Music Therapy in Addiction Recovery

 

 

 

The Power of Music

Music is something that most people will take for granted, but it can have an impact on their life. It can have a powerful influence on emotions and mood. Listening to a happy song can lift people’s spirits while some tunes can lead the individual to feelings of despair. The thing that makes music so special is that it allows people to communicate their moods. It can be difficult to explain a mood to other people, but music can express it exactly. There are many claims made for the power of music, and there is growing scientific evidence to back some of these. Music therapy has been shown to help people manage deal better with a variety of conditions. There is also good evidence to suggest that it will help those individuals who are trying to build a life away from addiction.

Music Therapy Defined

Music therapy can be defined as the clinical and evidence-based use of music to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship. It involves using music to help people manage physical, emotional, or cognitive problems. The client can interact with the music in different ways such as listening, singing, or dancing to the beat. They can also write songs or discuss lyrics.

Music Therapy Explained

Music therapy involves using the power of music in a controlled way. The music therapist is trained to in how to use music effectively. They can use their knowledge to decide on the exact course of treatment that will work best for each client. When they first meet the client the goals of treatment will be established, and this will guide their efforts. The therapy may involve some type of music creation or it could be just listening.

Benefits of Music Therapy

There are a number of purported benefits for this type of therapy including:
* It can help people reduce their stress levels. It encourages the relaxation response.
* It may lower blood pressure and is being used to treat hypertension
* Those individuals who are dealing depression can benefit from a lessening of their symptoms.
* Music may help to protect the heart.
* It can help improve communication abilities for people with autism.
* It can help people deal better with anxiety.
* Music can create a meditative state in the listener. This is because when music has a strong beat brain waves will become stimulated and fall into sync.
* Listening to music with a fast beat can improve concentration levels.
* It can encourage a more optimistic state of mind. The individual will be able to benefit from this increased positivity even after they have stopped listening.
* It can give the body’s immune system a boost. It therefore promotes healing and helps the body ward off illness.
* It can be useful for reducing muscle tension.
* It can help women cope better with the pain of labor.
* Listening to music can help people who are suffering from chronic pain.
* It reduces feelings of loneliness.
* It can help people dealing with Alzheimer’s disease.
* It is a good antidote to boredom.
* Listening to music can even increase spirituality or used as a tool to help people progress along a spiritual path. There are even some people who use music as a means to achieve spiritual enlightenment.
* It can work as an emotional release.
* It can help people overcome an addiction and can be a useful tool in recovery.

Music Therapy and Addiction

Music therapy can be of great value to people who are attempting to overcome an addiction. It is unlikely to be enough alone to help an individual recovery from substance abuse, but it can be a useful supplement to other types of addiction treatment. The benefits of music therapy for people recovering from an addiction include:
* When people first become sober they are likely to experience a rollercoaster ride of emotions. Creating music may help people purge some of their more destructive emotions.
* A common reason why people relapse after a period of sobriety is that they feel unable to manage their stress levels. Listening to or creating music can be a wonderful stress booster.
* Boredom is another relapse trigger for those in early recovery. It is usually easy for people to put on some music and this can relieve their sense of boredom.
* When people first become sober they can experience a bit of loneliness due to breaking away from their network of drinking or drug using friends. Music is good for helping people feel a bit less alone in the world.
* Music therapy can be all about enjoyment and do is recovery from an addiction.
* Meditation can be a highly beneficial tool for people in recovery. Music can be a good introduction into meditating for those who do not yet have the patience for a more formal practice.
* When people first become sober they can struggle with mental fuzziness. Music may help to improve their concentration levels.
* If people are dealing with symptoms of depression they may find that listening to music can help with this.

Music and Romancing the Drink or Drug

While music can almost certainly help people in recovery there may be some types that those who are newly sober will be best to avoid. If the individual spends a great deal of time listening to those tracks that they associate with drinking or using drugs it could increase the risk of relapse. This is because it will trigger memories of the times when the individual felt that their substance abuse was pleasurable – this is referred to as romancing the drink. It is possible to associate fresh memories with old music favorites, but this is probably best left until people are more secure in their sobriety. For the first year or so it may be best to completely avoid any music associated with substance abuse. There will be plenty of other types of music to explore and enjoy.

Thamkrabok Rehab Temple and Music Therapy

Thamkrabok is a Buddhist temple in Thailand that offers treatment to people who wish to recovery from an addiction. Music plays an important role at the temple because of its therapeutic powers. The monks of Thamkrabok even have their own recording studio. The former abbot of this temple believed that nature had its own music, and that it was possible for those who listened carefully enough to hear it. The monks even have a method of transcribing cracks in the wall of natural stone into musical composition. The UK musician Tim Arnold made a whole album this way.

Things to Consider with Music Therapy

If people hope to benefit from music therapy there are a number of things worth considering:
* In order to get the most from this type of therapy it is best to stick to a credentialed professional who has gone through an approved program.
* It is not necessary for people to have any type of musical ability in order to benefit from this treatment. They may not even like music very much to begin with.
* Music therapy can be of benefit to people of all ages.
* It is possible for the individual to create their own playlist of therapeutic music by adding those tracks that they found soothing. This may be less beneficial than a proper assessment by a music therapist, but it certainly can be helpful.
* There is no right music for relaxation. Some people will feel relaxed while listening to classical music but for other people it could be punk rock.
* It is a good idea to keep a journal in order to record how different types of music impact mood and feelings of relaxation. This way the individual will discover the music that works best for them.
* If people are having difficulties concentrating they may wish to try music with a fast beat to see if this helps.
* Music can be a wonderful tool to help people exercise. These tracks can motivate and encourage the individual to pick up the tempo of their activity.
* Meditation music can help the individual experience meditative states. It is not a good idea to use music long-term for meditation because it becomes too much as a crutch and can prevent the individual from advancing along this path.
* Simple drumming is a relatively easy thing for people to learn. This type of music creativity can be good for escaping pain and emotional turmoil.
* Learning to play a musical instrument can be a great choice for people in recovery. As well as this being entertaining it will also be a great stress buster.


