Music Therapy

Music therapy is a viable and useful alternative to more traditional psychological therapeutic methods. As an approach, it is integrated and affects almost every aspect of the body and mind. Moreover, using music therapy to replace or accentuate more traditional therapies often shows considerable success. In particular, these successes are notable in handicapped children, adolescents, and adults. Besides the handicapped, music therapy also benefits people who have emotional or expressive problems.

Music therapy has the ability to cross boundaries of culture, race, and age, and provides a viable means of adjusting behaviors that are difficult to regulate with other types of therapy. In fact, the functionality of music therapy is shown to be very useful with blind, disturbed, or handicapped persons who may have no other mode of expression and find music to be nonthreatening. Data is presented from several case studies to show that, for at least the past three decades, music therapy has been successfully used as an alternative to psycho- or physical therapy. Examples are also given advocating a continuous approach to music therapy, in order to increase its effectiveness.

Music is one of the approaches in therapy that affects the mind, body, and emotions. It is a way to help many of the problems associated with both handicapped and nonhandicapped children and adults. In the broad spectrum of this topic, many scholars and laypersons alike b

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is often more efficient to use subject heading to search electronic databases and delineate the years. For example, in each of the cases above, there were several hundred selections identified using the terms "music" and "therapy." However, when combined with the date fields "current" or "1984 to 1989," the list was considerably shortened. When other terms were included in the search, for instance "handicapped," "mental retardation," or "physical disability," one was able to get a more precise list of citations. One initial problem at this level, however, was that some of the useful material was located in rather obscure or foreign journals, not readily available or in translation (e.g. Annales Medico-Psychologigues, Zeitschrift fur Psychosomatische Medizin und Psychoanalyse, or the Slavic journal Przeglad Psychologiczny). Nevertheless, the 16 citations used in this paper do provide an adequate background of materials and, when combined with their own reference lists, give one a rather broad and useful perspective on the subject indicated. In fact, the difficulty in selecting the best sources for this project came with limiting oneself to a manageable number of sources that could be read thoroughly. For further research,

Category: Psychology - M