Music Therapy Has Positive Effects in Schizophrenia

Music therapy can improve negative symptoms of schizophrenia, such as lack of motivation, reclusiveness, and isolation, according to a review of previously published literature, presented at the American Psychiatric Association (APA) annual meeting.

In this exclusive MedPage Today video, poster presenter Amy Agrawal, MD, an instructor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, Veterans Administration Boston Healthcare System, discusses the history behind her research, and what she hopes the evidence-based findings can do for patients.

Following is a transcript of her remarks:

I actually have been a musician all my life. I played the clarinet growing up. I got several medals and was a lot of times first chair. Also I sang when I was younger, but I gave up music when I was in medical school, mainly because I did not have time and it wasn’t part of our curriculum.

And I actually noticed that my own mood improved after work. If I was stressed out, I would be a lot calmer. So I started realizing this could likely be of good benefit on the mental health units, doing some kind of singing groups or music groups.

I also happened to have a sister with paranoid schizophrenia, who also in the fall I noticed improve when she started singing. There was an experience where we were at a restaurant together and she seemed a little paranoid and she was getting loud, so I was afraid we’d have to leave the restaurant. And then she started singing songs from the ’90s, and even a song she sang at a beauty contest at one point, and then started laughing. And so we were able to have dinner together as a family at a restaurant.

And so it was around this whole time, I was also singing to myself for hours after work, I noticed my sister get better when she was singing. And then I asked my boss if I could start music groups on our inpatient psychiatric units. So she let me do that.

And at the same time, there happened to be a deadline for an APA project to present for the American Psychiatric Association. So my supervisor asked me to create a project and submit to them after I did a literature review on about seven articles on music therapy and schizophrenia.

I noticed that there are a lot of articles actually already out there on research done already showing that music therapy has positive effects on the lives of people with schizophrenia, including treating depression, sleep disturbance, quality of life. It helps improve socialization, and it targets negative symptoms of schizophrenia. There’s conflicting research on whether or not music therapy helps with positive symptoms of schizophrenia.

So I think the big thing right now is most doctors don’t know about this. We know that if you have someone come to the hospital and sing songs, it’s going to brighten a patient’s day. But for something as serious as schizophrenia, which is an extremely difficult psychiatric illness to treat and can really be devastating for patients and families and their clinicians and any friends — anyone associated with them — we need something other than just medications to treat these patients, because the medications often have really bad side effects.

Patients don’t want to take these medications because of the side effects or fear of side effects, or they don’t believe in psychiatric medication or the society around them tells them, no, don’t take medications, try to treat your mental illness a different way. Or there’s stigma around mental health treatment.

So we need to find ways to engage patients in treatment while they’re in psychiatric facilities or hospitals to show that we care about their overall whole health and well-being. And we want to work with patients to get them to agree with us in taking the medications that they need, but also we’re gonna try to find alternative therapies for them that will also help their symptoms and with the goal of improving their overall quality of life.

I’m hoping that we can get the word out across the world that this works. It’s not some sham healthcare treatment goal. There’s evidence-based research out there showing true evidence-based improvement in depression, cognitive symptoms, negative symptoms, quality of life, socialization, engagement with their care for people with schizophrenia.

So the goal is to get this information out there to the general public and to the hospital administrators so that they can start lobbying for funding, getting research grants to get more research done, recruit trained music therapists to come into hospitals and give this kind of therapy to patients, especially with serious psychotic illnesses like schizophrenia or other mental health issues. Getting donations, anything they can to get the funding and the staffing to support music therapy for people with schizophrenia.