Social, Emotional, and Mental Health Needs
Music Therapy for social, emotional, and mental health needs
Social, emotional and mental health needs (SEMH) is most commonly used to describe children and adolescents who experience moderate to severe challenges in a variety of areas such as emotional regulation, relationship building, anxiety, depression, or self-harm.
The impact of these challenges on everyday life can be significant, negatively impacting friendships and family relations, home life, access to education, self-esteem, and ability to carry out daily tasks.
Music therapy can help those with SEMH in a variety of ways, one of which is trying to address the root cause of the presenting issue which is most commonly trauma. This could be in the form of abuse, neglect, repeated negative/ stress inducing experiences, loss, or intergenerational trauma.
Music therapy enables children and adolescents with SEMH to access a non-clinical and low pressured therapeutic intervention. Through promoting individual creativity clients are enabled to build a sense of identity, simultaneously expressing themselves and processing challenging life events.
Practical Examples
Adopted Adolescent
An adolescent that was adopted as a toddler has experienced big challenges settling into secondary school and making friends. They are becoming increasingly isolated and prone to getting into aggressive confrontations with their peers.
Music therapy is a space where this young person can begin to explore their early childhood and adoption, allowing them to reflect on how that experience may still be influencing how they build relationships with those around them. By exploring this through music instead of words, the client can access unconscious memories and feelings that might not be able to be expressed explicitly through language, allowing them to explore and process previously unrecognised feelings/ experiences.
Adolescent with AHDH
The client has had repeated negative experiences at school, both being told off by teachers and bullied by peers, and is struggling to keep up academically due to challenges focusing. They are now refusing to attend school and having increasing episodes of dysregualted behaviour
In this situation, music therapy can offer this young person a space where they can begin to build a feeling of safety and security, helping to regulate their emotional responses and more successfully communicate with others. Exposure to repeated stressful/ negative situations could've put the client in fight or flight mode, causing a state of hyper-vigilance and overwhelm which negatively impacts how they interact with others and distort their perception of events The music can offer a way for these challenging experiences to be externalised, thought about, and reflected on which allow the client to move forward. Music therapy can additionally equip the client with coping mechanisms for emotional dysregulation caused by being in state of hyper-vigilance.
Adolescent who has experienced a traumatice event
This client experienced a singular traumatic event in which they came to physical and emotional harm. Since then, the client has become highly withdrawn, interspersed with episodes of huge emotional dysregulation in which they can become violent and aggressive.
Music therapy offers an opportunity for this client to process and think about their traumatic event is a less confrontational and demanding way than verbal exploration. This lowers the possibility of the client being triggered or re-traumatised through relaying thoughts and memories verbally. In this case the act of building a successful and supportive therapeutic relationship can also be extremely reparative, allowing the client to begin to open up and trust in their relationships again.