As teachers and doctors witness the physical benefits of music therapy on people with disabilities, including improved fine-motor skills, coordination, and muscular control, the practice is becoming more widespread. For people with limited speech, language, or other disabilities, music provides a benefit in addition to the physical ones: an outlet to express emotions.
For example, dysarthria is a disability that weakens the muscles used for speech, which of course makes speaking incredibly difficult depending on the severity of the case. This makes dysarthria one of those language disabilities that makes it difficult for a patient to express their emotions through words. This is where music therapy can come into play.
A pilot study conducted by Jeanette Tamplin established a treatment protocol for dysarthria using music therapy, specifically singing. In this study, a group of people with dysarthria caused by Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) or stroke were involved in 24 30-minute individual music therapy sessions for 8 weeks. During these sessions, the patients worked to sing old tunes they knew, and performed exercises such as controlled breathing, where “the cortex takes over direct control of the respiratory muscles by imposing timing priorities on the pace and strength of contractions” (Tamplin & Grocke) helped the patients control their respiratory muscles. They also performed exercises where certain mouth movements were made at a set pace to help build the strength of the patients’ articulator muscles, according to the Music Therapy Treatment Protocol for Acquired Dysarthria Rehabilitation.
Tamplin’s study concluded that these exercises, along with a variety of other exercises, resulted in patients showing significant improvements in functional speech intelligibility and respiratory capacity expressed by their more fluent speech.
But of course, just as important as the physical benefits of this study are the emotional ones. Now that the patients with dysarthria are more fluent in speech as a result of improved functional speech intelligibility and respiratory capacity, they could be able to begin using words once again to express what they really feel on a day to day basis. But why is this so important? Unfortunately, people with disabilities are much more likely to experience mental health issues or depression, as shown by a team of researchers who analyzed data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), and concluded that around 29% of people with disabilities experienced depressive symptoms in the pandemic period in comparison to the 16% of people without a disability. This is primarily because people with disabilities are often looked down upon and discriminated against by others and thought of as “incapable.” This practice is known as ableism, and it is demonstrated by people in a variety of ways, including helping a person in a wheelchair with something that they really don’t need the help with, or when words and phrases such as “handicapped” or “mentally retarded” are used. Therefore, music and music therapy are things that can be of great importance for people with disabilities, as both listening to music and music therapy not only provide physical benefits, but also mental health benefits.
The success of Tamplin’s study and similar ones show how important music can be for someone with a disability like dysarthria or any other one that makes it difficult for a patient to express their emotions through words. The benefits of music therapy for disabilities like Apraxia, TBI, and more should be carefully studied in order to make treatment more widely accepted and available.
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