Interviewee: I would say the overall one that we always use if we are calling a new facility to try to books music therapy there, whether it is Hospice, an older adult group or at the hospital, quality of life overall is just the one thing that really comes up. There have been social studies that you can measure quality of life, but we have not done those personally. Just knowing that these older adults that have mid stage dementia, but they remember who I am, even though I only go there once a month.
They still remember who I am and the same three songs that we always start with is pretty impressive. So, I think that speaks to, not only that music is that mental cognitive piece, but also it touches them emotionally …show more content…
Interviewee: Emotionally there are some songs that will have very strong emotions and if somebody is not cognitively oriented or feel safe, it is going to leave them feeling really vulnerable, which is a big reason why it is important to have a music therapist as opposed to maybe somebody like a volunteer who is less trained and they don’t know what to do with that. Whereas, a music therapist, we can go into either redirection or say to them, you seem sad, what is going on and actually employ counseling techniques. So, I have seen that before, but thankfully, since music can be used to redirect emotional stuff that comes up. Otherwise, I haven’t seen any negative emotions, I guess there was one time ever, there was a group that one older gentleman and one was signing extremely loud, he just loved to sign and the other members got angry.
That was an emotion response that I wasn’t ready to see, but it wasn’t really at the music, it was their group dynamics. It was also redirectable through music making, but emotionally, that is the only one that I can think …show more content…
A lot of people get frustrated that they hear or see. Again, that is not really on the music therapist and we try to structure it for success, but we can only take that so far. Same thing if they bring in too many people and we don’t have enough instruments and those kind of frustrations, but again, nothing with the music or the music therapy.
However, in saying that, if we have a group at a skilled nursing rehab facility where it is a lot of older adults and maybe a couple people that are younger who are doing rehab after a bad car accident and the rest of the group has Alzheimer’s or dementia, you will hear the younger people make a request of what music they want to hear and the older adults get really upset because they hate that young music. It is tricky and it 's better to have people in similar age ranges, if possible, like mostly older adults like 70 and older in one group, as opposed to having a couple younger people thrown in there.
Interviewer: Okay, that was the last question. So, I am going to go ahead and stop the recording.
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