Music Therapy and College Students's Mental Health

In recent years, music therapy has had a rise in recognition. It has been proven to aid in academic success among all ages but is mainly a focus in younger children. Musicians have been proven to have quicker speech encoding rates and have been proven to learn concepts more quickly. Research proves that children who were exposed to music therapy when learning new concepts had higher rates of memory and retrieval than those who were not exposed and also increased the overall morale of students.  This poses the question of how this compares to college students learning at an expedited and more advanced rate and how this helps with college students’ mental health. 

                  Though children are very susceptible to outside environments, college students are more vulnerable to society, being stuck in the limbo of still being young but becoming adults. College students are placed under many different stressors, this leads to their psychological control ability being rather weak due to trying to balance multiple different psychological/ physical stressors at once. Much like in children, research has shown that the use of music therapy on university students has helped improve overall mental health as well as learning. Music therapy improves the effect of education, allowing for a brain boost by allowing emotions to be conveyed through music. College students have been found to use music to convey the words they are unable to say themselves, giving a space for students to relax, thus boosting overall mood. 

                  Music has also been proven to help with memory and learning processes. College students who practice music therapy while studying have shown higher scores than those who do not,  showing a glimpse of the effects that music therapy can have on learning. The right brain of humans is associated with creativity, including things such as music. A stimulation to the right brain allows for memory to be more effective, thus the reason music therapy is so effective on college student’s abilities to learn and communicate with one another. 

                  College students are under a multitude of stress on a daily basis, by implementing educational tragedies like music therapy, overall mental health can increase as well as rates of academic success. 

References:

The Argument for Music Education | American Scientist, www.americanscientist.org/article/the-argument-for-music-education. Accessed 29 Apr. 2024. 

Hou, Juncai. “Effective Ways for College Students’ Mental Health Education Based on Music Therapy.” Journal of Healthcare Engineering, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 11 Jan. 2022, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8767367/.