User:Gksanders/Music therapy

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Grief Treatment for Adolescents

Grief treatment is also very valuable within the adolescent age group. Just as adults and the elderly struggle with grief from loss, relationship issues, job-related stress, and financial issues, so do adolescents also experience grief from disappointments that occur early on in life, however different these disappointing life events may be. For example, many people of adolescent age experience life-altering events such as parental divorce, trauma from emotional or physical abuse, struggles within school, and loss. If this grief is not acted upon early on through the use of some kind of therapy, it can alter the entire course of an adolescent's life. In one particular study on the impact of music therapy on grief management within adolescents used songwriting to allow these adolescents to express what they were feeling through lyrics and instrumentals. In the article Development of the Grief Process Scale through music therapy songwriting with bereaved adolescents, the results of the study demonstrate that in all of the treatment groups combined, the mean GPS (grief process scale) score decreased by 43%. The use of music therapy songwriting allowed these adolescents to become less overwhelmed with grief and better able to process it as demonstrated by the decrease in mean GPS score.

Impact of Music Therapy on General Mental Health

Music therapy has been used to help bring improvements to mental health among people of all age groups. It has been used as far back as the 1830s. One example of a mental hospital that used music therapy to aid in the healing process of their patients includes the Hanwell Lunatic Asylum. This mental hospital provided "music and movement sessions and musical performances" as well as "group and individual music therapy for patients with serious mental illness or emotional problems." Two main categories of music therapy were used in this study; analytic music therapy and Nordoff-Robbins music therapy. Analytic music therapy involves both words and music, while Nordoff-Robbins music therapy places great emphasis on assessing how clients react to music therapy and how the use of this type of therapy can be constantly altered and shifted to allow it to benefit the client the most.