope and acceptance toward the inevitable for the patient as well for the caregivers. Music therapy provides a biopsychosocial and holistic approach to palliative care.

Many young people experience social isolation during times of mental illness which can impact lifelong health outcomes. Supporting recovery involves addressing the social dimensions of mental health and promoting capacity for community engagement. A practice-based study was designed to explore how a pilot group music therapy project could support young people to bridge from mental health services into everyday community engagement. Results show that young people’s experienced of the group as a safe space that supported processes of coming together and constructing the social identity. The concept of scaffolding is offered as a useful way of considering how support may be structured.

This article describes music therapy services offered at the Adult Psychiatry Department of the Montreal General Hospital.

This study was the first application of group drumming to be used for an entire treatment session in an acute psychiatric setting. This was also the first research trial to use drumming alone to influence the mood of in-patient psychiatric individuals. Results of this study indicate that a group drumming protocol can be successfully utilized as part of the psychosocial training program in a hospital setting. 

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of a songwriting intervention on psychiatric patients' knowledge of coping skills and working alliance. It seems that group songwriting about coping skills can be as effective a psychosocial intervention as traditional talk-based psychoeducation to teach psychiatric inpatients how to proactively manage their illness. Additionally, music therapy can be as effective as talk-based psychoeducation in establishing working alliance. Implications for clinical practice, limitations, and suggestions for future research are provided.

 The purpose of the current investigation was to examine the efficacy of a music therapy protocol on mood states and levels of group cohesiveness in adult oncology patients. Participants took part in "music making" sessions (where the mechanism for change included the process of making music) and "music responding" sessions (where the mechanism included the process of responding to music). 

This systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials in burn patients was performed to determine the effect of music during treatments. In summary, a positive correlation was found between treatments including music interventions and pain alleviation, anxiety relief, and heart rate reduction in burn patients. However, additional high-quality studies with carefully considered music interventions for burn patients are still needed.