Music and Mental Health: The Parallels Between Victorian Asylum Treatments and Modern Social Prescribing

Music and Mental Health: The Parallels Between Victorian Asylum Treatments and Modern Social Prescribing
Dances and concerts were usually the only opportunity for patients to meet in a large group. K. Drake/Wellcome Collection
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Music has a powerful effect on the listener. It’s linked to better mental health and has been shown to alleviate loneliness, pain, anxiety, and depression.
For this reason, it’s increasingly being prescribed by doctors as a form of medicine. This practice—of referring patients to various activities such as running groups, art classes, and choirs—is known as social prescribing, and it’s fairly well established in the United Kingdom.
Rosemary Golding
Rosemary Golding
Author
Senior Lecturer in Music, The Open University
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