Professional flexibility towards the clients' needs in music therapy and music medicine in psychiatry

Abstract

Music therapists employed in mental health in Denmark have increasingly performed RCT and pilot studies for coming RCT studies during the last years. The Danish Health System does not allow any treatment to be recommended in the National Guidelines, unless it is proved that international evidence based results are replicable in the Danish Health System. In Denmark, music therapy treatment and research in psychiatry have primarily been developed with people suffering from schizophrenia, with people suffering from personality disorders, with traumatized refugees, in forensic psychiatry, and in depression-related insomnia. In clinical practice of music therapy in Denmark, much emphasis is on the therapist/client relationship, which is regarded as outmost important. Thus music improvisation, -listening, and -performing grows out of the quality of the relationship. Danish music therapists are not trained in one specific music therapy approach. They are trained to work in a flexible way towards the needs of the client within an integrative clinical practice form based on a psychodynamic theoretical platform with many new theory tracks added-on. When music listening is applied without a music therapist being present, we consistently call the activity "music medicine" and not music therapy.