Music therapy boosts mental and physical wellbeing

PHOTO | AALIYAH BOWDEN

Charlotte music therapist Travis Alexander works with patients to relieve anxiety and improve mental wellbeing through song.

To start the day, LaShawn Moten, grabs a cup of coffee and puts on cafe music to set the mood.

“It just keeps me in the zone and keeps me focused,” Moten said. “I think it's all a mental thing because I'm using it to guide my day sometimes.”

But after a long day of work, she may play smooth jazz like “Linger Awhile” or “Guess Who I Saw Today" by Samara Joy.

“Sometimes I forget all about the problem,” Moten said. “Even if I forget that the song is there, it is not that it’s not doing anything. It honestly becomes like background music and for some reason I feel like I’m able to just think [a problem] through clearly.”

Music therapy works to improve mental health through activities such as listening to or composing music, writing a song, singing, dancing, or playing an instrument. This form of therapy primarily helps people suffering from depression and anxiety and can alleviate stress, pain, and improves overall mood, according to the website Verywell Mind.

Studies have shown that music therapy can lower blood pressure and heart rate, relax muscle tension, relieve stress, and induce calm.

“The great thing about music is it has many different benefits,” said Travis Alexander, a music therapist at Charlotte Music Therapy. “I feel like we all listen to music every single day and it benefits us in many different ways.”

Patients who use music therapy may have difficulties with verbal and nonverbal communication or may have other health issues such as Alzheimer’s disease, autism, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, or cancer. It can also reduce pain when it comes with labor and childbirth, chronic conditions, and post-surgical procedures.

This therapeutic approach can be used on children, adults, and those who are musically inclined.

However, you don’t have to play an instrument or know how to sing to benefit from music therapy.

“The goal is more so to help these clients, these patients, these individuals, participants reach a specific goal that's not generally musically oriented,” Alexander said. “For example, like motor skills, gross motor movements, cognitive skills, emotional behavior skills, working with individuals that may have short- and long-term memory.”

In the United States, 6.5% of music therapists are Black, compared to more than 70% of the field made up of white people.

Alexander, a music therapist for about a year at Charlotte Music Therapy and other mental health treatment facilities across the area, is originally from Dumfries, Virginia, about 40 minutes away from Washington, D.C. He can play guitar, piano, bass, as well as sing. Other instruments he knows how to play are the ukulele and djembe, and he aims to learn the saxophone and trumpet.

Alexander, who also teaches private lessons, said more people of color should seek out music therapy, because music is central to Black culture. Slaves chanted and sang spirituals while on the plantation and artists in genres from the blues to hip-hop expressed themselves and influenced global culture through music.

“Music is therapy for us,” Alexander said. “When you’re writing songs about how you came up, your upbringing, how you express it, is music therapy. It wasn’t even a few years ago with George Floyd and the madness that was 2020 over the pandemic, you still had individuals marching out screaming, ‘We’re Gonna be Alright,’ by Kendrick Lamar.”

Alexander, 30, will typically ask patients what song they would like to hear and can learn and play it within minutes.

Younger children may request “The Wheels on The Bus” or “Let it Go,” the hit song from the Disney movie “Frozen.” Teenagers, on the other hand, may request pop or hip-hop songs.

“People think like, oh, you use Lil Uzi Vert, or use Juice World inside music therapy. Yeah we do,” Alexander said. “We use Nicki Minaj. Even going to the other side, we use Tim McGraw. We’ve used Michael Jackson. We’ve used Adele. We’ve used anybody you can name.”

Some other songs he knows how to play by heart on the guitar is “If I Ain’t Got You” by Alicia Keys, “On & On” by Erykah Badu, “So Fresh, So Clean” by Outkast and “Can You Stand the Rain” by New Edition.

Alexander aims to use his craft to uplift the Black community.

“I did see a niche or rather a vision that I have for myself when it came to music therapy,” he said. “My ultimate goal is to see if I can get music therapy out to different [historically Black colleges] crossing over the Cast Coast.”

Howard University is the only HBCU that offers a music therapy program in the Mid-Atlantic Region of the American Music Therapy Association.

Moten said she has never tried music therapy, but it is on her “bucket list” to try.

“I’m definitely not opposed to it,” she said, “because I do use it a lot throughout the day to just kind of control my mood and stay in a good mental space so I can stay productive so that other things aren’t stressing me out about my day.”

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