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Different Styles Of Music Therapy

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Moreover, music therapy also has many benefits for PTSD, ASD and TBI victims. Music therapy can help PTSD and ASD patients expand their concentration levels. After experiencing a trauma many people have difficulty focusing on different things due to anxiety. Some research has shown that, military patients have done increasingly well on attention span tests (Kaplan). Some forms of music therapy consist of writing lyrics, which can help with expression and depression. Therapists have likewise used percussion instruments to help patients with cognitive and emotional rehabilitation. According to M. Currie and M. Startup “Adolescents who participated in psychotherapy percussion playing had lower trait anger, decreased aggression, lower …show more content…

One case supporting this idea is that of an 11-year-old girl. She had a stroke at age 11 then lost her memory and ability to speak clearly. Through music therapy she was able to regain her ability to speak after 8 years. The therapists used singing and vocalizing to help her recovery ( Thompson and Schlaug). Another advantage is memory recuperation. The rhythm of music can help restore neural passageways and improve memory retention. “Music activates neural areas and pathways in several parts of the brain” (Thompson and Schlaug). Music has many additional benefits as well, such as improvement in motor skills and concentration.
Despite all the ways art and music therapy can help people cope with their trauma, there are some disadvantages for them. For instance, art therapy is not very consistent; the results rely heavily on the patient and the therapist. There are a large variety of methods to art therapy and it differs from therapist to therapist. For example, a patient could be truly benefiting from their therapy under one therapist and moving to another then using methods that aren’t as effective for that particular person. Sometimes during a session a patient may express something with no relevance to their trauma. Or a patient may fail to see the correlation between their artwork and the problem. Another example would be that the patient doesn’t feel comfortable with either the medium or the environment and it could cause

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