Melbourne Conservatorium of Music - Theses
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Item“With music, you feel it more”: A narrative inquiry into an online music therapy project for adults living with mental health challenges related to adverse life experiences( 2023-09)This thesis sought to explore the experiences of adults living with mental health challenges related to adverse life experiences who participated in an online community music therapy program. Previous research into music therapy and psychological trauma in adults has largely focussed on the perspectives of music therapists (Landis-Shack et al., 2017; Stewart, 2010; Sutton, 2002). This project takes an up an expanded definition of trauma that privileges participant self-identification over trauma-based diagnoses to attend to the lived perspectives of participants. Three interconnected studies, two qualitative meta-syntheses and a narrative inquiry project, comprise the thesis. The first study presents a critical interpretive synthesis, exploring recently published music therapy literature looking at music therapy and mental health challenges related to psychological trauma in adults. This study primarily highlighted the underrepresentation of participant perspectives in the literature, and the privileging of clinical discourses of trauma. The second literature synthesis further explored the presence of participant voice in extant music therapy literature related to adult mental health and trauma through a qualitative ethnographic meta-synthesis. Its findings illuminated a number of strengths-based recovery outcomes congruent with previous research into participant perspectives of recovery-oriented music therapy in mental health (McCaffrey, 2018; Solli et al., 2013; Solli & Rolvsjord, 2015), as well as some experiences more specific to the context of trauma-related mental health challenges. The third study yielded the central findings of the thesis. This study was a narrative inquiry into the experiences of participants in an online community music therapy project for adults who identify as living with mental health challenges related to adverse life experiences. Five adults were recruited via community and community mental health channels across Naarm/ Melbourne. An online group was co-facilitated with a mental health peer worker for five sessions, after which the format of the project altered in response to feedback and participation decisions from participants. After a seven-week group process, three participants chose to continue with individual music therapy sessions within the data collection period. Narrative inquiry (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Kim, 2015), a methodology centred around narrating stories of experience, was chosen to pursue the data analysis and presentation of findings. Five narratives are thus presented as the results of the thesis in Chapter Six. An additional dialogical narrative reflecting on the experience of co-facilitation between the mental health peer worker and myself, is presented in Chapter Five. The presentation of individual narratives is interspersed with theoretical discussion in Chapter Six, and further exploration of resonant, or shared threads of narrative experience in the second discussion chapter, Chapter Seven. Practice implications are then discussed, exploring differentiated music-centred experiences, considering the need for different levels of engagement, and developing approaches towards collaborative approaches to working alongside with people with lived experience. I then explore the alignment of narrative therapy approaches with anti-oppressive theoretical approaches that may bring a critical lens to exploring adverse experiences. I finish with a model expanding the notion of a musical asylum (DeNora, 2016) toward an assemblage of interconnected musical opportunities within a musical recovery community.