Effectiveness of Music Therapy in Mental Health: A Systematic Review

Running head: ESSAY
Topic Identification & Searching Research Evidence
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Author Note

1ESSAY
Introduction- Mental health refers to the cognitive, emotional and behavioural
wellbeing of individuals and also governs the way by which people think, behave and feel. In
other words, this state of psychological wellbeing is characterized by an absence of mental
disorders and also includes the ability of an individual to enjoy life, whilst maintaining a
balance between psychological resilience and life activities (Clement et al. 2015). According
to the WHO (2014) a person’s wellbeing is encompassed in relation to the realization of the
capability of the person to cope with stressful events of life.
However, there are a range of risk factors that increases the potential of an individual
to suffer from poor mental health. Some of the most common mental disorders are anxiety
disorders, mood disorders, and schizophrenia. Mental health nurses are entitled with the
responsibility of working in specialized fields and have the duty of providing care to people
suffering from a plethora of mental disorder and/or illness. The primary focus of a mental
health nurse is to work in collaboration with people and carers for overcoming the illness
symptoms and continuing personal recovery (Hunter et al. 2015). Thus, implementation of an
evidence based practice in mental health would prove imperative in enhancing the optimal
wellbeing of the affected people.
EBP and mental health nursing- Mental health has been identified as a national
practice priority in Australia. The National safety priorities in mental health plan provides a
direction in recognising, evading and decreasing harm to the affected people, residing across
different environments that has the provision of providing care to those with mental health
disorders. Mental health has also been identified as the topic of interest owing to the fact that
the nation considers safety of mentally ill people to be of utmost importance. Safety has been
recognised as an essential component of the quality of national plan. The National Mental
Health Working Group also works towards implementing the priority plan, with the aim of
providing leadership in the four priority areas (Commonwealth of Australia 2016). These

2ESSAY
areas are characterised by a collective effort of the stakeholders in preventing adverse events,
doing less harm, and increasing the safety of mental health services. Evidence based practice
(EBP) refers to a multidisciplinary approach of clinical practice that involves the
conscientious usage of best available evidences that would help in making essential decisions
related to patient care. This problem solving approach is imperative to mental health practice
owing to the fact that EBP will facilitate a systemic search of relevant literature that are most
relevant to a clinical question (Baker and Tickle-Degnen 2014).
The process will also help in making decision about particular mental health programs
and/or intervention that is based in best available evidences. These would be informed by
experiential evidences related to the domain of mental health. In other words, the three stages
of EBP that will guide the process of clinical decision making encompass (1) gathering
evidences, (2) interpreting evidences, and (3) applying the learnings in practice (Brownson
2017). The primary benefit of EBP in mental health is that it would provide assistance to the
healthcare professionals to remain updated with the clinical relevant and best interventions
that can be implemented upon patients. The fundamental principle of EBP can be associated
with the fact that specific design in study help in providing unbiased answers to a range of
clinical questions. Thus, in relation to a clinical question that concerns treatment, high quality
randomised have been found most effective in producing valid estimates regarding the
effectiveness of the treatment being investigated (Farrelly et al. 2016).
Clinical question- Clinical questions are required to be relevant to the problem or the
group of patients who shall be treated in a way that facilitates the easy search for an answer.
The clinical questions are either foreground or background. A foreground question was
formulated during the research that unravelled answers for specific knowledge related to
depression, a mental illness, in order to inform clinical decisions. A PICO framework was
adopted for the process. This mnemonic is made up of four components that helped in

3ESSAY
formulation of the search strategy via the identification of key concepts related to the clinical
question (Considine et al. 2017). The research question in relation to mental health was as
follows:
Does the administration of music therapy prove effective in reducing symptoms of
mental disorders?
The three components for the aforementioned clinical question is given below.
P (Population/Problem) Individuals with mental disorders
I (Intervention) Music Therapy
C (Comparison) Treatment as usual
O (Outcomes) Reduced symptoms
Table 1- PICO framework
The search strategy involved creating an organised structures of essential search terms or
key phrases that were fed into three electronic databases. The CINAHL Complete, EBSCO
Health, and PsycInfo international database were selected for retrieval of the articles. The
search terms that were fed into the databases were ‘mental’, ‘health’, ‘depression’, ‘anxiety’,
‘illness’, ‘disorder’, ‘mood’, ‘schizophrenia’, ‘obsessive compulsive disorder’, ‘symptoms’,
‘music’, ‘therapy’, ‘intervention’, and ‘management’.
The relationship between the search terms was established with the use of Boolean
operators. ‘AND’ was used for narrowing down the search results. ‘OR’ helped in broadening
the search hits by connecting between the synonyms. Truncations (*) and wildcards were
used for obtaining search results with different endings of the terms or multiple spellings
(McGowan et al. 2016). Search filters that were used for restricting the search to specific
articles were as follows: