Music Psychotherapy

A form of music therapy that uses musical activities — songwriting, improvisation, lyric analysis, receptive listening — to address emotional, psychological, and relational concerns rather than sensory or rehabilitative goals. Practitioners are typically licensed music therapists with additional clinical psychology training who use music as a symbolic, non-verbal medium for self-expression, memory work, and meaning-making. Music psychotherapy has been widely applied with cancer patients, adolescents, and people with substance-use disorders, but historically excludes deaf and hard-of-hearing clients because most clinical protocols assume auditory engagement rather than multimodal access.