Music Therapists and Multi-Disciplinary Teams: Do we put ourselves out there enough?
Since I felt entitled enough to start a blog, I thought I had might as well put my thoughts out there.
And part of the reason for that is that I believe as Music Therapists, we don’t always feel invited to put ourselves, or our thoughts, out there enough. Music Therapists talk of being overshadowed, that musicians confuse musical interaction with Music Therapy, that people don’t understand what we do.
Well… why should they understand what we do? Why shouldn’t musicians feel entitled to claim the therapeutic benefits of their work? Why shouldn’t other professions overshadow us?
I think it is ironic, in a profession which encourages our clients to adapt, heal, and grow so that they might better advocate for themselves. I will never forget a series of lectures by the imitable Jacqueline Robarts during my training. She showed us a video where there was a young boy in severe distress: he was besides himself with emotion. Jacqueline reaches a point where she gives the young boy a hug out of empathy and feeling an intense sense that he just needed to be held. A peer of mine asked her why she didn’t end the session, since the young boy was so upset. She replied, simply:
“It is therapy. It’s supposed to be hard.”
I have carried this phrase with me since then and find myself asking, why should this be less true for us as professionals?
Professionally, and personally, I believe that Music Therapists don’t do a good enough job of explaining what we do. I don’t believe we do a good enough job of evidencing what we do. I think there are various reasons for this: a divide within the industry as to whether the music is therapy in and of itself or not; a widely pre-entitled population of professionals, often white, who had the luxury of learning an instrument growing up; and a research mentality of asking for permission, rather then doing and evaluating.
I had the luxury of seeing Mark Ettenberger at the Music Therapy Research Conference held by the Music Therapy Charity in January 2025. He demonstrated his fantastic research work in his department and stressed that they research everything that they do and so they have evidence about what works and what doesn’t. What’s key, is they don’t spend lots of time scoping and piloting. They get in there and they do the work, and if they find a new way of supporting people who need help that evidentially works, then that is great. Importantly: they work in the areas that do, and they don’t work in the areas that don’t. They are not asking for permission to sit at the table, they are building the table and getting other professionals to fight for their place around it.
In the UK, we simply have to learn to be bolder. We aren’t entitled to be at the table and we shouldn’t expect others to hold the door for us. It is a competitive social and healthcare market for interventions: right now, we have to elbow our way in. It isn’t enough, anymore, to give long-winded explanations about what we do and why. It isn’t enough, anymore, to explain how there are added benefits of having a Music Therapist on the team outside of their clinical work. It isn’t enough, anymore, to assure work places that Music Therapists are highly flexible with great clinical results.
We have to show the world what we are doing and what works. We cannot expect the world to take the time to see for itself.
It is time for Music Therapists to learn how to be business tycoons from day one. How to budget and demonstrate value for money in numbers, not just assurances. How to document data in a scientific way. How to generate feedback. How to analyse trends. Part of this means not being afraid of the areas where we aren’t effective: and I get it - nobody wants to have been working in a setting for 5 years with a specific group intervention, to begin to research its effectiveness and find, to their horror, that it isn’t effective. But, as Mark Ettenberger said to us at the conference, whether we like it or not, we have an ethical responsibility to stop the work that isn’t working. This shouldn’t be a sad thing. This is part of being a rigorous, scientific profession. This is how we build evidence in the areas that are working. This is how we begin to build the table on which we invite the professionals. This is how it becomes clear who we support, and how we support them.
Music Therapy is a psychological intervention that uses music. That’s what I tell people when they ask. It really is that simple. That’s how you get people asking about who you work with, what the outcomes are, and in just how many ways a Music Therapist can be utilised. Because if we begin to shift our language as a profession so that the rest of the world can understand, we might find that we don’t need to elbow our way in for very long. There might well be a seat with our name on it at that MDT table.
Ben Richardson