Song-writing provides anorexia breakthrough
Published: May 30, 2005
Song-writing workshops can help counsellors better understand the worries of anorexia patients and thus aid their treatment, according to a Melbourne University music therapist.
Katrina McFerran is set to publish a paper on the role music can play in the treatment of the eating disorder, which affects mostly young girls and has the highest death rate of any psychiatric illness.
Dr McFerran has found that song-writing workshops can reveal critical psychological information that anorexia patients may not have told their counsellors or doctors.
Over a three-year period she visited sick teenagers at Melbourne’s Royal Children’s Hospital and conducted song-writing workshops with them, eliciting some surprising results.
“They used it to tell their stories and sometimes to give some information they weren’t prepared to discuss in a counselling kind of scenario,” Dr McFerran said.
She says patients’ songs showed that adults were not always on the mark when determining what issues were important to young people.
“For them it’s still about being cool and being liked and what people think of them and that’s really important,” she said.
“But the other thing that’s interesting, the second-most common theme was around relationship dynamics and what that told us as professionals was that these young women are very isolated, their eating disorder requires a lot of lying and that requires a lot of distancing strategies.
“They’re very alone and they reflect a lot on their relationships with people, and in fact their relationships with their mother was one of the most dominant themes in the material, which I thought was fascinating.”
Express who they are
Dr McFerran says young people would open up about their eating disorder during a song-writing session, whereas they might not during a formal counselling session.
“That was the most important aspect of the program to us, that music is important to teenagers and teenagers will allow themselves to express who they are through music,” she said.
She says the song-writing program offered a new perspective to add to those offered by paediatricians, nursing staff and other health-care professionals.
“[Song-writing] seemed to focus on getting beneath the issues quite readily and in a hospital environment with brief interventions it’s that swiftness that’s particularly important,” she said.
The sessions begin with Dr McFerran outlining the role of songs and how good songs involve the expression of authentic feelings.
“I usually give a spiel about the role of songs and how important it is to be authentic in expressing material in songs and how people who write songs that are just up in the air, they’re not good songs, so that forms the basis,” she said.
“We then brainstorm about what’s a topic that they could focus their song on and we cover pages and pages with lyrics, lyric ideas actually, so anything they say I scribble down.
“This is an idea that was inspired by the work of Emma O’Brien at the Royal Melbourne Hospital.”
The group then works out which are the most important themes and how to use different lyrics for the chorus and verses, before deciding on beats and harmonies.
“Often we choose to record it onto a MiniDisc and then burn it to CD for them as a reinforcement of what they’ve achieved in that session and an opportunity to reflect on what they’d done,” Dr McFerran said.
She says the popularity of Australian Idol shows the power of music.
“I think the whole Australian Idol thing is catching up on what young people have been wanting for a long time - it’s like karaoke, a chance to sing and be heard. It’s great.”
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