Why Online Group Music Therapy?
Undergraduate university students report some of the highest rates of stress, anxiety, and depression in Canada, despite a diversity of supports offered on campus. Stigma appears to be a barrier to help-seeking behaviours. Music therapy is a promising option because it is less stigmatized than traditional counselling as music is viewed as a ‘normal’ healthy activity. Most people have a positive relationship with music and have experienced music’s ability to evoke an array of emotions. For these reasons – music therapy is not a ‘hard sell’ to students on campus.
Recognizing that in-person experiences are important for human contact and emotional well-being – why would we offer online group music therapy? And the answer is predominantly access. More people can coordinate to meet online (over Zoom), than in-person on campus. For students who cannot attend on-campus supports, or prefer meeting over Zoom, online group music therapy is an effective alternative.
We conducted a randomized controlled trial at McMaster University comparing changes in stress and anxiety between students who participated in online group music therapy, online group verbal-based therapy, and ‘student life as usual’(control group).
Participants attended weekly (45minutes) Zoom therapy groups and completed self-report stress and anxiety measures before and after each session and provided hair samples in Week 1 and Week 6 of the study. The hair samples were analysed for cortisol – a biomarker of stress.
So what did we observe from this study? In the therapy groups, students’ state anxiety and self-rated stress dropped significantly from before to after each 45minute online group session, with no meaningful differences between music and verbal therapy. Highlighting that online group music therapy has similar stress and anxiety outcomes as online verbal-based group therapy. As for the hair cortisol, we observed that students in the control group had an average increase in cortisol, while remaining relatively stable in the therapy groups, suggesting that participating in any of the online groups may help buffer against mounting physiological stress across the term.
The findings support online group music therapy as a viable, scalable option for proactive student wellness that can sit alongside verbal therapy rather than replace it.
A few take aways:
Universities can reasonably consider offering online group music therapy, increasing access to therapy as part of a “health-promoting campus” strategy.
Providing students with more mental health support choices, such as online group music therapy, can increase student engagement in help-seeking behaviours.
Research Article https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2023.1183311/full