Research Paper on Effects of Music on Symptoms of Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder where people who are diagnosed with it are unable to think clearly, deal with emotions properly, interact with people properly, affect their speech, and how they view the world around them. Schizophrenia is a very complex disorder that is not fully understood.

The literature I found to be interesting is about how music can have a positive effect on people diagnosed with schizophrenia. It has been studied that the music intervention helped improve the subjects’ emotional and physiological behavior. There have been different studies that musical therapy along with their constant and prolonged use of antipsychotic medication would improve the symptoms of their schizophrenic episodes. One group was exposed to the classical music of Mozart only for one month, while the other group was exposed to no music and considered the control group. The two groups were then compared to “normal and healthy individuals.” There was a total of forty-five chronic schizophrenics. They all received a baseline functional magnetic resonance imaging which was performed in a resting state. The one group listened to Mozart’s Sonat K. 488 for thirty minutes a day for thirty days while in a quiet room. It was found that those who listened to Mozart had an increase in their relationship between the pallidum, which is gray matter, and ventral hippocampus, which is involved in the control of our emotions. The study states there might be a correlation between music and consistent use of antipsychotics to improve the negative symptoms of schizophrenia which are: blunted affect (diminished facial and emotional expression), alogia (a decrease in verbal output or expressiveness), asociality (lack of involvement in social relationships), avoilition (decrease in interests, desires, and goals and behavioral decreased in social initiated and purposeful acts), and anhedonia (not able to experience pleasure from positive stimuli). 

The study states how we need to recruit more people diagnosed with schizophrenia to assess and validate the findings from this study. This might help with the expansion of other types of therapy to treat schizophrenia. I did not read a specific recommendation from the study other than we should continue to try to further this research.

There are many ways that I would try to implement this information from this article. The human mind is extremely complex and to completely understand it would require much knowledge and research. The beginning of the article stated that “schizophrenia is a complex psychiatric illness,” and that would make me want to gain as much information as I could before trying to care for someone with schizophrenia. While I was reading the article there was much, I needed to try to look up and gain more knowledge and understanding before I could begin to understand the article. It is things like this that would be humbling and have a cause for compassion not just for the patient but for the family. This article has caused me to look at an individual not by their actions alone but the cause of the actions. It appears that schizophrenics have little control because it is an imbalance in the brain and one that I cannot fully comprehend. The best care I could provide to the patient would to be a well-rounded student nurse with compassion, knowledge, and patience to try to help the needs of the client. There are a few things I could try to educate the families on based on this article. This article still needs quite a bit more research and trials but, there might be a benefit to a time where the client would benefit from calm time listening to classical music every day. There would need to be a consistent time and place and music, but it could provide a positive outcome. I would want to educate the families on how schizophrenia affects the client. There are things about the disease process that we may not be able to fully understand and that might cause the family to be frustrated. I would want to provide resources to the family to be able to help them cope, understand, or provide the proper care to the client. This does not specifically talk about ways to interact with the client but that would be a very important topic of discussion. I would want to encourage the family to make notes of different behaviors they notice so they can learn the best ways to interact, deescalate behaviors, help improve times of loss of interests, and ways to provide safety for the client. 

This was a very interesting study on a very complex disorder, and I hope that there is research continuing how music can help those suffering from schizophrenia.