Enhance Anxiety and Major Depression With Art Orr Music Therapy

Reginal Eastward. Payne 2, Jayne O'Donnell and Marquart Doty, USA TODAY

Music and art are increasingly being used as tools for therapy for loftier school students who have faced trauma — from sexual abuse to homelessness — and have been proven to aid students cope, both physically and psychologically.

Studies have shown that participating in music and art can convalesce hurting, help people manage stress, promote wellness, enhance memory, improve communications, aide physical rehabilitation, and requite people a way to express their feelings.

"We have a lot of kids who come from really traumatic backgrounds… and some days it's just trying to go on them from fighting one another," said Katie Meyers, a clinician at Levine School of Music and an associate professor at Howard Academy in Washington. "The really cool matter well-nigh music therapy, for me, is that students relate to music and enjoy music. I've seen that continue actually unsafe things from happening or escalating."

Music therapy seems to work very well with those suffering from mental health disorders such every bit depression and feet. It'south often used in therapy with patients on the autism spectrum, and in concrete rehabilitation for people who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson or Alzheimer'south.

Music has the same effect on the brain as the smell of lavander and chamomile, which produce "feel-expert" chemicals similar dopamine. A 2011 report conducted by researchers from McGill University in Montreal found that music plays a significant role in causing a practiced mood. It showed that dopamine levels were ix% higher in participants who had listened to music they enjoyed.

"At that place's a lot of research that shows the human relationship betwixt music and its ability to change moods," said Meyers.

But spending in public schools on arts and music education has been flat for a decade, particularly in low-income schools. In fact, xl% of secondary public schools didn't require the study of arts or music for graduation in the 2009-x school year, according to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics, part of the Department of Pedagogy.

What makes things worse is the "equity gap." Within the school organisation in that location are "high-poverty" and "low-poverty" schools, the study found. Higher poverty schools have even less funding than the depression poverty — or wealthier — schools.

"I definitely think in that location's a stigma confronting therapy," Baltimore loftier school art teacher Kristen Yoder says of the African American community her students come from.  "Trauma becomes normalized, especially these tremendous traumas and at that place'south not always a recognition of a need to procedure it."

Students will say, "'I'1000 not crazy and I don't demand therapy,'" she says.

Art is "a special way for the kids to get some of the release," says Yoder who teaches at Renaissance Academy. "The more tools you give kids to express themselves, the more equipped they'll exist to handle stuff their manner."

How Music, Art Helps

Larry Owens of Baltimore was recently released from prison after 40 years for murder. But while in prison house, he learned the importance of the arts for helping cope with trauma. Shy and reserved, he discovered a talent he never knew he had: drawing and painting.

Art "kept me abroad from people I didn't like," he said. "My oral fissure tin say things real nasty 
when I get tired of someone, simply when I'm drawing, threaten me all yous desire."

"That'south all I did all day long. Out in the yard. In the art room. Or drawing in my prison cell."

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Owens didn't fifty-fifty know he could draw until the sudden death of Motown vocaliser Tammi Terrell in 1970. Distraught, he began to describe the beautiful young vocalizer and has been cartoon ever since.

Owens' childhood friend, Donald Shakir, was convicted of murder at the same time as Owens and found his peace in prison house through Motown too. Just he used a singing voice so cute information technology's hard to imagine cellmates were ever bothered by information technology. But there were enough who demanded he finish.

The songs that soothed him brought back besides many painful memories for others who would need he stop singing.

Shakir believes everyone who came out of prison house needs therapy, including him. He'll sing every bit he walks all over Baltimore and while he walks effectually the Patapsco flea market where Owens sells his artwork on the weekends.

"Nosotros brought as well much excess baggage out of prison to say we don't need it," says Shakir.

Owens, on the hand, prefers simply art to therapy.

A therapist, he says, "tin can not tell me what I'k thinking and feeling inside."

The Levine schoolhouse has five people who are certified in music therapy, and the focus is on using music to help traumatized students. A certified music therapist is similar an occupational or concrete therapist: They are trained to use music to assist people get meliorate, says Rhonda Buckley, the school's caput of campuses and strategic development. Students play instruments, write songs, play instruments together or only mind to and discuss music in more formal music therapy sessions.

Buckley, a saxophonist who founded a Washington arts center for disadvantaged children in 2000, sees music as a proficient mode for people of all ages to cope with trauma and stress. Artistic outlets are nigh "focus" and concentrating on arts shifts a person's thinking abroad from the trauma they experienced.

"Music can address the problems we face with homelessness, abuses," she said.

Merely but listening to music or playing it helps, she said. You don't demand a certified therapist.

Reginal Payne and Marquart Doty are fellows in the Urban Health Media Project, which O'Donnell co-founded.

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Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2018/03/22/whether-its-art-and-music-therapy-art-and-music-therapy-calms-traumatized-teens/446622002/

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