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Professor Naaheed Mukadam (UCL Division of Psychiatry) specialises in mental health of older people. In this Q&A, she explains how people with dementia connect with music that has meaning for them.
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What inspired you to explore music as a form of therapy for dementia
I had seen from my clinical experience that often, even people with very severe dementia would respond to music, even if they could not communicate verbally. For others I saw that they could sing, even if they couldn’t speak. These experiences were quite profound. It was incredible to see that this part of their brain was preserved even when they couldn’t communicate through other means.
I also saw that music had the power to calm people. Especially in the context of dementia, which can see people get quite upset and agitated, music was able to act as a stable and grounding force.
How can music, dance and performance help keep people connected to their identity and to those around them?
I think creative expression is so important and a real core of being human. Even when we lose language, we can retain our appreciation of music or movement. I think it’s crucial to understand what music and creative expression someone values and continue to help them access these even when they are cognitively impaired. It can also be a valuable way for people to connect with loved ones and do something together.
Can you tell us more about your work with music and dementia in South Asian communities?
I realised there was very little done in the South Asian community looking at music and memory and how those two are related and so I was able to explore this by going into a care home and a day centre with a diverse group of participants and exploring what music meant to them.
It was important to me to capture the power of music and what it means to different people in a creative way, rather than just through research papers. Therefore, I went into these two settings with a musician and dancer.
With the musician, we played different pieces of music and saw how people responded. We asked people to tell us their favourite artists and favourite music and we played that and used it to talk to them about their memories around those pieces or any other memories that were sparked when they listened to the music.
The dancer would play favourite pieces of music and then do movement sessions with the people in the day centre or care home. We also spoke to people about their memories and what the music and movement made them feel.
I would talk to the musician and dancer and we would share how we experienced the interactions and what we noticed.
I was also able to speak to a few carers of people with dementia to get their sense of what it is like for the person with dementia and also for themselves and how they find connection with their loved one. I asked them what pieces of music described their emotions around coping with looking after someone with dementia and then I wrote lyrics trying to put those experiences into words. I sent those lyrics to the carers and they commented on them. I put all of that together to write songs to capture the experience of loving someone with dementia and translated and back-translated them with the help of carers.
The dancer created dance around the experiences we captured in our groups and the musician put together his own experience of caring for someone with dementia with the experiences in the care home and day centre to compose music to explore memory and memory loss.
These pieces of music and dance were turned into a special event, what message or experience do you hope attendees took away from this event?
I hope attendees could empathise with those who have dementia or are caring for someone with it and I also hope it encouraged people to talk about it and not feel stigmatised.
Professor Naaheed Mukadam and Dr Jess Jiang have been funded by UCL Grand Challenges of Mental Health and Wellbeing for their project ‘Music And Neuroscience against Dementia: from Designs to Outcomes through Listening INterventions INclusivley INformed for Individuals.