Head, hands, heart, humanity: The Creative Dementia Collective is taking a whole person, whole team approach to caring for those living with Dementia and their care partners. Using music therapy, art therapy, pet therapy, and Dementia Education specialists, they are empowering their clients to celebrate who they are, until the end of life.

October is Down Syndrome Awareness Month! This week we are celebrating what it means to be differently abled and how music therapy can support the abilities and needs of those with Down Syndrome.

Today Ellisa discusses literature on intergenerational music therapy. This kind of programming is the bringing together of multiple generations in a group music therapy setting. From cognitive stimulation, to physical function to social connections, music can bridge the gaps and make a common ground for amazing intergenerational experiences.

Ellisa sits down with Emily Pivovarnik MM, MT-BC, NICU-MT to discuss music therapy in a children’s hospital. Emily educates us on her research, writing and music therapy work in neonatal intensive care.

Maggie sits down with Patina and asks her about her personal journey to entrepreneurship in music therapy and more specifically about her successful online music therapy resource company called, “Music Therapy Joy”.

Elizabeth sits down with Stephanie Lopes to discuss her work as a recreational therapist, Social Worker, and her recent work with biofeedback in an acute psychiatric unit. We will speak specifically about the heartmath approach to biofeedback, which measure heart rate variability.

Elizabeth walks us through the eighth sense of interoception and discusses how it may impact a few different populations in music therapy.

My attention is not divided. I’m not multitasking. I’m not half-way listening. I’m REALLY listening so deeply so I can hear you.

“We all need the same things” - Elizabeth sits down with Dr. Andrew Knight, PhD, MT-BC to discuss compliance based goals, goal writing and IEPs through the lens of music therapy. This conversation extends beyond the field of music therapy and gets at the building blocks of goal writing and attending to the root of our clients’ needs.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that we probably have seen this play out in our own lives. Certain songs (or patterns of sound) elicit a full body response with sometimes an increased heart rate, feelings of elation, and even body chills. This is when we’ve experienced that “sweet spot” where the music is somehow better than our neurologic expectations.

Music therapists are prone to several mental health risk factors: as a helping professional, we are prone to compassion fatigue and burnout while doubling as professional musicians puts us at an increased risk of depression, anxiety and high rates of stress. New years are new beginnings and perhaps this is the year that you prioritize your mental health.

The study sought to understand how music therapy altered mood for adolescents participating in group services as well as the effect that demographics had on mood alteration, or not. The study was conducted at a large pediatric psychiatric hospital and included over 350 participants aged 12-21 in 3 different units of the hospital.

This week’s learning comes from a recent article published in the Journal of Music therapy: "Individualized Education Program Team Members’ Perceptions of Music Therapy: An Interpretivist Investigation" by authors Rebecca West, PhD, MT-BC, Amy Furman, MM, MT-BC, Michael J Silverman, PhD, MT-BC. 

You’ve probably heard people say things like “music is good medicine” or “music is good for you”. Is there something scientific to this old adage? Ellisa is going to synthesize a research review for you by authors Mona Lisa Chandra and Daniel J. Levitin called “The Neurochemistry of Music”.

This week's segment is our learning week of September and we’re going to be answering the internet's most asked questions about music therapy. I’ve compiled this list that was generated from the website “answer the public”. It will be a little random, but it’s going to be fun. With that, let’s turn it over to the people and answer the internet's most asked questions about music therapy! 

I will leave you with a final quote from the authors “it is possible that these young people are more familiar and comfortable with chaos than we are as music therapists. It may then be counter-intuitive to attempt to eliminate chaos so that we can experience ordered, highly structured groups at odds with the environments to which young people return.”

GIM is also known as The Bonny Method of Guided Imagery and Music because it was developed by Dr. Helen Bonny. She was a pioneer in the music therapy field and was one of the first people to understand that music has a profound impact on a person’s psyche and went as far as to make it her life’s work to do research on the subject and develop her own method of music therapy.

Attachment is defined a little differently depending on who you are speaking to, but the first attachment theorist, the British psychologist, John Bowlby, described attachment as “a lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.”

Today I’ll be comparing and contrasting Neurologic Music Therapy and Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy. In the small, but ever growing field of Music Therapists, most everyone recognizes these names and also recognizes the small, but maybe not so subtle, differences between the two. Are these two approaches really as contrasting as we think? What makes them so different and why have they become so polarized? These are just a few of the questions that came to mind when I chose this topic.

This is the place where we as music therapists and other creative therapists come in. The unique nature of music and other creative arts experiences provide a space for this consistent and predictable environment, positive connection to others and awareness and learning of social and emotional skills and regulation.