Music in Recovery / Music as Recovery: Spirituality, Agency and Hope Alexander Douglas / contact@alexanderdouglas.info

Music, Wellbeing and Mental Health | Hereford College of Arts | 12.05.2019

African, African-Caribbean and African-American men represent the largest demographic amongst statutory mental health service users in the Eng-lish-speaking ‘West’.i Between 2016-2018 re-searchers from the universities of Royal Holloway and Leeds Beckett undertook an NIHR-fundedii study investigating the prospects for leveraging social/community concepts/processes specifically for Black men in recovery from mental distress us-ing a ‘co-production’ model.iii From the data, four pillars of recovery emerged:

• Relationships

• (Re)negotiating Identity

• Agency

• Safe Spaces

Hope articulated within language possesses the capacity for deception (of self and other). But a concept of music that is not linguistically-validated could well enable hope to be expressed in ways which connect cognition and emotion without the deceptive freight of language. Music does not depend on language for its existence, making it especially important to the linguisti-cally-vulnerable (not least because of their psychopathology).

20th-century philosophy of language has raised a formida-ble set of questions about meanings as ideas, the bifurca-tion of language and thought, structural limitations of lan-guage, the cognitive necessity of language (for both episte-mology and selfhood) and much more. Bloch (1991) has argued that anthropology depends too much on linguistic frames of reference for its very concept of culture, and Stanley Cavell’s Must We Mean What We Say (1969) high-lights what Mulhall (2002) refers to as ‘broader human opacities and modes of self-injury.’ Far from a benign force facilitating human existence and personal identity, lan-guage can be destructive (John Searle’s 1984 Reith Lec-tures constituted a very forceful attack on the ‘computer model of the mind’ that does require an honest reader to think about the consequences of that analogy for lived ex-istence – not least mental health recovery).

Thinking beyond gender, culture and race: these pillars are in fact genuinely universal. The specific problems in minority communities regarding the social understanding/acceptance of mental health (e.g. in Sikh religious language there is no word/lexeme for ‘mental (ill-)health’)iv are hugely im-portant but not the concern herein. Much of the work that takes place in therapeutic contexts has reduced ‘therapy’ to a form of technology (Szasz 1960) and ‘recovery’ to static processes that are holistically and conceptually underpowered.

‘While there is no single definition of the concept of recovery for people with mental health problems, there are guiding principles, which emphasise hope and a strong belief that it is pos-sible for people with mental illness can regain a meaningful life, despite persistent symptoms. Recovery is often referred to as a process, an outlook, a vision, a conceptual framework or a guiding principle’ (Jacob 2015). Unfortunately, these ‘guiding principles’ are arbitrary, often whimsical and even dangerous. It has been easy to think in the language of ‘recovery’ as re-sulting from ‘therapy’ with ‘models’ being an essential part of ‘theory-building’ but the rise in membership numbers of the Special Interest Group (SIG) in Spirituality of the Royal College of Psychiatrists indicates that it is increasingly understood that something more than scientifically-provable ‘best practice’ in ‘clinical care’ is needed.

Although Spitzer and Coutinho (2014) believe that music can be a very sure token of specific emo-tions, Cespedes-Guevara and Eerola (2018) currently offer the greatest challenge to the easy idea that perceptions of musical stimuli can actually become equable with actual emotive states. There is an enormous amount of work to be done in this area, and part of my intended research future is to bring music perception into dialogue with philosophy of mind and language as well as a more rigorous approach to aesthetics. But it is my contention (after Adorno) that the making of music can be a more truthful account of the making of a self (and the realisation of one’s agency).v

These four pillars are also crucial to musical formation in any culture and context – a drum circle, a choir, a school recorder group, a professional jazz quartet, a symphony orchestra, a Balinese gamelan, an Indian classical music ensemble – all need to offer safe spaces, exercise of agency, interperson-al relationships and the opportunity for people to change their minds about who they want to be musically. So for those suffering from mental distress, music-making is not only ‘part of’ re-covery – it is a spiritual (but not neces-sarily religious) act of recovery – and thus a critical part of the journey from an imagined reality to a reality-in-itself where agency is restored and hope is more than a fantasy.

How do people survive the mental healthcare system? Something greater – transcendent beyond quantitative research methods and qualitative approaches to clinical care concept – is needed. As such, it is my contention that ‘hope’ is the critical paradigm that binds these pillars together:

The result:

“We survived mental illness – but more than that, we survived

the statutory mental healthcare system…!”

a) it is what they will lead towards individually and collectively;

b) without it they cannot exist;

c) none of those pillars would be sufficient for recovery in and of themselves.

ENDNOTES i Pinto, Ashworth & Jones (2008); Keating 2007. ii National Institute for Health Research iii The research findings and this ‘social recovery model’ were publicly ‘launched’ at Leeds Beckett University in March 2019; the author was present. iv This very fact is driving a current doctoral research project in Sikh Studies at the University of Wolverhampton. v No single citation is sufficient to encapsulate Adorno’s thinking on music and epistemology without reductionist distortion; more specific research in this area is forthcoming. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bloch, M. 1991. ‘Language, Anthropology and Cognitive Science’ in Man [Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland] (Vol. 26, No. 2) Cavell, S. [1969] 2002. Must We Mean What We Say? (Preface by S. Mulhall). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cespedes-Guevara, J. & Eerola, T. 2018. ‘Music communicates affects, not basic emotions – A constructionist account of attribution of emotional meanings to music’ in Frontiers in Psychology (Vol. 9) Jacob, K. 2015. ‘Recovery Model of Mental Illness: A Complementary Approach to Psychiatric Care’ in Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine (Vol. 37 No. 2) [published on US Na-tional Institutes of Health website] Keating, F. 2007. ‘African and Caribbean men and mental health’ (Race Equality Foundation Briefing Paper) Keating, F. and P. Fisher, S. Joseph and K. Southby. 2018. ‘Social Approaches to Recovery for African and Caribbean Men’ (public presentation, Leeds Beckett University, 14th March 2019) Pinto, R. and M. Ashworth and R. Jones. 2008. ‘Schizophrenia in black Caribbeans living in the UK: an exploration of underlying causes of the high incidence rate’ in British Journal of General Practice (Vol. 58) Searle, J. [1984] 1989. Minds, Brains & Science. London: Penguin Spitzer, M and Coutinho, E. 2014. ‘The effects of expert musical training on the perception of emotions in Bach’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin No. 1 in G Minor (BWV 1001)’ in Psychomusicology: Music, Mind and Brain (Vol. 24) Szasz, T. 1960. ‘The Myth of Mental Illness’ in American Psychologist (Vol. 15)