[spiritual_emergency]

Music therapy may help to ease the symptoms of depression, anxiety and emotional withdrawal that many sufferers of schizophrenia experience, according to Dr Mike Crawford and researchers at Imperial College London.

In their new study involving four hospitals, the team found that encouraging patients to express themselves through music seemed to improve their symptoms.

This type of treatment has only been attempted before with patients who are already fairly stable.

“This study shows that music therapy provides a way of working with people when they are acutely unwell,” Dr. Crawford said.

Music therapy is a type of psychotherapy in which the patient is encouraged to utilize music to improve interpersonal and communication skills in ways that regular dialogue is limited. Forms of music therapy generally are based around cognitive/behavioral, humanistic or psychoanalytic frameworks or a mixture of approaches. There are usually both active and receptive parts of the therapy, meaning that at times music is listened to and at other times there is the use of musical improvisation or creation.

Source: Psych Central

See also: The Coded Messages of the "Schizophrenic"

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[Sarah116]

Yes I heard about that, it really does I just recently got a MP3 player and loaded a bunch of songs on it.

[brokenthoughts]

My P told me I was seeing and hearing things BC of music. I didnt believe him, only cause I dont listen to the type of music he was talking about, and really, I dont even really listen to music often. he makes me want to barf.

[spiritual_emergency]

Somewhere on the net, brokenthoughts, I recall reading the words of one doctor who stated "schizophrenics listen to loud music to drown out the voices". Perhaps that's true for some individuals, but it certainly wasn't true for me. In fact, that had nothing to do with why I was listening to music.

I can't say reading those words made me want to barf, but it did serve to remind me that people -- and this is true of all people, not just the kind of people who are doctors -- will often try to understand why something has happened or is occurring. When it comes to understanding the experience of psychosis and/or schizophrenia, the person with the answers is most often the person having the experience. There will probably be some common factors but no experience is a cookie cutter of someone else's. I listened to music because music served as my guide out of that experience. I listened to music because it expressed a quality of what I was going through that I could not put into words. And I listened to music so I could hear the voices, not drown them out. As always, individual mileage varies.