is Music Therapy and Aging, and we're very lucky to have with us Chrissy Pearson from

the Baycrest Center. She has a Bachelor of Music Therapy, is a registered psychotherapist,

and a fellow of the Association of Music and Imagery. She received a Bachelors of Music

Therapy from the University of Windsor in 2002, interned at Sunnybrook Health Sciences

Centre in Aging and Veteran Care, and she has worked in various settings, including

long-term care, palliative care, acute care, adult group homes and schools. And in addition

to practising traditional music therapy, Chrissy is a fellow of the Association of Music and

Imagery, and practice guided imagery and music as well. And currently works at Baycrest as

well as in the Music Therapy Center, so it should be quite a fascinating program. And

here's Chrissy Pearson.

[applause]

CP: Thank you so much, Greg, and thanks for having me here. I don't know if you can see

me over this, I'm not very tall, but I am back here. And we're getting beep, beep, beep.

Here we go. I'll just use the keypad. So I'm here to talk to you today about music therapy,

and specifically music therapy and aging. Here's a little bit of an overview. So I'm

gonna tell you a little bit about myself and why I'm even interested in this field and

how I came to the field. I'll give you a short explanation about what exactly music therapy

is. I'm gonna talk about music therapy and dementia, as well as music therapy for caregivers,

and also music therapy for what I'll call "normal aging", I'm not sure there is such

a thing as normal aging. But focusing in those three areas. And we'll talk a little bit about

some case examples I'll share with you from clients that I've worked with to give you

some examples, and finally, we'll maybe talk a little bit, if we have time, about how you

can use music in your day-to-day life just to simply be more wild, no matter what stage

in the aging process you're in. So I'll tell you a little bit about my interest. I had

a very musical childhood, I... My mother forced me to start piano lessons when I was very

young and I hated playing the piano, and she insisted that this was a good skill for me

to learn.

CP: And when I entered the sixth grade in elementary school, I was fortunate to be in

a school that had a music program and I chose to play the flute and I loved playing the

flute, and I went home and begged my mother, "Please can I stop with piano lessons and

take flute lessons." And fortunately, they said yes, that that would be alright with

them, and I started playing the flute and practising the flute with an independent teacher,

and in school, and played in all the bands, and did all of those musical things that I

was able to do throughout high school.

CP: And at the same time, my grandparents were all aging, and two of my grandparents

developed different kinds of dementia. And without knowing anything about music therapy,

I, especially with my grandfather, would go to his long-term care home and play music

with him, and sometimes some of the other residents would come and we'd sing together.

It didn't occur to me at the time that that was something even interesting, it was just

something that I was doing. And as it got time for me to graduate high school, I was

thinking about, "What am I gonna do and what do I want to study?" I was interested in clinical

psychology and thought, "Okay, I'm gonna go to university and study psychology or maybe

I'll study social work."

CP: I wanted to work with people, and my mom, who was a guidance counsellor, came to me

and said, "Look at this really neat program, it's called Music Therapy." And it sort of

beautifully blended my love of music with my desire to help people, and that's sort

of what got me to that place. In terms of the other thing that really made this click

for me, was just my own sort of life philosophy that no matter who we are, no matter what

our challenges are, what our abilities are, if we're living independently or needing support,

that we all have a right to live in a way that I would call well. We deserve to live

well, we deserve to have the resources that can help us to live well, and I really believe

music therapy, as a profession, is something that can help people to achieve that. And

being well is defined differently depending on who we are, and as we go through today's

presentation, you may see yourself in the presentation or other people from your family

that you love and care for, and how you feel about wellness might be different than the

next person, so I encourage you to sort of keep your own values in mind and your own

philosophy around what it means to be well as we go through the process of aging. What's

the saying? It's not how long we live, it's how how well we live, and that's sort of the

philosophy that guides me.

CP: So we'll talk a bit about music therapy. What is it? To become a music therapist, some

people are always surprised when I say to them, "I have a Bachelor of Music Therapy."

There's a degree that you take to become a music therapist. The degree involves being

part of the music department, part of the psychology department, and part of the music

therapy department. So it's three areas that you study, lots of practicum experience because

we are trained to work with lots of different kinds of people. So not just people who are

aging or have challenges related to aging, we work with many different kinds of people,

and our education prepares us for that.

CP: After we graduate, we do a 1,000 hours supervised internship that is within an area

that really interests us, and followed by a certification process. So once we've received

the certification, we can confidently say that we're ready to practice music therapy.

In Canada, there's five schools only that offer the training program. If you're interested

in the training program, I can... You can e-mail me and I can send you lots of information

about that. So the Canadian Association for Music Therapy, that's our national governing

body. They're the ones who set out all the expectations for education.

CP: They set out our code of ethics, our standards of practice. They oversee all the certification,

they make sure that our membership is up-to-date and that we've been continuing our education

so that their members are professionally competent across the country and practising appropriately.

And areas and scope of practice, I'm not gonna talk a lot about this because I could talk

about it for hours. Essentially anyone who could use music... Sorry, rather anyone who

could use therapy could work with a music therapist.

