Cameron Hunt

Professor Flores

ENG112 007w

4/29/19

Research Paper

What is music therapy? To put it simply, it is the use of music to heal, whether that be

mentally or physically. The earliest reference of music therapy can be traced all the way back to

the writings of Aristotle and Plato, but it really took off during World War I and World War II.

Other notable appearances is a 1789 issue of the Columbian magazine titled “Music physically

considered”, and in the 1800’s music therapy was the talk of two medical dissertations, the first

one written by Edwin Atlee (1804) and the second by Samuel Mathews (1806), Both were

students of Dr. Benjamin Rush, at the school of Dickson College, a physician and psychiatrist

who was a strong proponent of using music to treat medical diseases . While Music therapy has

been around since the Greeks, it has not gotten much support over the years, until just recently. It

earlier supporters are people like Eva Augusta Vescelius who founded the National society of

music therapeutics in 1903, and In 1926, Isa Maud Ilsen founded the National Association for

Music in Hospitals (Musictherapy.org), and few others have shown support to this type of

therapy but thanks to recent studies it has picked up steam and has helped a countless amount of

people since, including myself. Music therapy has been noted to help a multitude of aliments

such has dementia, anxiety, depression, help cope with cancer treatment. While music therapy

can be used to help with numerous diseases of the mind and body, this paper will focus on how

music therapy helps anxiety and depression. Music therapy has had a major role in helping

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people with handling their depression or making their anxiety just a bit better, that’s exactly what

it did for me.

When I was in high school, I suffered from pretty bad anxiety which eventually lead to

depression. From trying to do good in school and dealing with the hormones of puberty, it drove

my anxiety through the roof which lead to me getting depressed. That created a vicious cycle, me

being depressed lead to me doing worse in school and made my anxiety worse, this cycle went

on and on throughout high school to the day I graduated. Even then not everything was good in

my personal life, so the problems still prevailed. That was until one day, I had just gotten on

break from my job, I put my earphones in, opened up pandora and the first song that came on

made me feel better the second it started. That song was “God that failed” by Metallica, the first

of many songs I listened to after that moment. I became obsessed with the music they had

produced, hearing the loud riffs of their guitars, the deep bass and the masterful drumming had

this calming effect on me. To my surprise, I began to feel better day by day. My attitude

improved, which before then was worsening. My temper had been better, just overall I was a

better version of myself, large in due part to finding this genre of music. Since that moment my

anxiety and depression have been better than ever. Like so many other people that suffer from

the same stuff as I do or disorders/diseases much worse than mine, my life has been made better

simply by plugging my headphones in and playing my music. While just listening to music is not

a therapy session, I can certainly attest to the healing and therapeutic properties that listening to

music can have. now if I have a big test coming up or I had a stressful day at work, I just listen to

my music and the stress goes away. It’s a wonderous thing how something as simple as listening

to your favorite music can have such a profound effect on you. While I have been fortunate

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enough to find a way to alleviate the anxiety and depression, a lot of people still suffer in silence

from these disorders.

Over the past decade, the rising epidemic of depression has only gotten worse and worse.

According to Maggie Fox, an author for NBC news, people with commercial health insurance

such as Blue Shield and Blue Cross, 4.4 % of adults were diagnosed with depression in 2016

then includes the following diagram:

You can see that the rates of depression vary from state to state but there is only one state,

Hawaii, that has a rate lower then 3%. All other forty-nine states have a rate of 3% or more with

New York, Minnesota, and Utah having the highest rate of 6% (Fox). That is only the people that

are diagnosed with depression, a majority of the people with depression do not go to the doctor

to get diagnosed in fear of what people may think of them or being given medication after

medication to make them feel better or it makes them feel not like themselves and ultimately stop

taking it. That’s were music therapy comes in, according to Sonja Aalbers, who got her

Bachelor's degree in music therapy in 199, has a master’s degree in music therapy from the

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school of Hogeschool Zuyd (Zuyd University of Applied Sciences), along with several other

researchers have found that among 421 patients over 9 studies that “music therapy plus treatment

as usual is more effective than treatment as usual alone. Music therapy seems to reduce

depressive symptoms and anxiety and helps to improve functioning (e.g. maintaining

involvement in job, activities, and relationships). We are not sure whether music therapy is better

than psychological therapy. We do not know whether one form of music therapy is better than

another. The small numbers of identified studies and participants make it hard to be confident

about these comparisons.” (Aalbers). The article then goes to a “what should happen next?”

paragraph and it mentions that music therapy for depression is likely to be effective for people in

decreasing symptoms of depression and anxiety. In an article written in 2017 by Daniel Leubner

and Thilo Hinterberger, Leubner and Hinterberger are a part of the Department of Psychosomatic

Medicine in the university clinic of Regensburg, Germany, they describe depression as “a very

common mood disorder, resulting in a loss of social function, reduced quality of life and

increased mortality.”(Leubner). Later they mention that approximately three hundred and

twenty-two people suffer from depression worldwide, just showing how widespread this

epidemic is. “Music can be considered an emerging treatment option for mood disorders that has

not yet been explored to its full potential” (Leubner), while not being explored to its full

potential, it has still been quite effective in helping lessen the effects of depression which is all

anyone with depression is looking for, a way to feel better, to feel like the person they were

before becoming depressed, to feel whole again and music therapy has as good of shot as

anything else to be the thing that helps someone. There is undeniable proof that music therapy

has therapeutic values when it comes to lessening the effects of depression, but depression is not

the only illness music therapy.

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 One of the other disorders that music therapy can help is anxiety. Anxiety is described as

intense, excessive, and persistent worry and fear about everyday situations. Elevated heart rate,

increased breathing, sweating, and often times people with anxiety are tired. Anxiety is most

commonly caused by stressful situations that are in public like giving a presentation or it can

happen in a more secluded spot such as studying for a test by yourself or even during the test.

