Mental health covers a large field that includes young people and adults with emotional challenges, diagnosed mental health problems, or those within public health services who have, for example, addictions, personality disorders and other functional mental health disorders.
CIMTR's music therapy and mental health research theme seeks to investigate the practice and specific impact of music therapy in uniquely addressing unmet needs of young people and adults experiencing mental health problems.
Where psychotherapists would normally take the approach of talking and thinking, music therapists use music to interact and reflect verbally and musically with people.
This helps people in therapy to:
Currently, CIMTR is engaged in two mental health-related research projects:
Find out more about our music therapy in community substance treatment project.
In collaboration with the Military Wives Choirs (MWC) and the Veterans and Families Institute for Military Social Research (VFI) at ARU, we recently carried out a research project to identify and understand the barriers and incentives to joining MWC for women in the military community.
MWC is a network of non-auditioned choirs in the UK and beyond, open to women with a connection to the UK military. We surveyed past and current choir members about their experiences, perceptions and challenges associated with joining and being part of a choir. We then interviewed a portion of these women to better understand these experiences.
The results of this project have been embedded into the MWC’s organisational strategy and have informed a new recruitment drive to encourage new members to take part.
Read more about the outcomes of this research:
Odell-Miller, Helen (2017) 'Music therapy in mental health', Approaches: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Music Therapy, 9(1). pp. 11-24. ISSN 2459-3338
Ghetti, C., Chen, X.-J., Fachner, J. C. and Gold, C. (2017) 'Music therapy for people with substance use disorders (Protocol)', Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, 3. ISSN 1469-493X
Gavrielidou, M. and Odell-Miller, H. (2016) 'An Investigation of Pivotal Moments in Music Therapy in Adult Mental Health', The Arts in Psychotherapy, 52. pp. 50-62. ISSN 0197-4556
Ettenberger, Mark, Rojas Cárdenas, C., Parker, M. and Odell-Miller, H. (2016) 'Family-centred music therapy with preterm infants and their parents in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) in Colombia – A mixed-methods study', Nordic Journal of Music Therapy. ISSN 0809-8131