SOURCE: http://alcoholrehab.com/addiction-recovery/music-therapy-in-addiction-recovery/

Why Music is Like Drugs & How to Use it to Impact Your Emotions

 

 

 

 Why Music is Like Drugs & How to Use it to Impact Your Emotions

A deeper look into music’s influence on mood.

Creativity / John Marshall / April 19, 2016

That music impacts your emotion is not news. But what was once aural conjecture is now approaching the scientifically-sound—“experts in behavioral endocrinology and neuroendocrinology have found that musical stimulation (listening) affects various biochemical substance[s].”
As you probably know, chemicals play large role in your mood—specifically, the chemical messengers in the brain called neurotransmitters. These chemicals guide our behavior; fluctuations in neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, signal essential desires like hunger and sleep, and more abstract sensations, e.g. happiness and sadness. Music, like drugs, can alter our mental chemistry—the same basic mechanism that makes you feel buzzed post-espresso is what makes you bob your head to the beat.
In fact, these changes in “biochemical substances” may account for the bate of success in so-called music therapy, which is an effective treatment for conditions as varied as Alzheimer’s, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and depression.

Chemicals & Circumstance: The Biology of “Dope Beats”

In an essay titled “Drugs That Shape Men’s Minds,” Aldous Huxley wrote, with respect to improving one’s self, that there are “two methods available—the educational and the biochemical. We can take adults and children as they are and give them a much better training than we are giving them now. Or, by appropriate biochemical methods, we can transform them into superior individuals.”
In other words, your mood is the product of two things: circumstance and chemicals.
While we know that putting yourself in front of a upbeat live band on a Friday will lend to a good time, to what extent does music chemically improve mood?
According to Nature, “music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria…which [may] help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.” Moreover, the key to that sense of euphoria is indeed chemical—the same article explains that “that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release.” Dopamine is an often-discussed neurotransmitter, as it’s usually associated with neural reward (realized as pleasurable feelings) and the accordant building of habits.
The specific interaction with dopamine is as follows: when a listener enjoys a song, this neurotransmitter binds to a brain region called the Nucleus accumbens (hereafter NAc). This dopamine-NAc binding is also associated with “[engagement in] sexual activity, intake of drugs, eating of chocolate and drinking water when dehydrated.”
In addition to its effect on dopamine, music-listening is also associated with an increase in electrical activity in the left frontal lobe of the brain. There’s some correlation between depression and lower electrical activity in this part of the neuro-anatomy, and most neuroscientists (and cognitive scientists, et al.) suspect that there is some causality at play.
Alright—but when you’re really feeling a song? Like you pop in your ear-buds, throw on a track, and it puts you in the zone? It literally gives you “chills” or “shivers down the spine”? When this happens, you experience changes in heart rate, respiration, and blood flows to “brain regions thought to be involved in reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal…brain structures [which] are known to be active in response to other euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and drugs of abuse.”

The Extent to Which Music Changes Mood is a Matter of Taste

One interesting common thread throughout musically-induced shifts is that those synaptic, electrical snap-crackles are highly dependent on a single variable across many studies: your taste. Yes, music is like drugs, in that it can positively change the electro-chemical landscape of your mind. But that only happens if you’re into said sounds.
One study found that changes in serotonin, the other feel-good neurotransmitter—which is upped by sex and sleep, MDMA and Prozac, etc.—is totally dependent on the extent to which the subjects reported enjoying the music. As one might suspect, those who reported disliking what they listened to were found to have lower levels of serotonin than those who reported liking it, and vice versa.
With this in mind, perhaps a more precise claim would be: music that resonates with you has the potential to improve your sense of emotional well-being.
So how can you apply this phenomenon practically?
Dr. Ariane Dahleim, a research psychologist at the University of Sydney, said that music can definitely be therapeutic. In her own work, she finds music to be useful in “arousal reduction,” where arousal basically means “you are in a ‘heated’ state of mind and not thinking clearly. Errors in thinking are one of the biggest obstacles in mental health…from jumping-to-conclusions, to negative generalizations—nobody likes me; I’ll never be successful—and so on. We teach people to slow down their thinking and detect those errors.”

Pick Music that Matches the Mood You’re After—Not the One You’re In

Most of us tend to listen to sad songs when we’re sad, and happy songs when we’re happy. You don’t throw on Morrissey when you’re stoked. Or if you do, maybe you shouldn’t—as it happens, sad music can actually make you feel sad, and the opposite is also true. That being said, it’s pretty difficult to bump an overwhelmingly upbeat track when you’re glum. When you’re feeling gloomy, sunny stuff tends to bum you out even more. (For a severe illustration of this point, consider that suicide rates are actually highest in the spring and early summer, and not in the winter as most people suspect; when you’re consciousness is darkly-clouded and stormy, a bright and sunny world only makes you feel more isolated and alienated from your surroundings.)
While it’s harder to stomach a happy song when we’re unhappy, it’s worthwhile to try and find something you can stand, to ease yourself into it. Instead of turning your mood upside down, constructive a narrative like you would for a mix-tape. Listen to one sad song—fine, it’ll level you out. Then slowly select things that are more upbeat.
Dr. Dalheim agreed, and said that “having a playlist handy may be a smart, quick way to slow down and take a breath before you act upon a situation, which leads to better behavior.” She also adds that “music can elicit memories that may pull you out of a bad mood before it spirals into something disruptive.”
Furthermore, studies suggest efforts to harness music and re-shape your mood are worthwhile. A recent example monitored patients’ levels of arousal after heart surgery, and explored the extent to which music might alleviate any stress. The results found that those who listened to music after surgery were less likely to develop complications than those who did not.
Listening to music also makes it easier to work out. At least one study found that listening to music actually does hype you up, and subjects workout more intensely and longer with it than they do without. This can prove a vital boon to one’s mental health, considering the role exercise plays in the reduction of stress and anxiety.
In mitigating depression, alleviating stress, and in raising our spirits, we find music at the ultimate juncture between the educational and the chemical. By learning to listen better, we can begin to feel better, too.

