Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Jul 29:28:1884.
doi: 10.4102/sajpsychiatry.v28i0.1884. eCollection 2022.

Patients' voices from music therapy at a South African psychiatric hospital

Carol Lotter  1 , Werdie van Staden  2
Affiliations

Patients' voices from music therapy at a South African psychiatric hospital

Carol Lotter et al. S Afr J Psychiatr. .

Abstract

Background: In the Life Esidimeni tragedy, crucial voices of mental healthcare users and practitioners were silenced, captured in the Ombud's report as a 'failure to listen'. Working against this kind of failure, various therapeutic interventions listen deliberately and uncover the voice of the patient, that is, what matters from his or her subjective perspective in his or her particular circumstances. Amongst these interventions, music therapy provides for this sensitive listening by expanding the scope and means of expression from the verbal to the musical.

Aim: This article reports on a qualitative exploration of patients' lived experiences both during and after their course of individual music therapy, expressed both verbally and in the language of active music-making.

Setting: A tertiary public psychiatric hospital in South Africa.

Methods: Audio-video recordings of 131 music therapy sessions and 15 post-therapy interviews were analysed thematically. From three sets of themes accounting for patients' verbal contents, musical participation and verbal post-therapy reflections, 11 salient voices were identified.

Results: The 11 voices that emerged were (1) the voice of struggle, (2) the voice of disturbance, (3) the voice that feels, (4) the voice of isolation, (5) the powerless voice, (6) the voice that desires, (7) the voice of flow and connection, (8) the reflecting voice, (9) the symbolic voice, (10) the resilient voice and (11) the voice of liberation.

Conclusion: Although mental health practitioners may recognise these voices from their clinical experience, space and opportunity for hearing the voice of each patient should be generated deliberately.

Keywords: adult mental health; music therapy; musical participation; patient voices; verbal expression.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.

References

    1. Makgopa MW. The report into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of mentally ill patients: Gauteng province. Health Ombud; 2017.
    1. Van Den Tillaart S, Kurtz D, Cash P. Powerlessness, marginalized identity, and silencing of health concerns: Voiced realities of women living with a mental health diagnosis. Int J Ment Health Nurs. 2009;18(3):153–163. 10.1111/j.1447-0349.2009.00599.x - DOI - PubMed
    1. Bunt L, Stige B. Music therapy: An art beyond words. East Sussex: Routledge; 2014.
    1. Lotter C. The qualitative affordances of active and receptive music therapy techniques in major depressive disorder and schizophrenia-spectrum psychotic disorders [PhD, thesis, C.W. Van Staden]; 2017. Available from: https://repository.up.ac.za/handle/2263/63046.
    1. Lotter C, Van Staden W. Verbal affordances of active and receptive music therapy methods in major depressive disorder and schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. Arts Psychother. 2019;64:59–68. 10.1016/j.aip.2018.12.002 - DOI

LinkOut - more resources