While anxiety is easily remedied by being active, getting a good nights sleep on a regular basis,

or just eating healthier, a lot of people still suffer from it. Most people that suffer from anxiety do

not have the energy or the will to do those activities listed before, they are often paralyzed with

worry and indecision that they cannot think of anything else. That thing that they are worrying

about becomes all they think about and it consumes them. That is until music therapy became a

more prevalent way of treating. Music can relax people, make everyday things that may usually

stress someone out, and make them easier to deal with. Getting stress out over studying? Or that

big test later in the day? plug your head phones in a feel the stress drain away. Do that for any

activity you may find stressful, and it will make handling it much easier. According to Chelsea

Clark, the author of “Music therapy can provide natural anxiety relief and treat depression”

posted on universityhealthnews.com, she mentions much of what is previously stated earlier and

gives a description of what music therapy is and how it can help deal with anxiety in different

situations. “Music is also often used by medical professionals to help provide natural anxiety

relief during procedures such as surgery, chemotherapy treatments, and mammograms or blood

tests. Studies show that music can effectively reduce pain and anxiety in children undergoing

common pediatric medical procedures like blood draws or immunizations.” (Clark), undergoing

a surgery or treatment of any kind is sure to bring out some anxiety in whoever is getting the

procedure done, the patient will get nervous about any complications that may arise during the

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procedure, how their quality of life may decline after it is done, so many thing to worry about

will stress a person out to were it is unhealthy to stress anymore. Music can take their mind off

worrying about it as much. Also being the surgeon giving the surgery can be a very stressful time

so often times, they will play music that calms them to keep their head straight and do their job

successfully. Clark later then explains why music has this calming effect on us, “Music therapy

can suppress the sympathetic nervous system, which is involved with the “flight-or-flight” stress

response of the body. Music also triggers the brain to release endorphins, increase dopamine

levels, and block pain pathways, all which can help to enhance a sense of well-being.”. listening

to music helps release endorphins that increases dopamine, which is the chemical that makes us

feel happy, which counteracts the effects of anxiety and even depression. She list other people

who could benefit form music therapy other then people suffering from anxiety and depression,

and recommends what this essay has been recommending throughout, “And the next time you

are doing something that you find stressful or painful, pop in some headphones and see if your

favorite song can ease your discomfort.” (Clark). While not being a therapy session, it is proven

it still has stress relieving abilities. In the article I referenced to before, it mentioned music

therapy helping cancer patients deal with the treatments they endure which can be extremely

hard to deal with. Some of the more common treatments to cancer are chemotherapy and

radiation therapy, chemotherapy is the treatment of cancer through the use of drugs such as

cytotoxic, cyto meaning cell. Those drugs target the cancerous cells and try to kill them. While

chemo is a very effective way of getting rid of cancerous cells it can also target healthy ones,

making it harder to deal with. Radiation therapy is the use if targeted energy to shrink tumors or

destroy cancer cells. Both of treatments can take a toll on a person, on top of hoping it works

they also worry about the cost of the treatment. Anything to make quality of life for these people

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afflicted with such a terrible condition is worth a try and for some people music therapy is the

answer. In a paper written by Priyadharshini Krishnaswamy and Shoba Nair, doctors at St.

John’s medical college hospital, they ran a study that shows that music therapy relieves the pain

caused by cancer treatment. “Statistically significant reduction seen in the pain scores in the test

group after music therapy (P = 0.003). No statistically significant reduction seen in the pain score

in the control group (P = 0.356).” (Krishnaswamy). Fourteen patients were divided in to two

groups of seven people, one group, the test group, was given twenty minutes of music therapy

and the control group was given twenty minutes of regular therapy talking to a therapist. The

results show that the test group had much lower test scores then the group who attended regular

therapy. The authors suggested that a larger study should be conducted to back their findings that

music therapy should be used as a pain reliever along side with morphine or other pain killers.

The field of music therapy has picked up speed in recent years, from helping people with

depression to helping people deal with all different sorts of anxiety. While the field of music

therapy is small, it will pick up steam just from the fact that there are success stories from people

who use this type of therapy to heal from an assortment of disorders and illnesses. Once more

and more studies come out proving that music therapy is a viable way to deal with certain

disorders, the therapy will be used more and more, maybe one day as much as traditional

therapy.

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 Cite

Aalbers, S et al “Music Therapy for Depression.” Music Therapy for Depression,

www.cochrane.org/CD004517/DEPRESSN_music-therapy-depression.

“American Music Therapy Association.” What Is Music Therapy | What Is Music Therapy? |

American Music Therapy Association (AMTA),

www.musictherapy.org/about/musictherapy/.

Clark, Chelsea. “Music Therapy Can Provide Natural Anxiety Relief and Treat Depression.”

University Health News, 11 Dec. 2018, universityhealthnews.com/daily/depression/what-

is-music-therapy-find-natural-anxiety-relief-fight-depression-reduce-blood-pressure-and-

more-with-this-alternative-approach/.

Fox, Maggie. “More Teens, Young Adults Get Depression Diagnoses, Insurance Co Finds.”

NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, www.nbcnews.com/health/health-

news/major-depression-rise-among-everyone-new-data-shows-n873146.

Krishnaswamy, Priyadharshini et al “Effect of Music Therapy on Pain and Anxiety Levels of

Cancer Patients: A Pilot Study.” Indian Journal of Palliative Care, Medknow Publications

& Media Pvt Ltd, 2016, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4973492/.

Leubner, Daniel et al “Reviewing the Effectiveness of Music Interventions in Treating

Depression.” Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers Media S.A., 7 July 2017,

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5500733/.

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