music therapy
I haven't noticed many mentions here of music being used as a calming/relaxing/therapeutic measure for those suffering from AD and I wondered what experience people have with this?
Music can be such a large part of our lives and from an emotional point of view it's something we use to make ourselves feel better (or sometimes help us wallow in self-pity
) so I would have thought the right music in the right setting could be of benefit.
Interested to hear your views on the subject.
Well! You have read a lot about the power of music in Dementia, now! It may be worth adding something about the formal organisation of Music Therapy (MT), which is hugely important for people with many conditions in addition to Alzheimer's Disease (AHD) and the other forms of Dementia. There are formal university courses for musicians wanting to take up MT. There is a British Association for the practitioners. There is a charity, Nordoff Robbins, which supports training and the use of MT in residential dementia units, etc. As I understand it, the training centres on the skill of communicating with people with Dementia, of gaining their attention, as well as on appropriate musical activities. There is an obvious problem of the cost for Homes etc of using well trained musicians. Therapists may encourage and train carers, some of whom become enthusiastic but there is then the problem of time and of institutional resistance to taking on yet another task. My wife now has very advanced AHD but at an earlier stage she (and I) were lucky that her Home employed a very good therapist, who, among other things organised a small group of residents who had been enthusists for music and played instruments. The therapist would make close contact with them and sing speech to them and get livelier attention than was usual. Residents and family would sing together to her guitar and play on simple instruments. And she would sometimes play loved music on a CD player or on her clarinet. The effect of all this was startling. There was much fuller commuication around the group than usual, people who were often inert and in one case often angry were smiling and lively and sometimes lit up with joy at the climactic moment of well loved fine music.
But often the use of radio, CDs and DVDs is all that is possible. Some quite simple things would help a lot such as timers to turn on radio and TV, particularly for people alone, for suitable programmes, or CD players at suitable times. Might the Alzheimer's Society research and tell people what is available and perhaps encourage the production of easy to use equipment when nothing is available. There are more ambitious possibilities, for instance to do with DVDs of well known musicals. The musical parts of these are commonly very popular with people with Dementia but there are often long passages of narrative, which are not followed. Edited versions, focussing on the songs, would meet a real need. Perhaps the Society could get together with their equivalents in the USA and lobby the copyright holders for the films to produce such selective versions, perhaps one at a time, out of concern for the Dementia community, even if there would be little commercial benefit.
