Music, Communities and Mental Health
For our latest mail out we looked at how music and the arts can be a great way of expressing how we feel. To help us do this, Liesbeth Tip from the HarmonyChoir in Edinburgh has written a blog for us on how music can improve mental health and bring communities together.
It’s a rare soul that does not love music. Music can change your mood instantly, it can help channel emotions, and it can offer a creative outlet where you can express yourself. Add to music the benefits that being part of an accepting community can confer, and you have a powerful recipe to improve well-being. This is why choirs can be so beneficial, and there is more and more research available on the positive effects of being in a choir.
A few years ago, I asked choir members (of HarmonyChoir, see link below) and members of the general public about what emotions they experience when listening to music, and when making music.
A large majority reported happiness as an emotion they experience when listening to, and making music.
And if you are looking for something exciting in your life: basically, making music is incompatible with being bored, as only about 1% reported this emotion.
In Australia there are now mood festivals, where you can enjoy being brought in a certain state of mind (set up by Esther Pavel-Wood). Now that’s a quick and cheap fix! This is not to say that music can change all mental health for the better, but it can certainly help, even if simply as a temporary distraction.
When I asked HarmonyChoir members how they rated their sense of well-being, enjoyment and connectedness before and after two-hour rehearsals, they all reported improvements after rehearsal. What’s more, over a nine-week period, the after-rehearsal scores also went up. Importantly, except for at the very first rehearsal, there were no differences in these improvements between people with mental health difficulties in their background (past or present) and those who reported to not generally have any symptoms.
There is extensive research on the benefits of group singing for people with mental health difficulties; I put a link to a blog (for Mental Elf) below where I discussed the psychological mechanisms behind this positive effect more elaborately.
HarmonyChoir started out as a research project in 2016, its aim being to investigate benefits of singing in a choir on mental health, and mental health stigma.
As you all know, there are a lot of negative stereotypes out there about mental ill health, but research has shown that by bringing people in contact with each other, these can be changed (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006). HarmonyChoir was not a music therapy group, just a choir like any other — with the significant difference that there was more attention for the fact that the choir had the same ratio of people with different mental health backgrounds in it as you would find in the general population. No-one in the choir was aware of each other’s backgrounds (for obvious reasons of confidentiality), but people could of course speak about it themselves if they wanted to.
On some of the questionnaires that were used to identify opinions about mental ill health, attitudes changed and were more positive after the project. Anecdotally, a lot of choir members have since mentioned that they speak about mental health, theirs and others, much more openly than before they joined the choir. It seems to have become less of a big deal, and this normalisation shows more acceptance and less judgement of mental ill health. This is great news. For people with mental health difficulties, the added stress of stigma drains vital mental energy which cannot then be used for other, more positive things.
Recently, members of HarmonyChoir were invited by another researcher (from outside the original project) to talk about the benefit of being part of this musical community. The researcher, Cameron Maitland-Warne, interviewed members from several different arts and music communities around Scotland, and showed that being part of an accepting community was a key ingredient of the mental health benefits for members of all these groups.
As it stands, music, connecting and acceptance appear to be the central theme in the positive effects of community music making.
Another example. Oaknote SCIO (link is below) recently orchestrated a music-based project in primary schools and nursing homes/day care centres across Scotland, and I had the privilege of evaluating this project as an objective outsider. The children received training on dementia and Alzheimer’s disease by Alzheimer Scotland, and went on to interview the elderly participants about their history of Dance Hall music and dance. They also did music and dance workshops together. Turns out, these joint experiences not only helped bring back memories in the elderly, it created new ones, and improved well-being and a sense of belonging. In the children, it changed perceptions and stereotypes about old age, and made the children believe they were more similar to the elderly as before. The elderly had a great time, and felt less isolated. All mentioned they had made new friends, with a lot of intergenerational ones.
There are many ways that music and the arts can be used to improve health, well-being and mental health. It is also encouraging that there is increasing attention for the power of being member of a community (Maugham/Williams et al. (eds.), 2019). Practising arts and music at any level can help bring people together. There is a growing movement that advocates for using arts and music on prescription, as another instrument in the toolbox to promote (mental) health. For this to be implemented, more work is necessary to help build a case and evidence base for these techniques. In that sense, it’s important to evaluate any arts or music-based projects as much as we can (e.g. Dingle et al. (2019) for guidelines and recommendations for research with choirs).
