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Saturday, June 25, 2011

The Daily Muse: New Research Shows Music Therapy Helps People With Depression

     Welcome to the Daily Muse feature of Music Makes Sense!  This daily update brings you up to the minute news about music and music therapy as it relates to our professions, events and individual lives.  You can follow the daily entries by subscribing to Music Makes Sense on Twitter or by "Liking" the Facebook page for Music Makes Sense.  Enjoy, and thanks for reading!

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A new study out of Finland has shown some great results regarding music therapy treatment for people with depression. I am impressed with the fact that although the researchers were not music therapists themselves, they found music therapists at a music therapy clinic to do the treatment protocol for the study. They referenced the fact that there are not many statistically strong research experiments already published using music therapy. These researchers sought to use randomized groups and a large sample size to try and run a methodologically sound study. 



 They found that music therapy treatment consisting of live, interactive music intervention over a 20 week period was a significantly better treatment for clinical depression than standard verbal therapy. They even found that patients had continued to show better psychological attributes up to three months after treatment! Not only was the music therapy treatment significantly better, but it also had a large effect size. This means that there may be a tangible and meaningful improvement in mood and quality of life for people who receive music therapy as part of their treatment for depression. The abstract can be found here.


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