Credit: http://www.everup.com/2016/04/19/music-benefits-influence-on-emotions-and-mood/

 

 Elton John encourages young singers to get their highs from music not drugs

Elton John is urging younger artists to stay off cocaine – and speaks from his own experience.

He says: “Young musicians have disappeared into the bathroom and I’ve gone, ‘Are you doing coke?’ And they’re going, ‘Yeah!’ I said, ‘That’s not a good idea’ and they say, ‘It’s what I’m meant to do, isn’t it?’

“No, you’re not. It’s a f****** horrible drug. It brings out the worst side of your soul, you don’t need it, you’ve got so much talent.

"Stop it. It’s a f****** horror story.

“Just because Amy Winehouse , Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix died at 27, it doesn’t mean you have to.” 

Speaking about his own years of excess, Elton, 68, tells Vice: “I used to sit on my own doing lines of coke, smoking joints and drinking scotch. I used to think, ‘Why am I doing this?’ I didn’t realise I was an addict.”

 Credit: http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/elton-john-encourages-young-singers-6956340

 

RAVES ARE ABOUT MUSIC, NOT DRUGS

 

 

RAVES ARE ABOUT MUSIC, NOT DRUGS 

I am a 20-year-old university student, I have never overdosed on drugs and I have never been in trouble with the law.  I have educated myself on the dangers associated with doing drugs and I party responsibly.

To Mel Lastman and the police force of Toronto: Raves are not about drugs.  In my nine short months of partying, I have become addicted to the music, the people and the whole rave atmosphere.

The party begins.  Reality turns to fantasy, allowing me to escape the pressures of everyday life and live in a dream world for a few short hours.

The girl sitting next to me, whose name I don't even know, is my friend, my sister, my soulmate.  Peace and love replace anxiety and fear; violence and hate are condemned.

All are united as one; there is no differentiation based on race, gender or sexual orientation.  As I dance till dawn to the point of physical exhaustion, I have never felt more alive.

Banning raves will not eliminate the use of drugs; it will only move their use to a different location: the streets.  Banning raves will not eliminate parties; it will merely force them back underground, where there are no safety regulations.  In fact, it probably will increase the use of drugs and overdoses because of the lack of police and medical supervision.

The answer is not prohibition; it is education.  The use of drugs will never be eliminated in any society.  But, perhaps, the rate of overdose and death can be.  Ravers of Toronto, please party responsibly and show our city why we just can't stop raving: It's about the music.

Kimberly Gleeson Toronto 

 

Credit: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n668/a02.html

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Healing through music, not drugs: 

Brain-wave music therapy miraculously reduces night terrors, bad behavior in children.

 

(NaturalNews) A British mother says she has basically cured her daughter's night terrors by playing music specially crafted to produce calm brain waves.

Laura Mulligan of Manchester, England, said that her daughter's screaming night terrors woke their whole family every night for three years.

"My husband and I were on our knees waking up to 20 times every single night," Mulligan said. "When our second daughter Annie was born last year, we had to move each night between the two children, without any possibility of having sleep ourselves.

"I wished someone would just take them for me when they were sleeping and when I came back it would all be fine," she said. "It was really, really strenuous and at times I did feel like I was at the end of my tether."

With the new calming music, however, Mulligan's daughter is able to get back to sleep on her own.

Three sleepless years

Night terrors differ from nightmares in that they do not occur during the dreaming, or REM, phase of sleep. A person who suffers from night terrors will begin to scream, shout or thrash around in seeming panic, but without waking up, and will have no memory of the event the next morning. Night terrors are particularly common in children between the ages of three and eight.

From a very young age, Mulligan's daughter Niamh needed white noise to sleep. Eventually this stopped working, however, and then the night terrors began.

"Niamh would scream the house down," Mulligan said.

The problem became worse when their next daughter, Annie, was born, as Niamh's screams would wake the baby, whose crying would then wake Niamh. This could occur as often as 20 times per night.

"With two children crying and screaming, trying to get one asleep before the other wakes up, it is hard," Mulligan said. "There have been moments when all three of us have just sat on the bed sobbing our hearts out."

"[My husband] James and I were literally only getting one or two hours sleep at night," Mulligan said. "There was no way just one of us could stay awake with her, it was all of us, she would even wake the baby up.

"I don't think James and I were managing very well. We needed some outside help to deal with this.

"I was actually scared about driving the car, because I didn't feel safe as I was so tired."

Alphamusic calms brain, at night and during day

None of the techniques that Mulligan tried worked, until a friend mentioned the "Alphamusic" of Australian piano composer John Levine. Levine's music is designed to "heal people through the power of music" by triggering calming brain waves.

"I got the My Little Sea Shell track," Mulligan said. "The results outdid our expectations. We now put this music on all night on a loop and if she briefly wakes, she goes back to sleep immediately without fuss."

Not only are Mulligan and her husband well rested again, but the music even seems to reduce conflict between their daughters during the day.

"While they do craft work at the kitchen table, normally they are fighting and pulling - there is a lot of jealousy that goes on," Mulligan said. "I just put this special brainwave music on and Niamh is a lot calmer whilst they are cutting out and playing with each other.

