Role of music in the diagnosis and treatment of psychotic disorders
Research type
Research Study
Full title
An Anthropological Study of the Role of Music in the Diagnosis and Treatment of Psychotic Disorders
IRAS ID
329779
Contact name
Arnav Sethi
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT) and University of Cambridge
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
This study seeks to understand the role of music in the diagnosis and treatment of psychotic disorders. It will comprise 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst mental health professionals - psychiatrists, music therapists and nursing staff – at Fulbourn Hospital, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust (CPFT). Current psychiatric classifications characterise psychotic disorders through positive symptoms and negative symptoms like diminished emotional expression and 'flat'/'blunted' affect, along with inabilities to construct coherent accounts of a remembered self. As a radically altered mode of being that poses fundamental challenges to assumptions about human nature and a shared world, psychosis creates mysterious subjectivities. This sometimes leads anthropologists and psychiatrists to rely on caregivers’ narratives to approach psychotic subjectivity. This study will focus on the experiences and perceptions of practitioners insofar as they rely on music to access the experiences, emotions, desires and intentions of such patients. The study will gather information through semi-structured interviews with NHS staff including psychiatrists and music therapists, along with non-participant observation of their multidisciplinary clinical team meetings, and participant observation in group music therapy sessions. The study will thus compare different understandings of disease causation and symptom expression, along with exploring the debates around the use of clinical music therapy to alleviate psychotic symptoms. It will contribute to contemporary psychiatric thinking about the conflation of verbal expression and emotional experience in treatment regimes. This will be done by following lines of contestation and debate around the efficacy of clinical music therapy in relation to ideas about neurobiological causation, language-based assessments and psychopharmaceutical treatment. The study will use anthropological methods of analysis, which are broadly defined as presentation of findings through an inductive approach of focusing on research participants' own categories, perspectives and world-views.
REC name
London - City & East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
23/PR/1345
Date of REC Opinion
5 Dec 2023
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion