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Draft of my Wiki Article addition. There are many treatments for depression. Drugs and psychotherapy are common treatments, but a recent study by a group of Cochrane researchers found that alternative treatments, such as music therapy could deliver benefits.

Music therapy is an allied health profession and one of the expressive therapies, consisting of an interpersonal process in which a trained music therapist uses music and all of its facets—physical, emotional, mental, social, aesthetic, and spiritual—to help clients to improve or maintain their health. There is a strong link between music and emotion, and music therapy taps into the cognitive aspect the brain to help remedy emotional disorders. Music therapy is primarily used to ease symptoms of depression, though its effectiveness as a stand-alone intervention is not certain, according to a recent review published by the Cochran Database of Systematic Reviews.

Out of five studies, four of them found reduced depression symptoms in participants receiving music therapy compared to those who did not. The fifth study did not find any difference.

The benefits of using music treatment appeared greatest when providers used theory-based therapeutic techniques rather than “winging it.’ Common therapeutic interventions can include listening to music in groups, body movement and painting to music, and improvised singing.

The effectiveness of music therapy definitely varies between each treatment and patient. Many authorities in the field of depression treatment are always diligently comparing, and monitoring the effectiveness of various treatment techniques. Author, Anna Maratos, is the head of profession for Arts Therapies at the Central and Northwest London NHS Foundation Trust. She and her colleagues looked for randomized controlled trials, that compared music therapy with other, more traditional interventions for depression. They found a dearth of rigorous research.

Although the studies did not show a definitive cause-and-effect relationship between music therapy and clinical improvement in depression, the authors found a positive correlation. They attributed the unevenness of the studies’ results to the varied uses of music by therapists in the studies and the relative weakness of some researchers’ methods. Each study author determined his or her own definition of standard care, on the other hand, which included pharmacological, routine hospital and cognitive therapeutic treatment. These study results cause the question to be asked, “What is standardized treatment in music therapy?” It is clear that there is more research that needs to be done in the field of music therapy, it’s effectiveness, and it’s various treatments, but it is safe to say that it is an alternative for people who might shy away from traditional approaches, because music therapy is a less threatening avenue of treatment.