"I would like to thank John for composing this piece," she said. "I can't tell you how much of a difference this has made in our lives. I'll tell everyone who will listen."

Sources:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk

 

Getting high on music, not drugs

 Getting High on Music, Not Drugs:

 How one band is using rock music to empower Malaysia's youth to live drug-free lives.

Khai Aziz's life has been surrounded by drugs – his friends lost their lives because of it, his brother was stuck in a vicious cycle of heroin, and a man in his village wanted to sell his kids to buy drugs.
Drug use in his community is rampant, and drugs are running in the veins of countless youths.
Being in such an environment, it seemed only a matter of time before Khai himself succumbed.
But he rose above his surroundings and decided to use the power of music to spread the message that being drug-free is cool, starting the Drug Free Youth Malaysia initiative.
Youths are welcome to come and belong to a community that prides itself in being drug, cigarette and alcohol-free.
And there's a space for them to use music - instead of drugs - as an instrument for relief and liberation.
The youths feel inspired, motivated and some have begun to come out of the darkness of drugs.

Support Drug Free Youth Malaysia's music festival and help spread the message of "being cool without drugs". You can buy tickets or donate here: https://www.simplygiving.com/event/9e4a696a-eb6a-4a3c-8661-c955624f31a5

Getting high on music, not drugs

Drugs, music, and ideology: a social pharmacological interpretation of the Acid House Movement

During the summer of 1988, a musical concert experience called Acid House arrived on the cultural scene in many British cities. The media created a frenzy of misinformation in reporting about the latest drug craze. Acid House music was then banned from the pop music charts, radio and television, and retail outlets. Some psychoactive substances have been bought, sold, and consumed at Acid House events, but drug use does not appear to be extensive. At the physiological level, the nature of Acid House music, especially the drumming aspect, seems instrumental in providing altered states of consciousness. At the interpersonal and social level, the set and setting of Acid House events further enhances and reinforces the specific physiological and psychological responses. The degree of acceptance by various subcultural groups may depend greatly on the amount of media and societal exposure given to it, particularly if authoritarian attempts to suppress it enhance its political or ideological aspects.

Credit: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1356936 

Electronic Music and Drugs – The Real Story

Via Detroit Tech House

The electronic music industry is getting long in the tooth, and the older generation is reluctantly passing the torch to the youngsters. The overwhelming popularity of the music in general has caused an enormous spike in the number of young people interested in the scene, and it has created quite an interesting situation. On one hand, you have people who understand the foundation that was laid, and the importance of keeping the integrity of the community, and on the other you have the drugged out child who just wants to hear bass. I argue that both are an integral part of the new movement, and not so different if you look a little deeper.

Drugs have played a major role in the growing popularity of electronic music and we have all seen the articles about young people only getting into the music because of drugs. Some of this is true, but it was also true for the past generations, just in a different way… Back in the beginning of the rave scene, there was still plenty of drugs, people just seemed to have a bit more restraint about displaying their public drug use, and if they were to try a substance, it would be in a dark room with peers who understood what was happening. In the current scene, with day-festivals galore, we have a new normal… and that normal is kids chewing their faces off in broad daylight. Sucking pacifiers and smiling for pictures at the same time. The world has learned to equate electronic music with drug use, and it has gotten a bit out of control. Another thing that has changed is the chemistry of the drugs being taken. In the past, drugs were drugs, and while they probably weren’t the cleanest things in the world, they certainly had more of a trust factor than what you see today. Research chemicals from chemists who know very little are hitting the streets in mass quantity these days and getting into the mouths of many young people. Instead of Ecstasy and Acid, it’s Molly and a bunch of stuff that is similar to acid, but not quite the same… These drugs have taken hold because they are cheaper to produce and have more anonymity. So basically people can sell whatever they want to these kids and label it Molly. There is also a big up rise in young people doing harder drugs. My contention is that the combinations of drugs put into these mixtures eventually push some to want a bigger high, because they can’t seem to feel like they did the first time. Heroin has become way more popular than in the past with young people, and it’s something I would like to see go away, far far away. To be honest the drugs may ultimately erode the true potential this generation has for a cultural change, which is what I think the electronic music scene could do with the right mindset. But the drugs will be it’s downfall, probably. The connection of so many people with like mind has the potential to create a real movement in any area that it happens, but dumbing it down with bad drugs just makes it a soul-less money machine, where the only winners are bad people.

I do think the world and humanity in general is striving for connection and desperate for a feeling of community, and this is some of the reason for the drugs. We are so far removed from a communal lifestyle, one in which we actually share our feelings directly though human contact with one and other, that I think somehow sub-consciously the collective youth is taking it upon themselves to regain the connections we once had with one and other through any means necessary. Albeit a hasty, poorly thought out and futile attempt, so it may seem, the use of drugs strikes me as just that… In the times of tribal society people did take substances and communally appreciate their lives, their ancestry, and their ability to express themselves. Kind of like a family rave. They got together with people they loved and dove into what it was to be human and what it was to experience life. This is art, the art of living. I am not saying this is what is happening now, because it isn’t… What I am saying is that I believe there is a tiny piece of our DNA, or our soul, that remembers this ancient ceremony and remembers these connections we used to have with other humans, and it desperately wants to find a way back to it. Now, with all the current methods of distraction and dissociative activities such as social media we have crippled our ability to interact with people on a personal level. Just look at any nightclub in the city that plays pop music, all you see are people staring at their phones. The face to face relationships in the world are eroding and the only supplement that seems to work are these substances, which if only for a moment, remind us of the beautiful existence we are all a part of. They remind us of the connection we have with each and every being in the world, and perhaps mother earth is trying any way she can to get us to wake back up to the power we hold as a community of people who love each other.

