Collaboration and Assistance in Music Therapy Practice: Roles, Relationships, Challenges

Relating the innovative ways in which assistants and collaborators can become an integral part of a course of music therapy, this book explores how the involvement of a diverse range of individuals, such as family members, learning support assistants, caregivers and medical staff, can contribute to successful sessions. Illustrated by clinical examples, the book will help music therapists and students to make the most of opportunities to collaborate with individuals other than the client who may be present during therapy sessions. The book also takes into account the challenges that can arise in music therapy collaboration, and explores the relationships that can develop between music therapists, clients and collaborators.

Helen Odell-Miller is Professor of Music Therapy at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge and an honorary music therapist in the Cambridge and Peterborough Foundation Trust. She has worked as a clinician, researcher and manager specialising in adult mental health. She has published and lectured internationally and led research projects looking at clinical outcomes in dementia, and arts therapies in the adult mental health field. She is a board member of the International Centre for Research in the Arts Therapies, the Professional Advisory Board for Allied Health Professions and The Music Therapy Charity.

Eleanor Richards is a senior music therapist in the Service for Adults with Learning Disabilities, Lifespan NHS Trust, Cambridge. She is currently training as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Both authors have been involved in introducing music therapy into the St Columba Group Therapy Centre in Cambridge.

JÖrg Fachner finished his doctoral thesis on cannabis and music perception in an EEG investigation at the Chair for Qualitative Research in Medicine in 2001. JÖrg's research interests, publications and scientific memberships focus on qualitative research aspects of music, therapy and medicine, music physiology, and psychology, youth and pop culture, altered states of consciousness, transcultural psychiatry and anthropology of the body.