When asked about his “success stories,” John Hartman, senior music therapist at the Milwaukee Center for Independence, had to think for a few seconds. “There have been so many” in the five-and-a-half years he has worked at MCFI, he said.
He soon recalled two. One was a severely developmentally disabled man referred to MCFI by the county. “He couldn’t stand to be with anybody” and was continually “biting, kicking and scratching,” Hartman said.
Hartman couldn’t remember exactly how long he had to work with this man, but it was “six months to a year” worth of one-on-one meetings four times a week. With the help of music therapy — plus some medications and the MCFI day services activities — today, this man’s episodes of violence are far fewer, and he only needs to meet with a music therapist twice a month, Hartman said.
The second story concerned a mentally ill man diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, who lived by himself in an apartment that he refused to leave.
This man also received medications, but music therapy was his “only active treatment,” according to Hartman. Through music therapy, this man learned to “get control of his environment,” obtain insight into his condition and “express his fears and needs,” Hartman said.
This client now works out at the YMCA, has signed himself up for classes, applied for a job — and he arranges to meet Hartman for therapy sessions at such public places as shopping malls.
Even the brief music therapy session Hartman allowed this reporter to attend at MCFI’s facility downtown seemed to have at least an obvious short-term positive effect on the four developmentally disabled people attending. All of them were smiling and eagerly sang with Hartman and played rattles and tambourines with him.
One of them, a wheelchair-confined woman named Paula V. (at Hartman’s request, her last initial is used instead of her name), was enthusiastically singing and talking during the session. “I love instruments,” she said at one point.
“It’s fun, isn’t it John?” she said when asked why she liked music therapy. And she said she learned about “not interrupting; that’s what I like to do,” and about making eye-contact with people. “If you don’t look, they may turn away,” she said. Yet after the session, when encountered in the MCFI hallway, she looked quiet and withdrawn.
Ancient observation
That music has profound effects on people’s mental states is an ancient observation. For example, the Bible tells how David’s playing of the harp would drive the “evil spirit” from King Saul (I Samuel 16:23).
But it has been only in modern times that scientific investigations have begun to discover why and how this happens and to apply it in the processes of music therapy.
“There’s a ton of physiological and biological responses [in a person] when music is present,” said Hartman. For one, the body doesn’t produce as much of the chemicals that it makes in response to stress and anxiety — a key factor in helping developmentally disabled or mentally ill people, who often find socializing a terrifying experience.
Another key issue is how much of the brain responds to music. Unlike many other tasks that are processed in only one or a few parts of the brain, like verbal skills, “music is processed in the entire brain at the same time,” Hartman said.
This fact has “great implications,” he continued. “If you can pair non-musical tasks with music, more of the brain is working to learn and retain [them].” If part of a brain is damaged, “you can bypass that and enable another part of the brain to respond or regain function,” he said.
Hartman said he has had cases of “people who never talked before” because of damage to their brain’s speech centers “now talk because of music therapy.”
Not to say that they necessarily say a lot. Hartman emphasized that “I’m not a god” and music therapy is not about “healing or curing.” Nevertheless, as with one client, to go from saying nothing to saying “Hi, John” understandably is to go a long way, Hartman said.
While watching Hartman work and listening to him enthusiastically describe his profession, one has to wonder if to some extent being a music therapist is therapy for himself as well.
Hartman, a Wisconsin native who grew up in several different towns from Madison to New Berlin, had brain cancer when he was 9. The resulting surgery left him nearly blind.
But that didn’t affect his other abilities. He not only loved music all along, especially singing, but was also good at English and mathematics. While doing a research project for an advanced English class in high school, he learned about the field of music therapy and decided that would be his profession.
He studied at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. After graduating, he came to Milwaukee and visited MCFI with a proposal to start a music therapy program. He has been there ever since; and the program has grown to include three other music therapists.
He acknowledged that working with his clients can be “intense,” but he also finds it “enjoyable and challenging.” “I have a never quit attitude with a wonderful tool to encourage them,” he said. With music therapy, “you are dealing with the whole person.”
For more information about music therapy at MCFI, call 414-272-9248 or visit www.mcfi.net.
Loading ...