This is not to say that these substances and this activity don’t have consequences and can’t go terribly wrong… They can, and often do, and the depressed youth of America are prime examples of this issue. But, nothing another batch of prescription-based drugs can’t fix, eh? But I digress…So yeah, not everything is pure out there in festival world and moderation is almost never taken into account, but next time you see festi-kid in a cuddle puddle, maybe just maybe you will think about this article, and remember that we are all acting out against the consumerist, materialistic, internet-based society, trying desperately to find some community some connection and some acceptance.

Credit: https://www.detroittechnohouse.com/2014/01/30/electronic-music-and-drugs-the-real-story/

Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll: Music in the Counterculture

 

The formation of the countercultural movement in the mid 1960’s marked the first cultural-revolution that utilized multiple media forms to ignite society to action. It capitalized on a nation filled with youths eager to experiment with increased liberation in all aspects of life. This shift toward experimentation was backlash against cultural assimilation into middle America that had occurred so rapidly during the post WWII years. It encapsulated movements related to conflict in Vietnam, Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and the Sexual Revolution, contributing to the intense passion of each cause’s respective supporters. Nowhere was this desire for societal change more prevalent than in music. Youth’s fervent desire for change in the fundamental organization of American society manifested itself through music.

The emergence of new musical genre was one of the most notable means of expression for voices of the counterculture. While music had previously been characterized as black or white, young or old, the countercultural movement shattered those norms. 1950’s Rock and Roll, characterized by Elvis Presley, morphed and diversified into sub genres including pop, folk, acoustic rock, and electronic music. This diversification of music was linked to the increasingly prominent diversity of Americans, and the desire for true freedom of expression. During the countercultural movement, African American artists became more prominent and mainstream. As a whole, music became a much more open and free field of expression, open to experimentation with new sounds and alternative instrumental arrangements. Listeners were now free to explore the wide spectrum of musical genres, breaking down stereotypical barriers that had previously limited audiences.

Another fundamental role of music within the countercultural movement was to provide female artists with the ability to forge their own distinctive place within the music business. It provided a medium through which to comment on issues specifically related to gender, like the Second Wave Feminist Movement, and the Sexual Revolution, both intrinsically linked in the counterculture. Female singing groups emerged with a new sound and a new look. The Ronettes, The Crystals, and the Shangri-Las emerged in the mid 1960’s, attracting their own concert crowds without male singers accompanying them. Later, such talented performers such as Janis Joplin and even African American songstress Aretha Franklin would challenge traditional views of femininity with their confident and innovative musical sound.

Music during the counterculture was also increasingly politically charged and directed. Gone were the days of easy listening songs with feel good lyrics. Music became a powerful medium through which to drum up political support during rallies and protests. Artists such as Crosby, Stills, and Nash and Creedence Clearwater Revival wrote lyrics regarding specific political events, calling attention to the hypocrisy within government and calling for outrage among listeners. Music became a way of citing inequities within society and calling for an immediate countercultural response.

Music festivals also played a tremendous role in shaping the countercultural movement. Prolific festivals in California, such as Monterey International Pop Music Festival, and the infamous Woodstock provided a musical summit for countercultural revolutionaries to express their desire for change in the American way of life. Increased experimentation with drugs like marijuana and LSD also correlated to the enormously expressionist, experimental, and rebellious desires of millions of youths.
The counterculture created a change in music that continues to play a significant role in the function of music within society today. As it relates to youth movements, political conflicts, and the emergence of new genres, the countercultural movement opened the proverbial doors to an expansive creative freedom of expression, sound, and speech. Music plays such a dynamic role in shaping American culture, and without the countercultural movement’s musical influences, music today would not possess the influence it does.

Credit: https://pages.shanti.virginia.edu/CYOU_Project/executive-summary/

 

Drugs Uncovered: Chemical bonds 

Music and drugs have long been linked, with shifts in genres often running alongside trends in narcotic consumption. Kevin Sampson tracks the history, from Miles Davis to Happy Mondays, and wonders if the link is still strong. 

When Jack Kerouac first coined the term 'the Beats' for his loose-knit group of world-weary bohemians, he meant it in the sense that they were outsiders - a dangerous, free-thinking underclass. But the Beats' empathy for jazz and, in particular, the free-form bebop of Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, brought with it a glamorised fancy for heroin. As with so many working musicians, the pioneers of bebop eased their pressures with the needle. And just as the misadventures of Pete Doherty would be news today, Charlie Parker made the front pages in 1946 after a Sunset Strip binge led to his being committed for electro-shock treatment.

The kids loved him for it. Assuming a direct correlation between their jazz heroes' habits and their inspired musical improvisations, the Beats began experimenting, too. In an era where teenagers were carving their own niche and so to be 'hip' was everything, a fledgling youth movement was, for the first time, fuelled by narcotics. As Miles Davis noted in his autobiography: 'People were considered hip if they shot smack.'

With their subterranean fusion of radical jazz, their stream-of-consciousness compositions and their acquiescence to the languorous medications of smack, Kerouac redefined Beat's meaning to embrace the 'beat'-ific vibe of the time, and the drowsy ambivalence of heroin's afterburn. 'I'm beat' in Fifties New York would equate to 'I'm done in' today. But the laid-back, live-and-let-live philosophy the term espouses sowed the seeds of Flower Power when the Beats went West.

But before Beat turned to free love, there was an equal and opposite reaction to the Beatniks' pretensions across the Atlantic in London's Soho. Annexing their moniker from the modernists first described in Colin MacInnes' 1959 novel Absolute Beginners, London's original mods started to congregate among the coffee bars and clubs of Wardour Street in 1960. Eschewing the threadbare, wayfaring look of the beatniks, the mods favoured neat, tailored clothing and a correspondingly upbeat philosophy for life. They bucked the trend for binge-drinking and generally getting 'out of it', preferring a music, lifestyle and drug choice based on mental and sartorial acuity. Where the beatniks preferred barbiturates or downers, the mods were all about uppers.

