Why provide music therapy in the community for adults with mental health problems?

This paper describes music therapy within a community mental health setting for adults using a care programme approach in England. It describes the setting, and emphasises the importance of multidisciplinary teamwork in order to enable music therapy to be effective. It provides some statistics and descriptive clinical information which demonstrate the efficacy of music therapy for adults with long-term mental health problems, and argues that music therapy should be apriority for this client group. To support these points of view, the article includes a case study showing a psychoanalytically informed approach in music therapy. This paper was given as a keynote address at the 1994 Australian Conference of Music Therapy.