4-2 Music Therapist

Music Therapy is a medical therapy utilizing music to allow its patient (case) to use all kinds of music instruments, or simply making sounds, listening to music and describes their feelings as a medical healing to probe deeper on individual’s internal voices, emotions and feelings. Through the medical healing process, the patients learn to find ways to express their emotions and thus remedy their sense, organic or emotional functions.

• Interview with Music Therapist, Ms. Zheng and Music Therapy

When Ms. Zheng studies in the U.S. for her master degree in Music, she realized that besides playing the music instrument, she was more interested in helping others. Studying music therapy and training on becoming a professional music therapist would enable her to combine her beloved subject music with helping others. That was the reason she decided to study music therapy and became a trained and certified music therapist. Several other art therapies are rarely known in Taiwan such as music therapy, dancing therapy, art therapy. In this U.S., these mentioned above are already considered as highly developed and popular therapies for emotional remedy. Because of her love and passion for her native land, Taiwan, she chose to give up the high paid job as a professional music therapist in the U.S. and came back to Taiwan after her study and training.

• Music Therapy and people in need

Music therapy uses music to help those special physically or mentally challenged group to improve their physical strengths, emotional, and psychological health, recognition functions and interpersonal relationships skills. Among her patients, the elders and kids under special education are her major focus. Other than these cases that are supplied with reimbursements of National Healthy Care; for other adults cases that are medically diagnosed as having Autism, ADHD or Parkinson's disease, if they want to choose music therapy as their medical treatment, they have to pay the medical cost all by their own which will be a heavy financial burden for them and thus very rare people will choose music therapy in Taiwan. However, it is very natural that each individual may experience all kinds of traumas in his or her growing process and thus it is necessary that one may need psychological remedy from time to time. Thus, if music therapy can be put under the reimbursed-medical treatment category of the National Health Care system in Taiwan, it is believed that more and more people and can get medical help through music therapy whenever needed.

• The future of music therapy in Taiwan

Currently, the career choices for music therapists in Taiwan are not friendly because the general public has very limited knowledge on this type of medical remedy. If more music therapists devote themselves into educating and promoting music therapy to the public, such as giving lectures, or adding more resources in the school education, it’s possible that more people will get to know more about this career and therefore encourages more students to be more willing to enter this field that what it is now.