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Up until 1964, amphetamines with street names like Bennies and Dexies were both legal and commonplace, often prescribed for fatigue, weight loss, and respiratory and heart complaints. Universally known as Purple Hearts, Dinaml was the most popular high street pep pill of its time. Its side-effects, as described in moralistic detail in the accompanying use and dosage leaflet of the day, might just as well have been broadcast as a come-hither to the mod community: 'Do not exceed the stated dose. Can cause incidence of euphoria, enhanced wakefulness, increased physical activity, decreased appetite, increased respiration and feelings of power, strength, self-assertion and enhanced motivation.'

All around the country, women were popping a couple with their elevenses to help chase away the cobwebs, the blues and those pesky extra pounds around their hips. All over London, their sons and daughters raided their medicine cabinets for night fuel.

Above all, mods were night crawlers. They flocked to coffee bars instead of pubs, not just because they sneered at drunks but because most of these newfangled cappuccino bars boasted 2am licences (pubs shut at 10.30). They also had jukeboxes long before the boozers, allowing the young ones to wash down their Bennies with a frothy coffee and dance to the Who, Small Faces, the Kinks or the Pretty Things, whose 'Midnight to Six' is perhaps the quintessential mod track.

The mods' soul brothers were the rude boys from Ladbroke Grove, Brixton and Harlesden. Nattily dressed in tonic suits and pork pie hats, the rude boys were the sons of the sticksmen - the Windrush generation, brought up on the ska and bluebeat of their parents' birthplace. But in 1968, back in Jamaica, the scene was changing. Artistes like Toots Hibbert of the Maytals were slowing the backbeat right down. Reggae was lilting and gently mesmeric, as though crafted for the weed that inspired its form and theology. Reggae quickly became the soundtrack to an increasingly politicised young Jamaica. With the arrival of bands such as the Pioneers and the Wailers (featuring Peter Tosh and Bob Marley), the nascent reggae scene began to embrace sociopolitical and religious themes and, particularly, the growing influence of Rastafarianism on Jamaican youth. The smoking of cannabis in its purest form (grass, or ganja, as opposed to pot) became as intrinsic a part of the Rasta's holy trinity as the Ethiopian flag and the choppy skank of reggae's rhythm guitar. For Rastas, the smoking of herb or ganja is a spiritual act, often an accompaniment to bible-reading, with reggae the musical backbeat to both the religion and the way of life. And while the music made occasional reference to the darker practices of freebase and 'icing' (most notably Dillinger's 1978 anthem 'Cocaine'), reggae's constant referencing of kaya (cannabis leaf), collie men (weed dealers) and Mary Jane (marijuana) celebrates it as a spliff culture.

Cannabis was helping shape the development of the North Beach hipsters in San Francisco, too. When Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and the rest of the NY alternative community upped from Greenwich Village to San Francisco in 1962, they found a melange of counter-cultural ideas, individuals and music. A whole new scene was springing up around the ornate but dilapidated Haight-Ashbury area: clubs, 'happenings' and young bands with grandiose names like the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Quicksilver Messenger Service. Something was afoot.

There was also a folk scene based around The Cabale Creamery in Berkeley that began to fuse the anti-war philosophies of its regulars with a general drift towards Native American spiritualism and the kind of back-to-nature frugality espoused in Henry Thoreau's utopian classic Walden. The Creamery's co-founder, Chandler Laughlin, favoured free-flowing garments and headbands in the Native American tradition, and the younger followers of the folk scene began dressing similarly. One of their number was Owsley Stanley, a studious young man who spent his time manufacturing a drug whose complex name - lysergic acid diethylamide -was quickly abbreviated to three initials: LSD. And while pot served its purpose, often hallucinogenic, LSD was the drug the foundling hippy communities had been waiting for.

Laughlin discovered The Red Dog Saloon, an isolated club in the desert, and brought his followers out for what would turn out to be the world's first hippy 'happening'. Projecting Bill Ham's surreal oil and colour lightshow against the walls, and encouraging the notion that no boundary should exist between performers and crowd, Laughlin mixed together the best of the alt-folk scene with the emerging Haight-Ashbury bands and a load of LSD. By dawn, psychedelia was born.

The scene and its acolytes moved from the desert back to San Francisco and, on 16 October 1965, the first self-billed psychedelic rock show took place at the Longshoreman's Hall. Advertised as 'A Tribute to Doctor Strange' and attended by 1,000 devotees, the gig featured the Marbles and Jefferson Airplane, who invited their followers on stage to sip acid-spiked punch from a gigantic chalice. By January 1966 such gigs, hosted by Ken Kesey under his banner the Trips, were bringing in 10,000 hippies a night, with thousands more turned away. Kids were descending on San Francisco expressly to join the commune of peace, love and experimentation as it moved onwards to bigger and bigger homes, such as The Fillmore and The Avalon Ballroom.

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The tentacles and tenets of hippydom reverberated all around the world, but as with every bolshy new scene that drags itself kicking and screaming into the world with all the brio, vim and attitude of the here and now, hippies and their music inevitably became a sad parody of themselves. Instead of the vibrant terrorism of Jimi Hendrix or the astral psychedelia of Sergeant Pepper, we had soppy long-hair bands who happened to smoke pot and down mushrooms, culling the sixth-form imagery and iconography of Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons. We had Yes. We had Gong. But, as Jean-Jacques Burnel warned, 'Something better change.' The punks were coming.