Following this trend, I was very pleased to hear that recently the University of Edinburgh has started offering not one but two new Master’s-level courses on arts and health: ‘Encountering Health Humanities and Arts’, and ‘Humanities and Arts-informed Research Methods in the Social Sciences’.
This will help educate professionals who will look at health and mental health from a cross-disciplinary perspective, with solid roots in the arts and music, as well as help build the evidence base on what works best, for whom, and how.
I’ll also be involved myself again in a choir that a colleague of mine is setting up for patients, hospital staff, students, carers and members of the wider community at Little France (Edinburgh BioQuarter) starting in September. Give me a shout if you think that’s something for you!
The recent start of the Hear Me! See Me! Choir in Glasgow is another great initiative to help improve well-being and connectedness amongst people from different mental health backgrounds.
I met Liam and Jenny who set this up. I’m sure that their enthusiasm and belief in the message behind the choir will make this a huge success! I wish them all the best, and I hope our choirs will all get to sing together some day.
If you think about joining a choir but are hesitant, my advice would be: don’t judge it until you try it, and if you can manage, try to stick with it for a while to see what you think over a longer period, e.g. a few weeks/months. If it is not for you, keep in mind that there are plenty of other options in the music and the arts, and Scotland is full of them. Sometimes it takes time, the right moment, and a bit of trial and error to find out what suits best — as with anything in life.
Apparently, amateurs have more fun singing (Grape et al., 2003); it is understandable that the pressure gets higher when it’s your profession. If any professional musicians are reading this, please rest assured that there is increasing attention for the mental health of music professionals, e.g. at the Edinburgh Fringe (see link below for a recent article by Rachael Healy). I’ve also come across a lot of individuals in recent years who were doing their bit to put this subject on the agenda of their respective musical/performance fields, an example is Tabby Kerwin (link below).
There is growing interest in musicians’ mental health and for changing the stigma of mental ill health in this field.
In summary: music is a great way of improving health and mental health, and of bringing people and communities together.
The shared, fun activities can bring out the best in people and tap into creative abilities people did not think they had.
About the author:
Liesbeth Tip is a Clinical Psychologist, currently doing a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Edinburgh (subject: ‘Social anxiety in psychosis’).
She is founder and Chair of HarmonyChoir, which by popular demand, is still ongoing.
The HarmonyChoir project was made possible by the Innovation Initiative Grant (now called Student Experience Grant), funded by friends and alumni of the University of Edinburgh.
Email: Liesbeth.Tip@ed.ac.uk
References:
Dingle, G. A., Clift, S., Finn, S., Gilbert, R., Groarke, J. M., Irons, J. Y., … Williams, E. J. (2019). An Agenda for Best Practice Research on Group Singing, Health, and Well-Being. Music & Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204319861719
Maughan, D. (2019). Social Scaffolding: Applying the Lessons of Contemporary Social Science to Health and Healthcare (R. Williams, V. Kemp, S. Haslam, C. Haslam, K. Bhui, & S. Bailey, Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781911623069
Pettigrew, Th. P. & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90 (5), 751–783.
Article Rachael Healy in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2019/aug/20/minding-your-mental-health-in-edinburgh-festival
Links:
Website HarmonyChoir: www.harmonychoir.com
HarmonyChoir documentary of the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxJjPCSRY_I
Oaknote SCIO, project ‘Are Ye Dancin’?’: https://www.oaknote.co.uk/are-ye-dancin-1
Blog for Mental Elf: https://www.nationalelfservice.net/populations-and-settings/community-settings/community-singing-helps-mental-health-recovery/
Blog by Esther Pavel-Wood, organiser of the Mood Festivals: https://www.cutcommonmag.com/mad-music-is-a-mental-health-forum-that-people-actually-want-to-go-to/
Master’s-level courses University of Edinburgh:
Encountering Health Humanities and Arts — http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/19-20/dpt/cxcnst11086.htm and Humanities
Arts-informed Research Methods in the Social Sciences — http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/19-20/dpt/cxcnst11087.htm
