Teaching Group Drumming to Mental Health Professionals

Abstract

The author John Updike is quoted as saying “What art offers is space—a certain breathing room for the spirit.” Over the past 10 years, there has been a growing recognition of the healing and restorative power of the arts. Music, art, poetry, and movement therapy are commonly being introduced into healthcare settings. An organization, the Society for the Arts in Healthcare (www.sah.org), has been formed to demonstrate the valuable role that the arts can play in enhancing the healing process. The Society also provides resources and education to healthcare and arts professionals and encourages and supports research on the beneficial effects of the arts in healthcare. In the column this month, Ping Ho and her colleagues describe an innovative program at UCLA where drumming was taught to mental health professionals who, in turn, were encouraged to bring drumming to public school classrooms in underserved areas. The evidence described below suggests that the mental health professionals were receptive to education and roughly a third of those who went through the training, in turn, offered a program to clients in the school. — MJK There is strong evidence from the field of psychoneuroimmunology that stress reduction and social support improve health and resistance to disease. 1,2 Ping Ho and colleagues recently completed a study that focused on the use of drumming in a Los Angeles public school with low-income children. They reported that group drumming, integrated with activities from group counseling, led to significant improvements in a wide spectrum of social-emotional behaviors. 3 Significant reductions in the intervention group compared to controls were found in overall problem behavior and in behaviors reflective of specific problems, such as withdrawn/depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress, attention deficit/hyperactivity, oppositionaldefiance,andsluggishcognitive tempo. In this study, a school counselor with no music experience was used to deliver the intervention that was designed to accommodate an entire classroom of children, including children with special needs and abilities. Curious as to whether it was possible to educate a group of health professionals on the use of the drumming program, the research team sought support from integrative health advocate Remo Belli (founder and CEO of Remo, Inc) that enabled them to offer free professional development training to an entire division of mental health professionals largely serving elementary youth in underperforming schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District—the second largest school district in the nation. The training took place over a period of two