From the first three-chord blasts of the Ramones, Sex Pistols and the Clash, punk was shock-treatment for the disaffected teens. It was fast, furious, short and bittersweet. Songs were the antithesis of those 20-minute aural symphonies the likes of ELP and Rick Wakeman had been getting away with in the early to mid-Seventies. Most proto-punk anthems were two-minute garage thrash-bangs and the drugs of choice, too, were fast, cheap and often DIY. Amphetamine sulphate, speed, was everywhere, its crushed-tight powder geometrically folded into Stanley blade-sized wraps. Amyl nitrate, too (called rush before the gay community coined poppers, after its pupil-dilating effects), sniffed straight from the 10-bob bottle. Anything that would induce an immediate energetic charge to complement the adrenalised urgency of the music would fit the bill. Anything sluggish or introspective was condemned as hippy shit.

Yet, for all the similarities in the two scenes' backgrounds and fanbases, punk's drugging was quite unlike the pill-popping hedonism of the mod world. Mod was, generally, an aspirational and forward-looking code, whereas punk was rebellious and nihilistic, kicking against the system with youthful fury. Punk's narcotic sideshow was scuzzy, cheap and often home-made. Prior to a Psychedelic Furs gig at Eric's Club, Liverpool, a young man dumped a plastic bag on to a table top, with thick, crystalline powder spilling out. After the slightest hesitation, a dozen eager fingers began dabbing, licking, slurping, dabbing again. That man, now one of the foremost backline technicians on the live-band circuit, laughed: 'Go easy, will you. That's only just out the oven!'

The club was raided by the drugs squad later that night and was closed down, never to re-open. The fast times were, for the time being at least, brought to a halt.

Just as particular sociopolitical climates stimulated the special musical/narcotic relationships that led to the growth of reggae culture, for example, or punk, so too can economic conditions depress a generation's creative output. A direct product of the youth unemployment that accompanied Margaret Thatcher's first term in office was a country-wide heroin epidemic among the young. Heroin is an opiate, a soporific and it's no co-incidence that much of what passed for youth culture in the early to mid-Eighties was retrospective and nostalgic. Yet one of the Eighties' more idiosyncratic underground scenes grew exponentially from the inertia of dole-life. Bored and listless, eking their giro out over its fortnightly dawdle, teenagers fell back on the consolations of smack and pot. This was a life spent lying down, waiting for a better day and its curious soundtrack was a pick-and-mix culled from the catalogues of Frank Zappa, Pink Floyd, Simon & Garfunkel, Soft Machine, Peter Gabriel's Genesis and, curiously, Chris de Burgh. The progeny of the former working classes were now hitting the bong.

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But while this was, in the main, a passive and slow-travelling phenomenon, mainly confined to the northwest, at weekends it grew wings. In the form of jobbing cabaret bands such as Groundpig, the Munchies and Drama, the first of our tribute super-groups were starting to find a huge and grateful constituency among a young, under-waged crowd who simply wanted to let off steam among themselves. At its primal core, this was the tribal precursor to acid house.

For a scene to be genuinely innovative, it needs its own high-octane fuel. It needs that all-too-rare synthesis of right time, right place, right crowd, right music. And above all, it needs the right drug. So when ecstasy filtered its sinuous way through basement clubs of London in 1986, it lit the well-laid gunpowder trail to one of the UK's great cultural explosions. So many diverse yet empathetic little subcultures were waiting to be dragged in under that one great star-spangled panoply as 1986 became 1987. Warehouse parties, house music, rock bands such as New Order using DJs and samplers, the disco revival, the Wag-club-led return of working-class football dandies to the dance floor - and not just here but in Amsterdam, in Chicago and in Ibiza, of course. All these crazy little strands, waiting to explode, and ecstasy threw the switch.

From its earliest incarnations with Daryll Pandy, Baby Ford, S-Express and Bomb The Bass, right through to the golden age of Madchester, it was the acid in acid house that made the genre sparkle. Ecstasy, or MDMA, was unusual in that the drug had been developed by Merck not to cure anything specific, but to make people talk to one another. In its earliest trials, MDMA was intended to help revive marriages that had hit a stale patch. But ecstasy's ability to induce communal euphoria allied to coruscating light shows, and a new tribe of DJs who came from the dance floor themselves and knew how to build a crowd's delirium, meant acid house was an overnight phenomenon. And where punk grew roots at its own pace, developing its notoriety through fanzines, word of mouth and specialist night-time radio, gradually spreading nationwide, acid was the stuff of tabloid furore.

But this time the copycat rave syndrome didn't kill the genre dead. As quickly as the tabloid version of acid house filtered down to youth clubs and high-street pulling palaces, the sheer invention fostered by the drug itself and the communities it inspired led to side movements, subtle shifts in the tempo and the nuances of dance music from Balearic to New Beat. And it all led inexorably to indie dance. Of all the great pop repercussions to result from the marriage of MDMA and disco music, the gurning faces of Happy Mondays' Bez, stage left and Barry Mooncult of Flowered Up, stage right, best crystallise its inspired lunacy. Here were bands who took the purest ethic of punk - get guitar, make stuff up, play - mashed it all up with seductive drum loops, throbbing bass samples and irresistible dance-floor 'riddims', then asked their mates to dance on stage. It was back to the days of Aquarius, where nothing could ever be deemed excessive, no contribution lesser in value than another. So when Bez began regularly to lope onstage with the Ryder brothers, bug-eyed and slack-jawed, shaking his maracas like an electrocuted grasshopper, it was going to take something magnificent, and some industrial dosage of drugs, to trump his act. Barry Mooncult, who donned an all-in-one planet suit and proceeded to walk up and down in front of the band, smiling, was that ace. One of the century's last great 'happenings', set to a repetitive four-four beat as Shoreditch Town Hall rioted, felt like a moment that might never be bettered.

