Evaluating music therapy in adult mental health services: Tuning into service user perspectives

ABSTRACT

Many statutory mental health services worldwide have adopted a recovery-oriented rhetoric. These acknowledge that those who use mental health services have acquired valuable expertise through their contact with services and that such expertise should be used to inform health provision. The focus of this study was to tune into the perspectives of adult service users who have attended music therapy in statutory mental health services in Ireland. This aimed to furnish holistic descriptions of practice so as to augment existing understanding of what may be afforded to those who attend music therapy sessions. Six service users participated in semi-structured interviews in which they described their lived experience of attending music therapy sessions. Interview transcripts were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. Six common themes were found across each of the six participant cases. These included “Music therapy offers an opportunity to be meaningfully occupied”, “Involvement in music therapy can pose challenges”, “Music therapy offers an agreeable process”, “Group music therapy fosters reciprocity”, “Music therapy is flexible and adaptable” and “Lack of musical instruction can cause frustration”. Findings relating to meaningful occupation, challenge, reciprocity and frustration broaden understanding of what music therapy can offer to service users in mental health provision.

KEYWORDS:

• Evaluation
• interpretative phenomenological analysis
• mental health
• music therapy
• recovery and service user perspectives

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to all those who participated in this study; Rory Adams and Catherina Brady of the National Centre for Arts and Health, Tallaght Hospital (Dublin); Professor Jane Edwards (Deakin University, Australia) as PhD supervisor and Dr Alison Ledger (University of Leeds, UK) who was a critical friend in preparation of this paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tríona McCaffrey

Tríona McCaffrey (PhD, MA MT, BA, Psych Dip.) is lecturer on the MA Music Therapy Programme at the Irish World Academy of Music & Dance, University of Limerick. She is a founding member of the Alliance for Recovery Research in Music Therapy (ARRIMT), an international research group comprising music therapy practitioners and academics from Australia, Ireland, Norway and the United Kingdom.