CP: So whether it's a teenager in a youth program who's suffering with depression or

a person in long-term care who has dementia, a child in palliative care who's dying of

cancer, no matter who you are or what you're trying to cope with, probably a music therapist

could help you work toward some of the goals that you're trying to achieve. The goals could

be behavioural in nature, so, for example, trying to stop a difficult behaviour for someone

who's in the later stages of dementia. It could be social in nature, so for children

with autism, helping them to be able to integrate and interact with each other. It could be

psychosocial in nature, so people who have maybe had trauma in their lives and working

through those traumas and helping them to understand them and work through them in an

easier way.

CP: The goals could be about communication, so very physical goals of regaining speech

and the ability to speak. It could be self-expression. There are sometimes musical goals as well,

sometimes we work with people who are coming to us to actually work on something that is

musical in their life. But generally, it's not really about the music at all, it's about

what we're trying to achieve with the music. And that's something that some people struggle

with, they think they have to be musical to benefit from music therapy and it's actually

the opposite.

CP: I find the people who are, let's say, less professionally musical are often more

open to participating in music therapy. So, no experience required to benefit. So, what

does music therapy look like? Again, it looks different depending on who you're working

with. Obviously, working with a street youth looks completely different than working with

someone who's dying in palliative care, and what we are trying to do is to use music and

to use musical elements in a way that meets the person's needs. So today we're gonna be

focusing on aging, we're gonna talk a bit about dementia, we're gonna talk about music

and the brain. What I'd like you to take away from this as well is that music therapy really

spans all ages, all abilities, all different challenges that you might face in life.

CP: And if you want more information about music therapy with different kinds of people,

that's something... I do have a handout if you want more information that you can take

with you before you go, and certainly, you can look some things up or contact me and

I'd be happy to tell you more about the different kinds of people we work with and what that

would look like.

CP: Okay. Oh, the one thing I forgot to mention: When we're talking about what music therapy

looks like, I often have people who are musicians or entertainers who say, "Oh, yes, I do music

therapy," and so, I always like to explain the difference between music entertainment

and music therapy. Entertainment, I'm gonna say, most of the time is very therapeutic,

and the therapeutic value in going to a concert or the therapeutic value in having someone

sing for you or being part of a choir, all of those things are very therapeutic. What

makes music therapy different is just the therapist, that you're working with someone

toward specific goals, you're working with them continuously to help progress through

some goals or to help achieve a sort of level of wellness that you're not able to achieve

without it, and that, that sort of defines the entertainer from the therapist. But I

always tell the entertainers, "You're not wrong, you're just not a therapist."

CP: So yes, what you're doing is absolutely valuable and probably therapeutic for many

of the people who are coming to listen to your music and to interact with your music,

maybe dance and move to your music. That can be a beautiful, therapeutic thing, and music

therapy is what we're gonna talk about today, which takes it to a different level.

CP: So music in the brain is something that is being talked about in the media all the

time right now. I'm very, very sure that most of you have, have heard about some of the

interesting stories. What comes to mind right now is Gabby Giffords in the US when she was

shot, part of her recovery was working with a music therapist to regain her ability to

speak. Stories like that are everywhere right now and getting lots of attention, which is

really exciting for music therapists because it's been a long time of trying to educate

people about how this all works.

CP: And as we age, no matter what challenges we face, our brains are gonna change. That's

just what happens are... From the time that our brains are developing to the time that

we leave this earth, our brains are constantly changing, and as we age, the changing starts

to happen faster and in different ways.

CP: And sometimes that involves additional challenges, whether it's a memory loss or

physical ability that we lose. All of those things are going to happen no matter how deep

the challenge. We're probably gonna encounter something. And now that we have all of this

research that talks about the brain, we really understand why music therapy is so effective

and we can thank MRI machines and all the other scanning machines out there that look

at what's happening when we... Not only when we listen to music, but when we participate

in music and when we're working with a music therapist.

CP: So it's neat, they can see the difference between putting a CD on and listening to the

music versus singing along to the music or moving our bodies to the music versus sitting

with a music therapist and working through something musically. The scans all look different,

but what does look the same is that music is everywhere in our brain. It used to be

that people thought... Not people, researchers, scientists thought that music had a place

in our brain, much like speech has a place, much like movement or memories or emotions.

A lot of things have specific areas of the brain and if that area gets damaged, then

that skill gets damaged or that ability is damaged. What makes music so effective is

that it is literally everywhere in our brain.

CP: So when we're listening to music, lots of different areas light up. When we're participating

in music, even more areas of the brain light up. And that's why, especially as we age and

have challenges with memory or have challenges with speech or have challenges with movement

or physical abilities, music can often be helpful. There's four areas up there that

I've connected to the brain. You can see rewiring, I'll talk a little bit about that because

I find it to be really fascinating, memories, cognition and movement, and pleasure's there

at the bottom.

CP: Pleasure is a really important one. If we're not enjoying the music that we're listening

to, different areas of the brain light up that say, "Yeah, that's... I don't really

relate to that." So one thing to remember is that enjoying the music that you're...

Whether you're listening to it or working with a music therapist, you have to have that

pleasure principle for it to be really effective.

CP: Okay, so let me let me look at a few of these areas of the brain. Now that we know

sort of how effective it is, I really think it's... It's kind of the simplest and most

complex thing that we could talk about, is how music impacts the brain. When one part

of the brain is damaged, so for example, we have a stroke or we get dementia, we start

to lose our long-term memories, our short-term memories, music has the ability to sort of

rewire the brain.

CP: So if I've had a stroke and I can no longer speak, but I'm looking at you and I want to