And it still feels that way. Maybe grime and dubstep wouldn't sound as alien and paranoid as it does without the stupefying effects of powerful hydroponic skunk. New rave seemed briefly to get its kicks out of ketamine. Rod Stanley, editor of Dazed & Confused magazine, has a thought: 'No one has really "invented" or discovered a new drug for a while. Every time one has been found over the decades, young people swiftly work out the best music experience to go with it,' he says. 'If a new drug were discovered today, a new music scene would spring up overnight.'

But with scenes like techtonik making a virtue of being wholly drug- and alcohol-free, one has to wonder whether the links between music and drugs are finally breaking down.

Credit: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2008/nov/16/drugs-music-link

DailyBeast Op-Ed: Treat Dementia With Music, Not Drugs

 

 DailyBeast Op-Ed: Treat Dementia With Music, Not Drugs

by Dr. Bill Thomas

Yesterday The Daily Beast published an op-ed I wrote about the extraordinary power of music to transform the lives of people living with dementia.

The concept is elegantly simple: Provide a dementia sufferer with an MP3 player that has been loaded with music tailored to their taste. Let them listen. Ask them about it.

I was privileged to be part of an extraordinary film, Alive Inside by Michael Rossato-Bennett, that documented the small miracles as life re-ignites in the eyes of long-term dementia sufferers when they hear familiar tunes for the first time in years. You can watch Alive Inside in select theaters this summer and on DVD and iTunes this October. Visit www.aliveinside.us for a calendar of theatrical showings in cities nationwide. You won’t be sorry. In fact, you just might change a life.

Credit: https://changingaging.org/dementia/dailybeast-op-ed-treat-dementia-with-music-not-drugs/

 

 

Sex, Drugs, and Music Are All the Same to Your Brain

Photo Credit: DjMag

Sex, Drugs, and Music Are All the Same to Your Brain

Bob Marley was onto something with the whole "when [music] hits you feel no pain" thing: The brain seems to process music the same way it processes painkilling narcotics, according to new research from McGill University in Montreal.
The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, tested subjects' enjoyment of their favorite songs, once after they took the opioid blocker naltrexone and once after they took a placebo. Researchers used both measures of muscle movement and self-reports to gauge their delight. By statistically significant margins, the subjects relished their favorite tunes less while on naltrexone, a drug that shuts down the brain's opioid receptors and is prescribed to addicts to make their substance of choice pleasure-less.
"The opioid system is this big question mark," said Daniel Levitin, lead author of the study, as well as the book This Is Your Brain on Music. "We know from animal studies that the same areas of the brain affected by opioids are affected by food and sex. … We didn't know much about music because animals don't enjoy music."
Levitin said the inspiration for the study came from a conversation with Paul Simon. (Yeah, he said he "talks regularly" to that Paul Simon.) Prior research on the brain and music measured subjects' reaction to songs picked by the researcher. But what constitutes enjoyable music is highly subjective (as anyone who has ever taken a long car ride with a sibling knows). Simon suggested a look at how people reacted to their own favorites. Levitin saw this as a way to regain the "emotional control" sacrificed by making subjects react to music researchers picked that might not speak to them.
The 17 subjects were, in the words of the study, "asked to bring to the laboratory two music recordings that reliably produced intense feelings, including but not limited to the sensation of chills." Selections included "Lonely Boy" by The Black Keys, "Primavera" by Santana, "Creep" by Radiohead, "Turn Me On" by David Guetta featuring Nicki Minaj, "Comfortably Numb" by Pink Floyd and Overture: The Marriage of Figaro by Mozart.
Levitin wasn't surprised there were a few downers. "A lot of people find great pleasure in sad songs," he said. "When we hear sad songs, the brain releases the neurochemical prolactin, the same comforting chemical that a mother releases when nursing a child. We find it in both mother and child [during breastfeeding]. When we're feeling sad and misunderstood, that chemical is released to show us we're not alone."
Subjects put on headphones and researchers measured their involuntary movements. The subjects also controlled a sliding scale with which they reported how engrossed they felt in the song from moment to moment. The scale went from 0 to 100—0 presumably representing how one absorbs the soft jazz played at Panera Bread and 100 an experience on par with popping a Queen cassette into the deck of the Mirthmobile.
Although they didn't know when they were on naltrexone, respondents were much less into the songs while they were. The study concluded that "music uses the same reward pathways as food, drug and sexual pleasure"—which might be a scientific explanation for why sex, drugs and rock and roll make such a winning combination.

Credit: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/sex-drugs-and-music-are-all-the-same-to-your-brain

 

#HUSHMXD

Drugs in the Rave Culture are an inevitable issue. Especially in today's society of open acceptance and searching for ourselves and the meaning to our lives, in the name of living while you can. " As a drug addict from 14 years old, I wish i could turn back time, or there were resources I had known about, when i struggled with addiction", says Courtney, Founder of the Hush Community. As a recovering heroin addict she can understand the troubles of not only trying to stay sober, but understand and no how to say, enough is enough. "I've watched 3/4 my friends die of drug overdoses, had a Father who struggled with alcoholism and has seen it all". Not everyone has a support system an escape or knows where to start, in getting help for drug addiction. As part of our mantra here at Hush, we want to help a culture and generation of people, know there's more to life than addiction. We want to show you, there's a replacement for the reward system in the brain, for those who want to deal with these addiction triggers and cravings. Also we want to point others who are in the shoes where we once stood, into the right direction. It's ok to ask for help! It's confidental by law everywhere. No matter your age. Life's short and we're severely lacking bright and focused people to lead our future generations. If you have a problem with addiction or know someone who does, please reach out. Don't wait until you lose them. #HushMXD, is about replacing the addiction triggers with music and helping light the way to a clean and positive way of life.

REACH OUT: www.HushFm.mxd