“Sound Health: Music and the Mind”: The New Initiative of the National Institutes of Health and National Endowment for the Arts

Music therapy, as a formal intervention, had its origins in the years after World War II in treating the posttraumatic stress of returning veterans, and rapidly expanded to include interventions for other psychiatric conditions as well (Collins & Fleming, 2017). Other clinical applications have included patients with cancer, stroke, dementia, and a variety of painful medical conditions. Yet one does not have to be a formally trained music therapist to appreciate and use the power of musical interventions throughout the human life span, from the lullabies sung to newborns to the recorded music played for hospice patients. Nurses have always used music creatively to reach patients who were nonverbal and soothe patients in turmoil. We often encourage patients to sing or use musical instruments during their recovery and rehabilitation.

A brief foray through current literature in our specialty yielded diverse musical interventions being used by psychiatric-mental health nurses for patients with anxiety (Pavlov, Kameg, Cline, Chiapetta, Clark, & Mitchell, 2017; Yang, Chung, Liao, Yang, Chou, Miao, et al., 2016), psychotic symptoms (Chung & Woods-Giscombe, 2016; Peng, Koo, & Kuo, 2010), poor sleep quality (deNiet, Tiemens, & Hutschemaekers, 2010), and depression (Lai, 2009). Another interesting study examined effects of music therapy on self- and experienced stigma in patients on an acute care psychiatric unit (Silverman, 2013). Concomitant with the recovery movement, many users of psychiatric services are asking their clinicians for nonpharmacological options. Music can be a highly appealing and cost-effective augment to the plan of care. Given the abundant potential for further applications of musical interventions in our specialty, the new federal initiative “Sound Health: Music and the Mind” is exciting.

“Sound Health: Music and the Mind” was launched in June with a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra and a flurry of publicity about the initiative. Goals are to bring together experts in neuroscience, health care disciplines, and music therapy, discovering new knowledge about music's effect on the brain and the best ways to use it in health care settings (Collins & Fleming, 2017). We already know that there is an area of the brain that responds only to music, not to other auditory stimuli (Norman-Haignere, Kanwisher, & McDermott, 2015). We also know that music triggers a release of dopamine in the striatum (Salimpoor, Benovoy, Larcher, Dagher, & Zatorre, 2011). Especially fascinating to me, a lifelong lover of jazz, is the research showing that musical improvisation produces more widespread activity across neural networks (as compared to stricter rote performance) (Limb & Braun, 2008).

Much more research is necessary to fully elucidate the mechanisms by which music therapies achieve their effects, and to establish which types of therapies are most efficacious for which conditions. Collins and Fleming (2017) note that few randomized controlled clinical trials have been conducted, while also acknowledging that standardized interventions may be difficult to develop because individual music preferences of patients will vary so greatly. It is incumbent on specialists in psychiatric-mental health nursing to follow the progress of the new multidisciplinary research initiative and to make our own contributions to it.