Description of an Experience in Musicotherapy carried out at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Genoa

Author(s): Berruti, G.

Abstract: The introduction in our Department of Music Therapy for the treatment of in-patients has led to considerations both of a general nature and more specifically relating to features of hospitalization meant as a distinctive moment of psychiatric intervention. Music Therapy has been adopted with psychotic patients and, in this sense, its use reflects the general trend to integrate the various resources and modalities of approach in the therapy of psychoses. Such integration aims at identifying the possibility of modulating the therapeutic relationship with seriously ill patients in conformity with the different levels of regression and with the need for rehabilitation in a broad sense. It is during hospitalization that the condition is encountered in which the patient, to the greatest extent, loses his own capacities (albeit relatie and peculiar) for adjustment and autonomy, as an objectifiable and acknowledged regressive moment. Often it is a particularly delicate and important moment, a time of communication and search for a new potential balance. esides, within this context, every act may assume a high symbolic value and a meaning which goes far beyond its concreteness; often it is just through the laying down of rules or, in any case, through certain actions that the therapeutic relationship with the more seriously ill patient develops, rather than through a verbal elaboration in the absence sometimes of the assumptions which make the later possible. Music Therapy, therefore, represents an enrichment of our tools as regards the possibility of opening channels of communication, mainly for messages not easily put into words, and for patients with whom a way of contact which develops through structured interviews might turn out to be impracticable or exceedingly upsetting. This paper will be published by the BSMT later in l992, price on application.

Note: University of Genoa

Keyword(s): Psychiatry, music-therapy, patients, intervention, hospitalization, psychiatric-patient.

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