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Description of initiative
The study explored the project A Song for the Mind, which is a private-based choir activity aimed at people with mental health conditions, their relatives and professional facilitators. The initiative is created and founded by the private mental health organisation SIND Herning Ikast-Brande and the private choir school Den Jyske Sangskole. The initiative is a user-targeted activity promoting meaningful choir lessons. The purpose is to create a recreational offer to people with mental health challenges during or post treatment. The focus is on developing an inclusive community, connecting culture stakeholders with other private and public organisations uncovering meaningful activities, non-pharmacological ‘treatments and unexplored mental health potentials based on the interaction between the participants and partners. The vision is to create a foundation or developing an arts and culturally based activity to people afflicted with psychological vulnerabilities, independent of age and illness.
Themes: Culture and...
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Results, benefits, impact and lessons learnt
The study has shown that singing in a choir within the activity A Song for the Mind can instill meaningful life experiences in the singers. The singers experience that choir singing enables them to get in touch with, and capable of expressing, emotions that are otherwise difficult to express. Joining the choir, singing and engaging with the lyrics, helps the participants get in contact with complex feelings and visualise and express some what ‘materialise’ traumatic and/or social challenges. This gives rise to feelings of being connected to oneself, and, simultaneously, opening up to become aware of the world of nature, the other person, and the choir. Despite struggling with mental health challenges, songs, tones and lyrics create an opening for connection a relation between the participants the other and the group. Joining the choir was experienced as being ‘set free’, getting in contact with complex experiences, enabling emotions to emerge. Singing created a vocal and emotional and social ‘visibility’, which was experienced as a huge relief and as being given the opportunity to, without directly using speech/words, concretise perhaps extreme and unconventional life occurrences to other people. To some of the singers, this is a life-changing experiences and a crucial learning process to the professionals. As the participants are sensing and connecting to themselves, there is an opening for growing a nascent awareness. Joining the initiative seems to evoke presence, leading to an awareness towards relational aspects and solidarity. Singing music function as a transformative power in reconfiguring a person's experience and behaviour as, it so poetically has been formulated by researchers, a ‘magic mirror’, a ‘beyond the head resource’ or a ‘companion’. In a choir singing perspective and health care practice, this can be seen as a budding and ground breaking formation of cultural activities holding learning and empowering potentials instilling mental health.