Music Therapy: An international treatment or a fairytale?

By Rana Khaled

Have you ever thought that listening to a specific piece of music repeatedly can help you recover from dozens of serious diseases?  Have you ever thought of how you can make use of every piece of music you get exposed to on your way to work, home or university?

While the repeated accidents of recycling expired drugs in some private medicine factories raises many question marks around the absence of the government’s role in monitoring the drug manufacturing process in Egypt, alternative art therapies can provide a partial solution to many patients all over the country. Although it’s still new in the Arab world, music therapy has been proven to play a crucial role in treating people with various psychological disorders without any side effects.

On their website, the American Music Therapy Association (AMTA) defines music therapy as an established health profession, in which music is used within a therapeutic relationship to address physical, emotional, cognitive, and social needs of individuals.

Over time, research in music therapy fields showed its effectiveness in many areas, including overall physical rehabilitation and movement facilitation, increasing people’s motivation to become engaged in their treatment, providing emotional support for clients and their families, and providing an outlet for expression of feelings. Depression is among the main psychological disorders that music therapy was proven to be very effective at.

“Music is the only international language that all people understand regardless of their cultural, educational or social backgrounds,” said Dr Youssef El-Gidawi, one of the pioneer psychiatrists who conducted scientific researches in the field of music therapy in Egypt. “However, till now, there’s no proper scientific explanation for how music actually works or affects the human soul or mind. All we have is theories!”

One of those main theories explains that music has biological roots connected to the human mind, because the only sound that the foetus hears inside his mother’s womb during the nine months of pregnancy is her regular heart beats. Those beats change according to her physical and psychological status which creates a specific rhythm inside the baby’s mind.

Another theory assumes that the whole world consists of sound and light vibrations. Some of them have been converted into objects and others remained as vibrations. These vibrations move into the nucleuses of the human cells and affect the neurotransmitters and thus music vibrations affect the mind of the human beings in different ways.

“Paying attention to the importance of music therapy started in America during the Second World War during the 40s of the last century. It was found that playing music in the factories helped improve the psychological status of the desperate women whose husbands went to the war and thus increased their concentration and productivity in the factories,” El-Gidawi noted.

Before that, ancient Egyptians mentioned that psychological and mental diseases can be treated by music and Nile trips. This information were found on the papyri in the different phaoronic temples including the famous Abydos temple.

Music therapy research in Egypt started in the 1980s when Dr Nabila Mikhail dedicated her PhD empirical study to examining the effects of the songs on raising or lowering the blood pressure. In 1985, El-Gidawi studied the influence of music on the children with Down’s Syndrome. The findings of the study showed how music contributed to lowering the violent behaviours of those children and helped them get rid of many aggressive behavioural practices.

After a few years, El-Gidawi introduced the use of music therapy in treating blind and autistic children. It allowed them to better understand the outside world aiming to bridge the communication gap between them and their surrounding environment.

Hussein Emam, a specialised music therapist whose recent MA thesis examined the influence of music therapy programmes on children with special needs, explains the importance of creating a special programme for every child taking into consideration the different needs and understanding levels of those children.

“I created a special programme where I allow the children with special needs to learn how to play music, how to read a musical note and how to differentiate between the different musical sounds and instruments,” he said.

Emam is recently working on his PhD’s study about the influence of music on language acquisition among children.

“Unfortunately, most of people here still don’t understand the crucial role music therapy can play in healing many psychological disorders and helping children with special needs. Egyptian music therapists still work individually and separately because there’s no support from any academic or governmental association,” he asserted.

According to AMTA, music therapists should first assess the emotional well-being, physical health, social functioning, communication abilities, and the cognitive skills through musical responses.  Then, they have to design music sessions for individuals and groups based on client needs using music improvisation, receptive music listening, song writing, lyric discussion, music and imagery and music performance.

“The session starts with listening to the patient and knowing everything about his medical history, the circumstances of his life and the extent to which music is important to him. Then, the therapist needs to tailor certain pieces of music to the patient and asks him/ her to listen to it for certain periods of time and then put him under the same psychiatric tests again to evaluate the improvement the treatment could achieve. The short songs with the repeated rhythm were found to be most suitable for curing children,” El-Gidawi added.

However, he warns people of being deceived by those who claim to cure mental diseases using music. “Music can only be used for treating psychological diseases, not mental disorders. During the last few years, many people claimed that they composed different metallic music pieces that could help people with schizophrenia. This is a big lie!” he asserted.

On the other hand, music has been proven to be very dangerous or even deadly if it’s used in a wrong way. El-Gidawi explains that playing quick loud music by the drivers of the buses and microbuses in Egypt is the main reason behind the increasing numbers of accidents lately. This music has the same influence on the mind as drugs, as it puts the person under unstable mental status for hours.

Also, using digital drugs to get high as an alternative for the traditional drugs is another crucial crisis that threatens the youth in the Arabic world. I-dosing involves donning headphones and listening to “music” and those who want to get addicted to these digital “drugs” can purchase tracks that will purportedly bring about the same effects of marijuana, cocaine, opium and peyote, he added.

However, Emam is convinced that music therapy will be the future. “Whenever people’s awareness increases, the music therapy will occupy an important position among the alternative therapies,” Emam said.  “Inviting foreign delegations and expeditions is the only solution for helping Egyptian psychiatrists and therapists know more about the latest music therapy techniques, uses and implementations around the world.”