Colloquium - Professor Helen Odell-Miler

Music Therapy for people with personality disorders:  the function of live music-making in music therapy -emotional regulation and finding meaning

Music therapy is well known for its capacity to enable meaningful communication to take place for therapeutic benefit for those who have little or no language, such as for people with severe autistic impairment or dementia, and more recently, for its beneficial outcomes for people with schizophrenia in helping with motivation and social interaction, and for reducing symptoms of depression.  Music therapy is less known for its contribution for people with personality disorder, where ordinary spoken language and thinking are not impaired, but for whom psychological and emotional elements of music therapy are important in the process. The talk will discuss emerging ideas from clinical work and research demonstrating the particular qualities of music relevant in this work, and approaches found to be significant.